The Amazon Marketplace team’s goal for the “Day One: Insights for Entrepreneurs” campaign was to educate Amazon selling partners (their term for brands who sell on Amazon) from some of the top minds in business. Mew Studios came in as a creative partner to create an entire season (nearly two dozen videos) of educational content featuring folks like Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, Tim Ferriss, and more. What resulted was a unified campaign that culminated in above-the-fold banner placement on the Amazon.com retail homepage and multiple dedicated pages on the Amazon website.

Listen…

…sometimes work isn’t fun. Sometimes you’re on the west coast and you get a phone meeting request for early morning eastern time. Or you’re trying to present super-professionally on a Zoom call for a new client and your 2-year-old  just strolls through your office door with food on their face… It’s not all movie stars and catered lunches.

But then other times, you’re doing a video shoot with Mark Cuban on the court of the Dallas Mavericks’ team facility. Or you’re driving around Seattle in the back of a cab with Tim Ferriss. Or loading in near Times Square with a Pulitzer Prize-winner.

And that’s what happened. The head of marketing for Amazon Marketplace had this idea: build a system to capture the best-of-the-best in the industry giving advice (what Mark Cuban called “quick and dirty tips”) to Amazon sellers from wherever they were in the world. And then create, from those interviews, world-class educational content in a number of different styles.

Chalk talks

We’ve created hundreds of videos of educational content and there’s a few ways you can go. And because we knew we’d get every kind of advice, tip, trick, and nugget of information from each of these influencers, we’d need to use every one of ‘em. For content that amplified the influencer’s interview, we developed a specific style of video: motion graphics and lightly illustrated vignettes that lived right on top of the interview footage, above and around the speaker’s head. We wanted to see and hear the interview and really highlight a nugget of wisdom on-screen to help with memory retention. We called  them “Chalk Talks” because the style looks like…well…chalk!

Whiteboards

Much like grade-school classrooms in the mid-70’s, when the chalk-writing style didn’t work, some of the videos got turned into whiteboards. For more complex topics, we instituted this style of animation where the entirety of an illustration gets slowly revealed and animated on-screen in sync with the influencer’s voiceover, allowing the viewer to track in real time. From a production standpoint, this also meant we weren’t showing the speaker on-screen, allowing us to pull out the most cohesive parts of the interview to thread the story of what they were trying to say as seamlessly as possible.

The Marketplace team loved this, as well, because it provided a whole bunch of really great illustrations that could be reused  in other places on the campaign.

2D CHARACTER ANIMATION

Educating Amazon selling partners was the overarching goal of the entire campaign but a secondary goal was to inspire. As filmmakers, we’re really just storytellers. So we loved the opportunity to hear the personal stories of these influencers that would  encourage brands and selling partners just getting started on Amazon. Because, hey, it’s really tough being a small business owner. So focusing on the influencers’ own challenges and how they overcame them was a really vital part of the campaign.

Since there really isn’t a whole bunch of readily-available footage from when Arianna Huffington founded The Huffington Post, and because we had to work within the confines of the budget (so hiring Cate Blanchett to play her character wasn’t an option), we landed on using 2D character animation.

Using highly-stylized backgrounds and puppeted characters that can move, talk, and interact with their environment, we were able to show how an animated Arianna Huffington navigated those early days and how 12-year-old Mark Cuban sold garbage bags door-to-door. We could even go back to 19th century Italy to tell the story of violin virtuoso Paginini.