Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

We gave kids and parents a way to play together and, in the process, produce a highly shareable film. It’s an interactive and joyful experience that puts the brand at the centre of delivering quality time to families.

Background

Screen time has taken over family time. While families might spend time in the same room together, they’re very often on their separate phones. One of Australia's largest department stores, BIG W, wanted to bring families back together so that they actually engage with one another during family time.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

Rather than blame technology, we embraced it. We created Craft Camera Action - a digital tool that turns a kid's real-life craft into the heroes of their own movie. It all began with our animated story, ‘The Big-Headed Bilby’. The difference was that our animation didn’t include any of the main characters. Families had to create the heroes with odds and ends lying around the house. Then, using integrated AI, the creations were instantly rigged and rendered into the film by simply taking a photo in Messenger. The film was then delivered back to the family via the platform - complete with credits for each film and the ability to share the cinematic debuts on social channels. Besides turning Messenger into a film editing tool, the interactive platform provided craft inspiration, tools and quizzes to help families make their own characters.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Our audience was families with younger children. And every aspect of the idea was tailored for this audience - from the type of story (including the moral take-out), the animation style, the influencer strategy of using micro-influencer mums to the tips, tools and inspiration. Our approach was to create easy ways for families to play together while also giving them an easy way to access BIG W’s craft range to complete their movie debuts.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

Our campaign launched in June 2021, to coincide with the start of the school holidays. The activity had extra meaning and utility for families at this time though, as much of the country was experiencing COVID lockdown. Building up to the launch we built our timeline with all our stakeholders to allow us time to craft our story and animation and to be able to utilise all of those assets throughout the bespoke Facebook and Instagram advertising we used to drive awareness and clicks to messenger. We also allocated a solid three week testing period to iron out bugs and optimise the user journey. Working directly with Facebook from the inception of the idea and with a best-in-class digital production partner in Zebrar, developed one seamless user experience from the first advertising touchpoint served to the customer through to the viewing of their unique, personalised mini-movie within the Messenger platform.

List the results (30% of vote)

Craft Camera Action was a game changer for BIG W and for Facebook. The campaign delivered on BIG W’s ambition to be recognised for providing inspiring ideas and activities to keep kids entertained during school holidays. A Facebook brandlift study showed this metric improved from 43.5% to 48.3%. The advertising we created for the campaign within Facebook and Instagram generated a 20% higher ad recall rate & 42% higher click through rate than benchmarks, indicating an incredibly strong engagement level for the campaign. In terms of the Messenger experience itself. Over 20,000 unique characters were created. Over 1,000 films were generated and shared via social channels. That’s tens of thousands of hours of actual time engaged as a family. Craft Camera Action was recognised internally by Facebook as best-in-class receiving one of only 8 Lighthouse Awards across all of APAC in the second half of 2021.