Storytelling for Ford.

A significant challenge for large enterprise companies offering an array of products and services is how to tell interesting, memorable and engaging stories around their value propositions and what opportunities exist for a specific segment of their target audience.

In 2019 the Ford Dev Program had one such challenge and needed a way to breakdown complex technology concepts into simple, bite-sized and engaging stories. The challenge was to take a holistic story view of their entire program, break it down, and spotlight 2 specific paths that their developer audience could exploit while integrating their API project with Ford. 

After deep consideration for their developer audience, and workshopping some initial ideas with the team, we settled on short animated video explainers as the best way to explain and deliver our development path stories whilst keeping them ‘snackable’ and ‘shareable’ for our wider audience. 

I worked closely with the Ford Dev team and facilitated some mood-boarding exercises to collect ideas from stakeholders and explored a couple of creative directions. Together, we agreed on the creative direction we felt would best position to tell our stories and explored different styles and aesthetics while respecting the company’s mission, values and message.

Following this, I created a very detailed creative brief, and invited several animation studios to pitch for the project. We heard from many great studios, but we finally settled on MezzoLab, a fantastic animation studio based out of Portugal. We choose MezzoLab as we felt they understood our brief the best and went the extra mile to show us how things might flesh out.

Mezzo worked with us on storyboarding each of the animations, from creating initial stylistic concept frames to consulting on the script, voiceover, sound design and music selection. Joao and his team were extremely professional, fun and patient with our last minute changes and tweaks, it really felt like we were working with a member of our team, as opposed to an external vendor.

This was a fantastic process from end to end, and everyone was delighted with the results.