Animation with The Human Touch
Internal engagement videos
PHD is a global media and marketing communications agency. The UK office were relaunching their intranet and commissioned Content Creatures to develop an internal engagement brand for their onboarding process. A key deliverable was a series of videos covering the company culture, its history, its core business and award wins.
Client
PHD T-Shaped
Industry
Media
What We Did
- Animation
- Copywriting
- Creative strategy
- Digital assets
- Motion design
- Music composition
- Storyboarding
- Voiceover production
Project film:
unlocking the challenge
From initial stakeholder interviews, our Creative Partners gained a key piece of insight. In an age when media agencies are selling themselves on big data and AI, PHD remains committed to its roots as a people-led business. They recognise that prospective staff and clients chose PHD because of their ‘The Human Touch’.
The problem with this creative thought for our client was that the most obvious execution, to feature current staff, was undermined by another key insight – longevity. The media industry could be characterised as one with high staff turnover, where people changed roles frequently.
Creative Internal engagement strategy
This meant any live-action film would date quickly. As our client was open to something creatively ‘a bit different’ and because of the brand’s internal culture, our Creatives felt encouraged to propose a more light-hearted animated approach to an internal engagement brand.
Our solution was an engaging character route, flushed with warmth and personality, something we felt PHD employees could relate to.
The creative solution
After working up a few character sheets of options, the client approved a simple, flexible core character using the PHD colour palette to differentiate individuals. These characters were diverse, yet free of gender or racial characteristics – in animation terms, we call these ‘nudes’. Don’t be alarmed, the characters are free to wear clothes, use props and even change shape.
After developing an initial set of characters and poses for use on and off screen, we worked up the main animation storyboards.
The simple ‘Human Touch’ internal engagement brand was designed to evoke a strong sense of nostalgia, harking back to childhood series of the 1980s.
rolling out the assets
To enhance this we chose actor Robert Ashby to provide a warm, knowing gravitas to the voiceover (a read that leant heavily on Arthur Lowe’s narration of the original Mr Men series!)
The concept was a huge success, with PHD using the animations in full, as well as short gifs to focus campaign messaging.
We also created character artwork for print, to brand the intranet and for use on collateral within induction packs for all new starters.