Creating An Award-Winning Campaign for Cat Footwear in Spain
¡Vamos a Valencia!
Flexin’ our Production Services Skills in Spain
Valencia, Spain, is a dynamic European city with a vibrant, multicultural population. Located on Spain’s southeastern coast, where the Turia River meets the Mediterranean Sea, it’s got a laid-back vibe that makes it one of the world’s coolest, most authentic shooting destinations. It was an ideal place to produce the most important campaign in the history of one of our favorite clients, Cat Footwear. As we planned the launch of the Cat CODE collection, Valencia stood out not only for its colorful character but also because Spain is an extremely cost-effective filming location. Producing this campaign in Spain meant we could shave 50 percent off the typical U.S. production budget, making the overall project spend far more efficient for our client.
The Cat CODE collection sold out in key markets shortly after the campaign launch.
As a growing global creative video agency, WhereNext has worked on productions in 32 countries and counting, and we’re always in search of fresh destinations to explore and discover. Our clients enjoy the perks of having a multilingual international team capable of economizing location and talent costs through our worldwide network. On your average day in our Bogotá studios alone, you can hear Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and German.
Our Production Company in Spain & Cat
The goal of the campaign was not only to launch the new range of Cat Footwear but to bring the brand’s image in line with a new generation of cool, young urban consumers. Our target market was globally-minded young adults searching for unique and authentic experiences abroad and at home (markets include USA, China, Latin America). Cat Footwear is designed to be durable yet comfortable and fashionable, perfect for spending all day on your feet in a city, and we produced the campaign to reflect that vision.
We’ve always been committed as an agency to working with clients whose vision and products we believe in, and Cat fits that bill to a tee. Our team in Spain represented the exact same “enthusiastic doers” who are Cat’s core demographic for these sneakers. When our multicultural team of award-winning directors, videographers, editors, producers, and creatives aren’t at work, they’re out cycling the mountains of Europe, rock-climbing, birding, trekking, surfing, and otherwise exploring the planet.
Hustlin’: How We’re Growing as a Creative Video Agency
With a short amount of time to organize an entire shoot on a different continent, our multilingual producers worked round-the-clock to prepare before we traveled to Valencia. During this time, we scouted locations, negotiated permits and payments to shoot throughout Valencia’s urban core (including La Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias), cast models, organized catering, styling, and makeup services, arranged accommodations, and created storyboards on the fly. Our pre-production team in Colombia was in constant communication with our team in Spain, as well as regularly liaising with the client. Due to Spanish national holidays, the two weeks we had planned for ended up being fewer than ten working days. We’re comfortable working under time pressure, and our production teams on both continents pulled out all the stops to get everything ready under a super-tight deadline.
The invaluable experience of working on a project like this one was dealing with different filming requirements, tax laws, and restrictions. This was an important part of our continued learning experience as we keep growing and expanding our vision in a global setting. This experience of filming all around the world gives us the ability to turn on a dime and make things happen no matter where we find ourselves working.
Rolling with the Punches
During the shoot, our production team faced several challenges. For example, the significant difference in North American, Colombian and European sample garment sizes meant that we ended up with a large number of pants that didn’t fit our models. With some ingenuity—and a lot of safety pins and tight belts—we made it work. However, it was an excellent example of the endless tiny details that WhereNext solves for when planning international shoots.
Every day we uploaded pictures from the day’s shoot in Spain and sent them back to our editing team in Bogotá. The client needed the images turned around immediately for a Cat Footwear global executive conference, so we designed a dynamic, agile workflow to select, edit, and color the pictures in real-time.
In our Bogotá studios, our editing team worked around the clock to create engaging videos for our client. We were determined to create something exciting and unique for the biggest product launch in Cat Footwear’s history and turn it around in just a few weeks. The Cat CODE collection sold out in key markets shortly after the campaign launch, and this success has led to a slew of new Cat projects in the pipeline.
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