Feeding Social Content Channels
Merrell hired our in-house communication agency to produce monthly photographic and motion content drops to promote their outdoor footwear lines.
The Client Relationship and Goal
Merrell, one of the world’s premier outdoor footwear brands, was seeking to produce an ongoing series of photographic and motion assets to promote its product SKUs across global social channels. The goal was to provide their marketing team with a regular flow of assets to keep all their media channels fresh and engaging. We call this service Story365.
Our storytelling agency team had previously produced a series of art-driven, outdoor advertising and print campaigns for the brand in Austin, Portland, Seattle, and Asheville, as well as a series of campaigns targeting the Latin American diaspora in the United States, so we understood their brand identity and culture.
The Deliverables
Over the past 12 months, WhereNext has produced:
250 photographic assets
200 motion assets - videos and GIFs
The visual assets included full-body landscape shots, full-body portraits, and close-up product SKU details. We’ve produced this Story365 campaign in ten different locations in Colombia.
The Locations
Merrell asked us to scout and produce in locations for this ongoing campaign in Colombia. By shooting in Colombia, they achieved cost-effective and diverse visual monthly asset drops that showcased different ranges of product SKUs in unique environments while remaining true to Merrell’s brand identity.
It was vital to the client that the shooting locations were not country or region-specific; the vibe had to appeal to both North American and global markets.
The locations also needed to feature a mixture of outdoor environments - rivers, dirt trails, forests - in different seasons. For example, we were able to produce winter assets in Colombia during summer in North America and summer assets during the North American winter.
Our Merrell field productions have taken place in various locations around Colombia, including El Nido del Condor Ecolodge in the central Andes and the Bogota area: Suesca, Choachi, Guatavita, La Vega, Sasaima, Machetá, and Bogota’s Eastern Hills. Colombia’s biodiversity and ease of access to wilderness areas made it the ideal location for showcasing a broad range of outdoor shoes and activities.
It was important to Merrell that landscapes were not country-specific.
Our Storytelling Process
Once a quarter, Merrell sends a range of shoes and clothing for each content drop to our Bogota office. Our pre-production team then creates a mood board based on the brand’s campaign manifesto, scouts locations, cast talent and organizes styling, hair and makeup, and photo direction.
Merrell then approves the artistic direction and shooting locations, and we lock in talent and other logistics. We cast talent who represent the spirit of each shoe: real trail runners, hikers, and climbers.
In line with Merrell’s brand identity, we cast models who represented the spirit of each shoe.
Field Production Team
In the field, we deploy a light and fast team: DP, photographer, producer, stylist, and talent to each location. Our still photographer works in parallel with our DP to produce both stills and motion in a single take.
Workflow: Exporting Regular Content Drops to the Client
With over 40 social content pieces delivered to Merrell per month, culled from hundreds of initial selects, the efficiency of our Story365 content workflow is critical the ensure all assets are delivered as quickly as possible.
The first stage in our workflow process is organizing the assets. We pre-select photo and video files from the thousands taken each shoot. Our Producer Sandra Eichmann Perret then trims these pre-selects down to 30-50 images per product SKU to send to the client. After the client makes their final selects, we send them to our Art Director, Yenssy Gonzáles. Yenssy post-produces the selected photos by separating each object from the image and individually color-correcting and editing each object.
For the videos and GIFs, our Editor and Motion Designer, Felipe Nieto Moya, assembles the 12-second social media video clips and creates the GIFs. These are reviewed by our Head of Video, Julian Manrique, and we send them to the client as offline versions (offline means that they have not been color-corrected nor have graphical treatments been added). Once they are client-approved, the videos and GIFs are post-produced, color-corrected, and uploaded to a server where our client can download them.
Our Producer reviews all post-produced images, videos, and GIFs before the final versions are exported and sent to Merrell.
Because we deal with thousands of RAW assets per monthly content drop, this delivery process requires a high level of organization. Every asset is documented on a Google spreadsheet and linked to a video hosting server where the client can review them and make comments before they are approved and moved to post-production. This also ensures that our client is constantly engaged with the process and has access to all the information in just one easy-to-access document.
Results
Merrell has bolstered its ability to deliver fresh, fun, targeted, and relevant social media content to its audience members around the globe.