Screen time has taken over family time. While families might spend time in the same room together, they’re very often on their separate phones. One of Australia's largest department stores, BIG W, wanted to bring families back together so that they actually engage with one another during family time.

Rather than blame technology, we embraced it.

We created Craft Camera Action - a digital tool that turns a kid's real-life craft into the heroes of their own movie.

It all began with our animated story, ‘The Big-Headed Bilby’.

The difference was that our animation didn’t include any of the main characters.

Families had to create the heroes with odds and ends lying around the house.

Then, using integrated AI, the creations were instantly rigged and rendered into the film by simply taking a photo in Messenger. The film was then delivered back to the family via the platform - complete with credits for each film and the ability to share the cinematic debuts on social channels.

Besides turning Messenger into a film editing tool, the interactive platform provided craft inspiration, tools and quizzes to help families make their own characters.

Our audience was families with younger children. And every aspect of the idea was tailored for this audience - from the type of story (including the moral take-out), the animation style, the influencer strategy of using micro-influencer mums to the tips, tools and inspiration. Our approach was to create easy ways for families to play together while also giving them an easy way to access BIG W’s craft range to complete their movie debuts.

Our campaign launched in late June 2021, timed to coincide with the start of the school holidays. The activity had extra meaning and utility for families at this time though, as much of the country was experiencing COVID lockdown.

Building up to the launch we built out our timeline with all our partners and stakeholders to allow us time to craft our story and animation and to be able to utilise all of those assets throughout the bespoke Facebook and Instagram advertising assets we used to drive awareness and clicks to messenger. We also allocated a solid three week testing period to iron out bugs and optimise the user journey.

Working directly with Facebook from the inception of the idea and with a best-in-class digital production partner in Zebrar, developed we were able to ensure the campaign could live entirely within the Facebook and Messenger ecosystem as one seamless user experience from the first advertising touchpoint served to the customer through to the viewing of their unique, personalised mini-movie within the Messenger platform.

Every design element of our campaign was created to embody the hand crafted nature of the concept. Our mini-movie centred around three iconic Australian landscapes - the outback, the bush and the ocean. Within these environments we developed our animated characters, which met and interacted with the crafted characters from our users. We pulled those environments into our Facebook and Instagram ads to bring the world we’d created to life and generate advertising that was truly unique and stand-out in the cluttered world of people’s Facebook feeds. We also developed and shot our own example Craft characters who showed up in our ads and as inspiration for our users. Every element was crafted by our team - right down to writing our supers in Play-Doh!

Craft Camera Action was a game changer for BIG W and for Facebook. The campaign delivered on BIG W’s ambition to be recognised for providing inspiring ideas and activities to keep kids entertained during school holidays. A Facebook brandlift study showed this metric improved from 43.5% to 48.3%.

The advertising we created for the campaign within Facebook and Instagram generated a 20% higher ad recall rate & 42% higher click through rate than benchmarks, indicating an incredibly strong engagement level for the campaign.

In terms of the Messenger experience itself.

Over 20,000 unique characters were created.

Over 1,000 films were generated and shared via social channels.

That’s tens of thousands of hours of actual time engaged as a family.

Craft Camera Action was recognised internally by Facebook as best-in-class receiving one of only 8 Lighthouse Awards across all of APAC in the second half of 2021.