Newsela “Doodle” Videos
Challenge
Educators were in the midst of a whirlwind catch-up, for their students, themselves and the news seemed to be talking daily about teacher burnout. As a part of the More than News campaign, we wanted to make educators aware of our premium products and the everyday classroom issues they solved - without getting stuck in the noise. Schools had adopted dozens of digital technologies during the pandemic - and at this point post pandemic every edtech company had a lot to say.
We also needed this concept to be repeatable - so that we could easily recreate it whenever we needed a new video.
Concept
The high level concept goal was to entertain and inform all in under 20 seconds.
Working with executive stakeholders, I conceptualized a video formula (right) that was easy to rinse and repeat for any future use case. I also planned this concept out to be internet friendly and “meme-able”. The basic formula was an if/then formula Classroom problem + Feeling that problem creates (with funny clip) + Newsela Solution. The funny clips at the heart of this did the heavy lifting, and were easily lifted out into memes that could be re-purposed in Giphy and across our social channels.
Solution
We took the formula to our video agency, worked out the final representation/optimization and with my oversight produced a total of 5 videos for the first round. The videos were a huge hit - breaking all of our previous watch records. One video alone racked up over 1 million views on a single platform.
Role: Creative Director
Tools: Adobe illustrator, Creative Strategy
Worked with: Agency - Demo Duck, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing