Facebook’s 9 Views on Video – behind the scenes
Facebook is one of the world’s great video platforms – but who does Facebook turn to when they want to produce their own marketing video? Recently at Moskito Design we helped Facebook build and launch 9 Views on Video, an educational video marketing camapaign that appeared across the EMEA region targeting what advertisers really need to know to create thumb-stopping video advertising.
It was a timely multichannel campaign for Facebook, and for us here an exciting chance to flex our muscles and push ourselves in new directions, as our Video Production, Graphic Design, Copywriting and Localization teams were all heavily involved.
I recently grabbed five minutes with Luca Salvioni, our video team leader, and Gaia Girardi, one of our Italian copywriters and translators, to find out more about what went into the production of the Facebook video campaign.
Luca, tell me about the campaign.
Luca: 9 Views on Video is this huge multi-country campaign for which we were required to produce eleven videos – the nine main videos and a pair of intro videos from Nicola Mendelsohn, the Facebook EMEA vice president. We followed the whole thing from pre-production to the final product of the videos and then we also put together a digital campaign to promote the videos.
So you were present at the creation, so to speak, helping manage the video production from the beginning. What was it like working with Facebook in their London video studio?
Luca: It was really cool to be there. They’ve got everything a videomaker could want in their studio and they gave us all kinds of freedom to work. Beth Antonelli, the Facebook Measurement Marketing Manager who led the campaign, was very helpful on the set helping direct. Sometimes it was sort of good cop, bad cop: Beth knows the people and the mileu, so for our first time on their set I let her give all the orders! But it was great to work side by side with them.
How did being involved at the beginning affect the final outcome?
Luca: It was great to be able to sit down at the table with the Facebook, er, face to face, and partner with them to help them decide how to achieve what they wanted. There were a lot of changes along the way – in fact, on any project, with any big client, when there are a lot of people involved, things tend to change a lot. It comes with the job. But if you have a clear objective about what you want to accomplish, you’ll find a way to do it within the constraints you have to get the best result. And in the end I think the final product was convincing and really satisfying.
Gaia, you worked on the Italian translation and captioning/subtitling for the campaign’s five languages. What was different about working with video rather than web/marketing copy?
Gaia: We do a lot of copywriting and copy localization, but in this case it was great to do so much work on video because you actually get to see what the speakers – in this case internal Facebook video advertising experts – are trying to communicate. You can watch their faces, see their conviction and the effort they’re putting into it, and it made the act of translation both easier and more interesting. Almost like professional interpretation, rather than simply translation.
What were the biggest challenges involved?
Luca: Working with the sheer amount of data from the video shoots. It was well over 1 terabyte of data that we had to cut down to about 30 minutes of final footage. The good thing is that because I was on set I could already help shape what was going on to narrow down and focus the creative possibilities before post-production.
What about for copy and localization team?
Gaia: The first was the technical aspects of the subtitling itself. Italian, French and Spanish work in similar ways, and can be divided fairly similarly for the subtitles, but German is a particular challenge. It helps that even though I don’t do translation in German I still know the basics, so I can see how to create subtitles that are split and divided along meaningful lines.
You worked on all five languages then?
Gaia: We all worked on it together. Our French, Spanish, Italian, German and English copywriters collaborated really tightly to make sure the translations worked on the page, then worked as subtitles. Even if the Spanish translator didn’t necessarily lay down the Spanish subtitles herself – I did that – she was involved in quality control at the end. By all working together so closely on the project it helps us makes sure we can express all the subtleties of each particular language while sticking closely to the speaker’s meaning and within the technical constraints of the subtitles. And it also means we could pay a lot of attention to the details despite the size the project and the tight deadlines were working under.
What does this experience mean for Moskito – and our clients?
Luca: We were able to learn a ton from this project, putting together all these competencies. I think we’re kind of unique in a way because we cover most aspects of communication.
There are lots of specialist companies that churn out video for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday. We’re not over-specialized in this sense – we’re great at so many areas that were involved in this campaign, from social media post copy, to the web design of the minisite, to the graphic design for the social posts. Like a lot of growing agencies, we’ve relied on independent partners in the past, but little by little we’re bringing all this work inside to become a truly full-service agency. A super-qualified full service agency.
Not just qualified, super-qualified. Get your video production and post-production, creative copywriting and multilingual creative localization and digital strategy all in one place at Moskito Design.
