M&S Celebrity Kitchen
Client: Marks and Spencer, Stagestruck.
Year: 2018-2019.
Responsibilities: My involvement was the text and animations alone. I had nothing to do with how the videos were shot, edited or released.
The Challenge: Marks and Spencers are having trouble making their customer more are of new foods being announced each month. They would like to increase awareness of these products on a monthly basis so as they're released, customers can visit their store with in intention of buying the new product. They wanted to appeal to a new market age range.
The Solution: The solution to this was for Marks and Spencers to hire four (sometimes more) celebrities to help advertise the new foods that were being announced. The regulars were Paddy McGuinness, Amanda Holden, Rochelle Humes and Emma Willis. Stagestruck would then go out on location to shoot the footage, and then it would be cut down to a rough cut, and I would be given the footage to add text and graphics to keep the viewers engaged. These were released on YouTube to appeal to an audience of young adults.
The Process: The process itself was working within After Effects, selecting phrases and moments that were exaggerated and animating text or graphics that matched. We gravitated towards one or two plugins mainly animation composer to animate all of the text as this was efficient. In some instances I turned to expressions and rigging for one or two of the more complicated parts. These had no storyboards involved as the turn over for these was tight, and the celebrities improvised on the days, so we never knew what we were going to get!
The Results: The results were highly successful in terms of archiving the goal, the target audience were made more aware of food being announced at M&S. Over the 12 videos that we produced monthly, we totalled around 1,953,000 views on YouTube, it also went out to other platforms like Instagram. We visited the YouTube headquarters as well to identify what was working for the videos and where viewers dropped off.
Part way through this project M&S rebranded, which affected the style of the videos. When this happened I was tasked with illustrating a set of Emojis in this new grainy style. My work then became part of the new branding and my emojis got used on all of their digital marketing throughout 2019 to 2021.