You can create stories that are 30 seconds long and three-and-a-half minutes deep
Mike Kasprow, BBDO Toronto
When BBDO Toronto was tasked with creating a campaign for Mercedes Benz with the theme of “Unleashing the Senses,” they decided to try something a little different. The resulting two-minute video uses 360-degree video to put the viewer in the passenger seat of a Mercedes driving down Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway with the top down as the sun rises over the city.
“There are platforms that are really interesting to tell stories in, and I really do think 360 degree video is. But I hadn’t really seen any executions that had done a really interesting job of doing it in the marketing space to date,” said Mike Kasprow, the senior vice-president and executive creative director at BBDO.
“As it relates to unleashing your senses, the idea of putting a top-down, early in the morning, crossing a relatively beautiful (when its not packed with cars) highway, was a really interesting way to go.”
Kasprow said that shooting in 360-degree video also provides more opportunity to enrich the content without increasing the length of the ad.
“You can create stories that are 30 seconds long and three-and-a-half minutes deep, so that on each successive viewing you’re getting more and more information that’s interesting and a compelling part of the narrative,” he said.
The unique opportunities that the medium provides, however, come with unique challenges. Kasprow said certain conventions are yet to be established in 360-degree video, such as signifying to the viewer when it’s an appropriate time to move the camera in a particular direction.
“In planning the narrative, the production design, you’ve got to create compelling reasons for people to turn the camera in a particular direction at a particular moment,” he said. “We made sure that the actor was looking a particular way, in a particular direction, so that someone would notice that there was something going on on the other side of the frame.”
He also said handling post-production, scripting for multiple camera angles simultaneously, incorporating appropriate and compelling audio voice-overs and elevating the medium beyond a novelty by giving it a narrative flow are challenges facing this space.
Those challenges, explained Kasprow, were met with the help of agency partners, which included audio production by Grayson Matthew and graphic design by RedLab Digital.
