Case Study
Motion For Social
Sour Patch Kids: Sour Cherry Blasters
Even a 6 second social media ad needs a process to ensure the client gets a great ROI and a successful campaign.
The media buyer requested two creatives for A/B testing in mutlple regions of the market.
Creative #1
Creative #2
| Client | Mondelēz, Circle K |
| Product | Sour Patch Kids: Sour Cherry Blasters |
| Agency | Six12 Creative |
| Motion Creative, Animation, Sound Design After Effects, Trapcode Particular, Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition |
Craig Nelson |
| Print Design | Ros Klassen |
| Storyboards | Addison Sedgley-Brosseau |
The Source Artwork
The task was to take the client’s packaging artwork and augment and adapt for: In-store signage kit (seen below), a new Froster (frozen drink) flavour, and a bilingual, multi-platform social media launch.
The graphic designer had already done an excellent job of creating those initial keyart compositions that I was able to draw from for the motion creative pitches.
The Brand Guide
Sour Patch Kids are a well-loved brand that came with an detailed and established brand guide. The client was very steadfast about hitting the right personality and positioning notes.
Storyboards
You’re trying to get that viewer-scroller to do something …tap a button, visit a website, add a comment. Even if you do get them to stop, you’ve got 6 seconds to get your message across. It’s only enough time for a few beats of animation, so they’ve got to count.
Animation
This part is the most fun! At this point, the client has (mostly) bought into the pitch, and now it’s up to me to figure out how to make the animation happen. Position, Scale, Rotation, BABOOM!
I used After Effects for the animation, including Trapcode’s Particular plugin to generate the burning fuse and cherry explosion.
Sound FX & Music
Audio is like the cherry(!) on top except it’s not. Music and sound effects can take a so-so animation, and fwap, the ‘good’ knob goes all the way to ‘great’. Audio can offer a much sharper hook AND more often than not, gets a more enthusuastic ‘APPROVED!’ from a client.
There was no voiceover for this project but if you want to hear my dulcet tones attempt a scratch VO track, check out the Explainers & Training Case Study.
The Audio Mix: music and sound effects Adobe Audition
Breakdown: Sound FX & Alternate Music Options
Platforms & Languages
These are a few examples, but in reality, with 2+ creatives for A/B testing, 4+ social platforms and two languages being output, the number of final video files often numbers into the dozens.
Instagram Stories 9:16
Youtube 16:9
Facebook Feed 1:1
The Bottom Line
The bottom line was a happy client. Their targets and KPI’s were met or exceeded for the campaign. And as usual in social media, the motion social media posts widely outperformed static image posts. The ROI for the motion posts made the case for themselves.
The agency was happy too! Two more flavour launch campaigns were activated in following seasons.
