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.

Families nowadays often spend time in the same room, but on separate devices.

BIG W wanted to bring families together for family time.

Introducing Craft Camera Action.

A digital tool that turns a family’s real-life craft into the heroes of their own movie.

We created an animated story with the main characters missing.

Families crafted the heroes with odds and ends at home.

With a simple photo in Messenger, the creations were rendered into the film, with personalised credits, creating a bespoke version of the animation.

We gave families a way to play together and produce a film they could enjoy afterwards.

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.

It all began with our animated story, ‘The Big-Headed Bilby’ which was discoverable via Facebook Messenger. The difference was that our animation didn’t include any of the main characters.

Families had to create the heroes using craft supplies and odds and ends lying around the house. The interactive platform provided craft inspiration, tools and quizzes to help families make their own characters.

By simply taking a photo of their creation via Messenger, the bespoke characters were instantly rigged and rendered into the film using integrated AI. The film was then delivered back to the family via the platform - complete with personalised credits for each film and the ability to share the cinematic debuts on social channels.

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 and 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.