1) As it becomes easier and easier for consumers to tune out advertising, it becomes more important to create work that people find entertaining and want to engage with. To that end, 2016 saw a trend towards longer narratives from Big Brands, shot by Hollywood directors, with A-list talent.
My favorite examples of these include Wes Anderson directing H&M’s Holiday Short with Adrien Brody, Harmony Korine directing the latest Under Armor film with Steph Curry, and Rihanna directing Cara Delevingne for the recent “Do You” Puma work.
And these films didn’t exist in traditional mediums like TV, where consumers are used to seeing big-name stars. All of this content was cleverly released on social and presented as personal stories from the director and the celebrities. Making fans feel like they owed it to them to engage.
In 2017, I expect to see this trend continue into 360 video, Instagram-serialized stories and Snapchat appointment-based films.
2) On the creative and production side, Big Spaceship built out its in-house studio this year allowing us to be more agile in our approach to creating original content on any scale that’s appropriate for our brand partners. As part of our new office space, The Studio, is a fully outfitted production facility that allows us to crew-up quickly to produce high-quality content and at the same time experiment with other growing platforms like VR and 360 video.
As we staffed up this past year, we have been very focused on pulling folks from different industries to make sure that we bring on multi-skillset, hybrid-type folks.
3) I’m most proud of Big Spaceship’s work with YouTube around the election. YouTubers are famous for organizing movements, spreading awareness, commenting, liking, and disliking. Yet, despite this incredible digital activism, research told us that apathy was still a huge barrier and Millennials were the least likely demographic to vote in real life. VoteIRL asked YouTubers to put down their digital devices and vote in real life.
But to Vote you have to be registered. After testing registration times in every state, we discovered that it takes an average of 1 minute and 34 seconds to register to vote. So, we asked our most popular YouTube creators to make a very specific video: “Film yourself doing anything you want for 1 minute and 34 seconds while your viewers register to vote.” All in all, we laid the groundwork for elections to come.
4) 2017 is the year we will see a massive surge in platform specific content, specifically vertical video.
The industry has resisted it for years, and long proclaimed that our eyes are horizontal so all video should be as such. While that may be true, it turns out that we are also very lazy and don’t want to flip our phones on their side. So, 2017 will establish vertical video as the lingua franca of mobile content.