YourSocial
Recrouting / Social Media Ad Campaigns
HÜTTENHOF
Seeglück Hotell Forelle
Heuberger Fenster
Summary
When Alex Carioli and Christina Lang approached me to work with them on different social media ad campaigns, I was initially skeptical due to usual budget constraints and my expertise lying in high-end productions.
However, upon learning more about their needs and the collaboration with DAH Digital for hotel industry campaigns, I decided to give it a try. With minimal pre-production planning, we focused on shooting talking head ads, both horizontally and vertically.
During shooting, the challenge lay in making non-professional actors comfortable in front of the camera to deliver authentic messages. In post-production, I created numerous ad variations to test audience response effectively. Despite the challenges, the collaboration resulted in a successful team effort, producing compelling and varied content for social media advertising.
About the Collaboration
by Roman Pilgerstorfer
Your Social
When I first talked to Alex Carioli he told me how him and his collogue Christina moderate social media pages and that they needed me for video work. Since many businesses are not willing to spend a healthy budget on their social media and my expertise lies within high end productions I was a bit skeptical if our collaboration would work out. But when we got into further details of what they needed, I was open to at least try to work with them on a project.
Alex explained that they cooperate with DAH Digital, to produce social media ad campaigns for the hotel industry since many hotels are in quest for new workforce. DAH Digital runs the ads and produces concepts for recruiting campaigns and YourSocial would manage the associated accounts and assist in production.
So we decided to give it a test run and see how we work out.
Pre Production
Alex told me that for the first project we would not need to do much pre production since they have already done similar jobs multiple times and are confident, that they would show me on spot what they needed and how it was best done.
Going in with a minimal brief of “we are going to shoot talking head ads” and “you’re going to figure it out” I was a bit stressed but confident that I would grasp the essence quickly.
Also we decided to shoot traditionally horizontal and later on use a section of the video for vertical ads which is common practice when two variants are needed.
Shooting
Working with people who are no professional actors I learned that it is extra important getting comfortable in front of the camera and establishing a good mood with your subject. Easier said then done this is a pretty tricky task with a tight deadline on the day.
For ads like these it is especially important to have people talk authentically and as far as possible without any scripting. We humans are very capable and smell any incongruency in ads with messages like that. Therefore your target audience and potential employee might be turned off by the ad very quickly and doubt it trustworthy.
The painful thing in the paradox is a very funny one at the same time. Most people truly enjoy their job and are happy to message others to join them on their work. But as soon as the need to speak in front of the camera they are hesitant and uneasy. So I was happy that Christina and Alex did their best to relax the situation and set people up so that they could deliver a powerful authentic message.
Whilst shooting I kept in mind to leave enough space for a vertical cutout in the edit and collect enough material for each position to not reuse too much B-Roll.
After two consecutive days with 9h on set we were exhausted and a team was built.
Post Production
Having previously produced ads for myself, I got a good understanding of what is helpful when running ads.
Firstly getting straight to the point is essential but another thing we talked about is to make a good variety of the same ad to see, what the target audience responds best to. For algorithms like at Meta it is best to feed them with lots of different ad variations so it can figure out, what works best.
Deriving from this knowledge I produced up to 140 ad variations for a single position in a hotel which we could feed the algorithm to choose and test with.
