7/14/10
by Jaime Borschuk, Interactive Design Manager
This year Metromint decided to make a 30 second video spot to run online as part of our summer ad campaign. While discussing possible ways to summarize the product in that small amount of time, we wondered what our fans would say.
We have great fans who say great things about Metromint, and we thank you for your endless phone calls and emails. All of your experiences with Metromint bring new excitement and associations to the brand that we can't always come up with on our own. In addition to making our own video about Metromint, we wanted to know what YOUR videos would look like, and so we ran The Metromint Very Short Video Contest, for which we challenged YOU to make a video about your experience with Metromint that was at most 25 seconds long.
For this contest we decided that we would review the entries ourselves and hand pick 5 that we felt fit the brand, told a story, and held entertainment value. From there, we would let YOU vote on which video would win the grand prize, a 32G iPad, and 2nd Prize, a $200 Apple gift card.
We were impressed and delighted by the quality of submissions we received. It was difficult to narrow the entries down to just 5 finalists— we wanted to change it to 10!— but those were the rules. Below is a playlist of our top 5. Congratulations to Colton Phipps, who was voted Grand Prize Winner, and Jonathan Mann, voted 2nd place!
You can see more entries on our YouTube Channel, and soon on the Video Jukebox I'm building for our homepage.
While the video contest was going on, we were busy building our own 30 second piece. It would be an animation! Instead of outsourcing this whole project to an agency, we decided to take a smaller scale approach.
Metromint Creative Director Jon Weber provided the initial concept and storyboards, and animator Alexander Tarrant brought the imagery to life. Metromint's Marketing Coordinator Jenn Chan, Founder Rio Miura, and summer temp Justin Sedor (in this order in the photograph to the right) worked together to develop and mix the music and sound effects that would accompany the voiceover we produced with the help of Voice One.
And the final product? Here it is! Our 30 second Metromint piece is now airing on Hulu for the next few weeks, along with select user generated content from the video contest. We like how our piece turned out, and we hope it succeeds in introducing our story.
