– Introduction –
NUDES is a remake of an award-winning Norwegian miniseries, which has also been successfully adapted in Italy. The remake was produced by 3Cat in collaboration with Vertigo Films, Wild Bunch’s Spanish subsidiary, and ESCAC Studio. This project is very special because it combines three of our services: Think Early, Think Visual, and Think Data. All in all, three departments collaborated together.
Each member of our team played a vital role in marketing NUDES, creating high-quality and relevant marketing materials tailored for its audience. Our Think Early, Think Visual, and Think Data teams worked hand-in-hand to create this successful case. We first built a coherent strategy, followed by the creation of all visual materials, and then tested them on a special audience panel, thanks to our partner Beta Series.
Javier Peña and Celia Fumanal, who were part of the teams, will tell us all about it in the next two posts.
– Interview (Strategy) –
- Seeing all the incredible amount of material available, I wonder, at what stage of the series was The Film Agency involved?
Javier: We started before the shooting stage started. Since it was a remake, there was a lot of material of what the series was about and loads of options to position its Spanish version. It was definitely the best moment for us to start, before it was even shot, so we could talk, discuss, consider, and coordinate the photographer on site with a plan.
- And did you brief the creative photography crew during the shooting?
Javier: Yes, because we needed to develop a strategy, and to agree with the producer. In this case we were three parts: our team, as the agency that was going to develop the creative and the strategy, there was the producer and there was also the channel, where the series was going to be broadcast. So the three of us needed to agree… First of all, with the strategy – That is the core. And after that, we start with the ideas, of how we are going to express or convey that series marketing strategy, of how we are going to make it different.
- I was able to see that the strategy analyzes the market, in the perspective of the product, as well as the material itself, its strengths and weaknesses. My question now is actually two: How much of the information presented in this stage comes already from the client, and how much is yours? Also, how important is this stage for the art creation process?
Javier: It’s a difficult one! The creative process is as powerful as the client allows… It’s a mix, and we go together! We need to solve a communication problem that the client has and needs to position. We need to make a decision on how the series is going to be communicated, so we manage to get to that audience, that means that we need to understand.
Sometimes the producer, the client, has a lot of information and we work to get to the core, to analyze, to distill that amount of information to understand which one is the way we need to work with… We try to find the final decision, our own area, our own way to communicate, that’s different, and get something. At the end, we try to be memorable!
- I can see a lot of this effort, for example, in the benchmarking. The examples you guys took range from Merli to Euphoria, a very wide benchmarking: National and International, Mainstream and Niche content. Can you talk a little bit about the selection of the benchmarking?
Javier: We consider series that are more or less comparable – Because of the theme, because of the audience… So, we try to be as broad as possible, and recent as well. So, that gives us a perspective. Sometimes, even in the early stages of the benchmark, we analyze films or series that we consider that maybe are not that close. That is because they are giving information, and we need that information, so the client and us together can make decisions.
Celia: Sometimes when you try to confront a benchmark, what you do is try to understand it like a puzzle. You have all these elements that you can maybe relate to your new product. You try to extract all the elements that are going to help you make decisions. Because that is the most important aspect for a benchmark, to give you a wide view of the audience that you may have at that moment, and also understand what elements you have in your content that can work – Maybe it’s a marketing strategy, maybe it was the vibe of the material, something that gives you a hint where you can go through it. But, the most difficult thing about a benchmark is that we are not a prototype industry. I mean, something that worked before doesn’t mean it’s going to work for another momentum.
- As the second step is creating a briefing for the photos and videos that would later become the beautiful posters and video promos that we saw, what elements did you consider to be essential after analyzing the project? My assumption is that a lot of the elements came from the word cloud, in the series strategy process, is that correct?
Javi: We use the word cloud as a tool to make clear the key elements, and then we need to translate it into visual elements. In this case, the word cloud is done at the beginning, in the early stages of analyzing, that means when we start developing the different leads, not all those concepts are going to be utilized – But it helps! For the final image that we produced for this series we tried to work towards elements of a digital universe where there is a lot of “repetition”, “artificial” and “fragments” (…) And there is also the communication with the client, where there was a moment that they asked us to introduce different colors, that also gave us a push to the project because every part of the series has a different color concept.
Celia: For me, the word cloud, is where you frame the universe of the content (…) you can scope the universe that is going to be something and that something is what you have to visually translate. Is not like everything is going to be there for the visual part but you know how the frame of this universe works.
– Conclusion –
In this first part of the interview, we explored how The Film Agency’s team developed the marketing strategy for the NUDES series. We covered the project’s initial stages, including market analysis and benchmarking, and the creation of a word cloud to guide visual elements. The collaborative effort between departments and the client was crucial for effective communication and high-quality promotional material.
Stay tuned for the second part, where we will discuss the creation of the materials and the data testing phase to verify the strategy’s effectiveness. Check our services here!