Seller Marketing & UX Explainers

What started as 90 seconds of animation ended up inspiring the redesign of the entire Sell(dot)Amazon site, nearly 100 videos, and support for nearly a dozen different teams inside Amazon.

The Seller Marketing and UX (SMX) team approached us with a goal: promote awareness about their tools, products, and services to increase adoption of the whole platform and individual programs. It was a big job: a multi-year campaign of creating animations to help explain the wide-array of tools and resources available to the Amazon Seller. This is the kind of client relationship we love: collaborating at the beginning of a project with an ending goal in mind. And the goal here was to help small businesses, which felt like a really worthy effort!

Production at Scale

The volume was daunting (there are A. LOT. of tools…) so we knew we’d have to adapt our processes to maintain the level of animation production and quality for years to come. We built out our team by bringing on more writers, concept artists, illustrators, and animators. We built out our project management by creating and adapting powerful systems, frameworks, and structures to ensure the production of the animations would go smoothly from initial concept to final render and delivery.

There are a lot of steps in the creative process, a lot of people that need to be consulted, and a whole bunch of pieces that need to fit together perfectly to ensure a successful final product. Each stage of the process requires feedback, re-works, and adjustments. It’s easy for hiccups to happen in this multi-step process, so we needed a robust system that the project managers, artist, and the client could track.

After brainstorming and planning sessions with the Amazon team and weeks of iteration and concepting, we had our idea defined: portray the Selling on Amazon experience as a large warehouse/campus that a seller “character” would gradually explore and learn inside.

Consistency is key

Even though the scale of the project meant multiple illustrators would need to work in tandem on as many as videos 10 videos at once, each illustration needed to feel consistent and messaging across various scriptwriters needed to be authentic. So we generated Content and Style Guides to help keep everything aligned. We built out an asset library of hundreds of ready-made illustration pieces, custom animations, and plug-and-play libraries minimize confusion and get scaled up quickly as the team grew. And we broke down some of our favorite animations to understand why they looked so great. From these learnings came frameworks, scorecards, and rulebooks to define every piece of the creative process. Like the rule that “Characters or objects must move at least every 3 seconds.” We noticed that when there wasn’t movement every 3 seconds, the video would feel too static. So we generated some 30 rules and created a checklist to ensure the highest level of quality for every video in the series.

Pretty important stuff…

Each video is unique and worked together to really define the global style for the entire sell.amazon.com website, as well as internal resources for nearly a dozen teams across Amazon. We even created an explainer video to support other teams in making their own explainer videos in the same style as a part of an internal Amazon “toolkit.”

The final videos and all their accompanying assets are still a huge part of the overall brand guidelines, they’re constantly being updated and utilized in marketing and advertising efforts, and they’re going around the world in dozens of different languages.