CHALLENGE

Having a client for more than a decade can often lead to creative stagnation – both on the side of the client AND on the side of the agency. For The M Network, our challenge is to continue to help our clients evolve, pushing their brands forward and looking for ways to innovate. The trick to this is to be able to help clients drive ahead without pushing them completely over the edge.

For The Children’s Trust, they have always felt that advertising should be deployed only to push to specific services. Even their past “branding” spots always contained some form of a direct call to action.

Understanding this, our M Network team, working with the internal Communications team at “The Trust”, has taken a long-view regarding their branding. Our collective mantra, whether with regard to The Trust logo, their graphics, their tone and tenor, or even new initiatives, has been “evolution, not revolution.” In that sense, their latest branding campaign has taken us more than 10 years to create.

We have slowly and methodically worked with the Trust’s Communication team to educate the board and stakeholders about the value of being “top-of-mind” – forming an emotional connection with the target audiences based on big themes instead of specific services. The philosophy behind this approach is that these ads help the target audiences create a stronger, emotion-based bond with the organization. If that is accomplished, then, when the target audience is in need of a specific service, they will think of The Children’s Trust first, irrespective of whether they see an ad for that specific service or not.

Our belief has always been that adding true branding, to a marketing mix that already includes “topical” or product/service specific advertising, helps make the entire marketing effort more effective and more efficient.

You can see a little bit of the evolution of our approach in these three spots dating from 2007 – 2015. All of which set up this latest campaign.

APPROACH

Part of our approach to this campaign was simplicity. The message: raising children is a journey, and The Children’s Trust is with parents for every step of that journey.

Simplicity, however, is rarely simple to pull off.

In order to achieve the same level of emotional connection across all of our target audiences, we would need to allow them to see and hear their own, individual stories within the larger narrative. That meant we would want to create the spot in what is termed the “heart language” of each of our audiences – English, Spanish and Haitian Creole, to be specific.

We also needed this spot to look and feel like the places, homes and families of our target audience. This meant that, instead of finding locations that were beautiful and aspirational, we scouted for areas that would look familiar to the various audiences – familiar colors, textures, background elements, etc.

Maria applies make-up to our Hispanic graduate.

This public street behind Edison High School in Little Haiti proved to be the perfect backdrop.

It doesn’t hurt that the late afternoon sun provides perfect lighting. (We like to call it “lighting by God.”)

Additionally, we wanted the spots to do more than just tell the story of a journey; we wanted to give the viewers the feeling of being in motion, on this journey, with us. To do that, we designed all of the shots leading up to the final scene to be in motion, moving forward. This required us to think about how to capture certain shots – and informed our decision on what gear to use. It also forced us to get a little innovative in a number of places.

For the littlest ones, a 4k GoPro Hero 6 was mounted to the child-seat and the tricycle. This allowed us to get our shots without too much set-up (taking less time) or intrusion (avoiding making the kids uncomfortable).

The good news: she barely even noticed the camera on the front of her tricycle. The bad news: she didn’t really know how to ride a tricycle yet.

When confronted with a cute little girl who just didn’t know how to ride a tricycle, we created a harness to pull the tricycle – making it look like the girl was actually riding.

Here’s Thom proving, once again, that any problem can be solved with enough Gaffer tape.

The bicycle shots were shot in 4k using a Sony FS7 mounted in back of a camera truck. This allowed our young talent to ride at a normal speed, while giving us the smoothest shots possible.

We’re still not sure why, but Quincy kept yelling “faster-faster” during every take.

And for the walking shots – we deployed a device called a “OneWheel.” It’s basically a motorized skateboard with one, giant, all-terrain, wheel in the middle. It was originally built as a commuter platform for snowboarding enthusiasts (you can learn more here https://onewheel.com). We found out rather quickly, though, that the OneWheel was more than just fun and games, it made for a super smooth and versatile camera platform capable of going down sidewalks, through gates, up curbs – you name it.

Our in-house OneWheel expert, Jason, proves that we can dolly just about anywhere.

The last component that we felt was important to bringing the viewer on this journey was the sound. Sound plays such a crucial role in building both emotions and believability. For this spot, we didn’t use any of the natural sound, opting instead to foley everything. From the footsteps to the ambient sound, all of the effects were created or captured in house and added after the edit. To give an idea of our approach, here’s a version of the spot with the music, announcer, and soundbites stripped out. All you hear in this is sound effects.

Finally, with respect to sound, we originally pitched the spot without any sound bites at all – just the announcer with lots of sound, sound fx, and breathing room.

Ultimately, the client still remained a little uncomfortable not mentioning any of their services at all, so we added the “dialogue” as a sound element to allay their concerns.

Here’s a version of the spot as we would have aired it

OUTCOME

Despite not getting “all the way there,” we have moved the needle with these spots. As the writing of this case study, they are just beginning their first airing, so we have no data on public reaction yet. Internally, the client loves them and has gotten positive feedback from her CEO, members of the staff and members of her board. We’ll call that a small victory. (And we’ll update this post once the spots have aired).

SCOPE OF WORK

• Branding
• Concept Development
• Media Strategy
• Multi-cultural / Multi-lingual marketing
• Script Writing
• Video Production
• Foley
• Sound Design
• Video Editing
• Graphic Design
• Video Editing
• OneWheel Riding