Alchemix cinematic ad campaign
The launch of the Alchemix Self-Repaying Loans product signified a major innovation within DeFi. In order to mirror the break-away from conventional DeFi products we had a keen desire to do something similar within the crypto advertising space.
One thing you don’t see often in the crypto space is an emphasis on highly produced media for use within advertising. That’s exactly what we set out to do.
In late summer 2021 we went about planning a cinematic ad that could be rolled out through paid advertising platforms to help raise awareness about the core product.
The team agreed upon a discretionary budget of around $150k that could be used to produce the media. This is toward the low-end compared to many trad-fi production budgets of a similar standard. Fortunately Alchemix’s core team have in-house resources who were able to take on much of the heavy lifting. This enabled us to realise our vision without the typical excessive funding for such a project.
What are we hoping to achieve with the ad?
Messaging focuses solely on raising awareness of our product. As is well-known within marketing theory ‘awareness’ is the first stage of the Sales Funnel. Once awareness is achieved we’re able to use other media and mechanisms to funnel potential platform users towards our end goal, to convert them into actual users.
The objective to turn heads and drum-up interest about the product is our top priority.
Where will the media be used to gain traction and product awareness?
So far our primary outreach platform is twitter. One of the largest challenges with twitter as an advertising platform is the speed at which ‘moments’ pass. The DeFi space moves fast and yesterday's news is quickly digested as readers are distracted by the next wave of gossip.
Because of the close tie-in of the crypto community within twitter we’ve opted not to use its paid-for sponsored advertising for fear of being labelled as another scammy project by the crypto-savvy audience.
We tend to rely on natural growth of our twitter community through word-of-mouth and genuine user driven social sharing to extend our audience.
Advertising platforms where media can be shared repeatedly to targeted audiences are necessary to justify the production costs of a live action CGI advert. Our current plan is to experiment with paid advertising on TikTok and Facebook using analytics to measure and refine our approach.
Production
After weeks of planning we had created a full-colour storyboard, later utilising Tvori, a VR based pre-visualisation tool for creating the animatic.
The advert finally went into production. The set was built over a long day using props sourced from a large warehouse who were also accommodating the latest Game of Thrones production.
The shoot lasted two days directed by Snape with help of metalFace from the marketing department and a production crew of 20 including the three actors.
Achieving some of the more complex shots required the use of a cutting edge motion-control camera rig. This amazing machine enables the same camera move to be repeated for scenes where layers of visual effects need to be shot separately for compositing in the VFX workflow.
Following the shoot we went into post-production which was predominantly carried out in-house with the exception of the soundtrack that was created by a talented composer (who is endorsed by no other than the West End’s legendary Andrew Lloyd Webber!).
When did the advert go live?
We launched the ad on the 12th Jan 2022 on our youtube channel via twitter and so far the feedback has been tremendous.
Thanks to everyone who has shared, taken the time to watch it and left feedback!
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