Driving engagement through animation

Indeed is the #1 job site worldwide, with over 180 million unique visitors per month. With offices in 19 countries around the world, I worked remotely with their European HQ, Dublin Ireland, participating in their Marketing Campaign Lab - A team setup to conduct a series of experimental ads to test performance for the multinational.

Campaign - Job Happy

I was tasked to interpret the phrase "Tap dance your way into work everyday when you find a job you love" using the Jaywalker Pictures animated style. I simplified tap dancing into dancing, but more broadly, this was about capturing single moments of happiness in a way that could be delivered in a short, engaging animation suitable for the Facebook news feed. This led to the slogan "Be this job happy", with 6 second animations depicting characters of different industries dancing in their respective workplaces.

Execution

Simple, 1-2 second dance loops were created to maximise flexibility and allow maximum detail on each frame. At 30 frames per second, a 6 second animation amounts to 180 frames, each frame a high resolution, 1920 x 1080 digital painting. Character design and colours had to work within existing brand guidelines and all environments were painted to maximise detail, depth and visual interest.

We test a lot of ads on facebook and all of Jason's have consistently performed very well. From looking at the metrics, we see far higher than average engagement rates, high relevance scores and most importantly - high click thrus and app installs. It suggests that thoughtful, well-made advertising can be both enjoyable and can help sales.

Campaign - Find People Faster

The Brief

Indeed wanted an engaging animation that would encourage small business owners to use Indeed.com to post job ads. After brainstorming a number of concepts, I worked with Indeed to develop storyboard animatics to narrow the parameters of the ad to the following:

• Show the character using the post a job functionality of the website
• Focus on small business owners
• Make the video as short as possible
• Integrate a crossover between live footage and animation
• Emphasise the concept of speed - how fast it is to use Indeed.com to post your ad
• Maintain a positive spirit and charm that would align with their brand guidelines.

Concept

I distilled the concept of speed into the slogan "Find People Faster" and based the video around the physical artefacts of a job search, in this case, a traditional "Help Wanted" poster. This gave me scope to build a narrative that incorporates a live footage/animated crossover and show the Indeed website being used. This ad is currently being submitted for airtime on RTE, Ireland's national broadcaster.

Execution

Pre-production involved dressing a residential window as a cafe window to avoid issues with filming on commercial premesis. Set design tasks ranged from illustrating and rigging the "Help Wanted" poster, right through to carpentry and flower arrangement. A completely free music soundtrack was sourced to avoid legal issues and costs with distribution of the final work.

The shoot posed it's own challenges that had to be overcome, such as shooting into a glass window which brought reflections and patchy lighting conditions making it hard to get consistently lit footage.

Post-production involved compositing and rotoscoping to remove wires from the poster. Animation involved over 350 frames of character movement. Ensuring character performance matched with music and brought a sense of weight, gravity and believablity was key to the success of the project.