Extreme Reach -
The Anthem

Category

Commercial

Client

Extreme Reach

Country

USA

Runtime

1:30 min

Year

2021

ExtremeReach's marketing team returned to Prodigium - after 3 successful, brand-sensitive projects together (Linx, Luca, and ER Payroll) - for our most ambitious project together yet: building a visual manifesto, an Anthem video, to launch their newly merged corporate culture.

The real challenge? This flagship video - one of the largest and most ambitious ad campaigns ER had done to date - needed to be completed within less than a month, just in time for the 2021 ANA Marketing Masters conference where ExtremeReach would present its new global presence to stakeholders around the globe.

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Case Study

ExtremeReach is a US-based advertising technology and payroll processing company. They were going through a major merger with Adstream and the resulting company would become the most sophisticated advertising delivery and logistics company on the globe, covering many more markets and countries than ER had covered initially. This anthem video would provide a unique creative expression to the new, larger organization - both to unite staff, and to bring the rest of the advertising industry up to speed who ER had become.

Ideation and
Creative Team

We went on a deep-dive with ER's Creative Director Cody Dennison and Chief Marketing Officer Melinda McLaughlin to understand the new ER brand, its role in the global advertising ecosystem, and the stakeholders that will benefit from the new and merged Extreme reach. Prodigium's creative directors Hiroki Kamada and Tobias Deml teamed up to find the right creative team to bring elegance, scale, a creative twist and a solid imagination to a concept that would revolve around Creative Logistics: the delivery and intelligent analysis of creative advertising assets, anywhere in the world.Based on our extensive network, we tapped director Michael Brown who had recently completed a large corporate campaign for a multinational electronics company, and Tony Borden who could oversee the increasingly complex editorial process we had in mind.

The vision our directorial team developed was centered around perspective-shifting sculptures. Due to an enormous time constraint - less than a month from conception to final delivery of a large, multi-national corporate ad campaign - we opted for CGI as the means to create a unique set of sculptures, rather than physical ones. We envisioned a merge of an anthemic voice-over, powerful, geometric shots of metaphorical imagery, and a custom-built CGI world to encapsulate the ultimate collision of Creative and Logistics.

Ava discovered this issue and worked tirelessly for two years to build a solution to the problem: An app that would transcribe conversations by using the participants’ smartphone microphones through speech recognition. By having multiple phones present and building voice profiles, the app is able to distinguish between voices and create a chat bubble-like transcription of the conversation. The deaf person can easily read along and contribute to the conversation by typing and using text to speech – all within Ava.

Previz & CGI Prep

While comparing the most appropriate CGI vendors to execute the massive sculpture - a sourcing that took place across 4 countries on an incredibly compressed timeline - we teamed director Michael up with our storyboard artist Gracie Maseda who we worked with on “”; together they were able to quickly build the world we had laid out together, and figure out the geometric constraints. We were deeply inspired by a shared reference between Michael and us - the Kahn’s Library at Exeter Academy, made famous by Alex Roman’s seminal CGI short film "The Third and the Seventh."

With a location in mind and a CGI execution as the goal, we pre-visualized all shots in storyboard form - those that required compositing between a live action actor and CGI, and those that were CGI-only. In our 10+ years of dealing with CGI, we’ve learned that pre-visualization is everything and can save hundreds of thousands of dollars of wasted iterations.

Thanks to that past expertise we knew the capabilities our CGI partner needed to have. We ended up striking a partnership with Indigo Studios and a British-American set of modelers, animators, lighting designers and CGI generalists; the hard-working teams were led by Chris Clor, George Watson, Felipe Roque and Kim Fairman. Ultimately, collaboration and communication were key; our background in CGI (Prodigium co-founder Tobias Deml spent half a decade as a CGI artist) came in extremely handy to communicate at a high technical level and successfully navigate the short schedule we had at our disposal.

With that many moving parts, multiple vendors and a growing staff working on the project at an expeditious speed, we were able to fully leverage experiences we’ve mastered in the past, such as a full 3D-animated commercial we did for Epson, to streamline workflow for everyone.

Production & Post

We filmed the live action components of the campaign in a single day on a greenscreen stage in New York City. Previz was paramount here, since the CGI pipeline was at full throttle; camera perspectives, lens choices and lighting situations needed to match already-established realities in our CGI world, and camera and shot data needed to be handed back to our 3D and compositing artists.

Picture editing and the last third of the CGI and compositing pipeline happened in parallel, so exchanging files and feedback on a frame-accurate level was paramount so excess renders would be minimized; a necessity to meet the deadline of the project.

Creative & Deployment

ExtremeReach’s Melinda and Cody were instrumental in making this project a success. From working closely with our copywriter to being deeply involved in the editing process, it was really important to us to have constant client feedback on the creative of the campaign, and make sure it’d fit the vision they had built for the ANA Marketing Masters showfloor together with another creative agency that specialized in physical conference booth designs.

As per usual with Prodigium projects, the video got done in time for the conference and was well-received by C-level executives inside of ExtremeReach, and left a strong impression at the ANA Marketing Masters. Not only that, but in parallel ER did a fully revamped web presence on its Creative Logistics, which the video became the opening piece to.

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