DatasiteOne We Can't Redact Everything

For many years, Merrill Corporation has been a known brand within the work of corporate finance and M&A. Merrill’s SaaS offering, DatasiteOne, is designed to be the most feature-rich program specially designed with their audiences needs present in mind.

As they began to launch their new feature, Redaction for DatasiteOne, they knew they didn’t want to follow the status quo. They wanted to create a modern eye-catching campaign that embraces the way 23 to 35 year olds behave with brands.

After reviewing the creative brief and analyzing previous campaigns, our team jumped into a creative workshop. We filled our whiteboard with seemingly hundreds of ideas, linked things together and narrowed it down to the top ideas.

For each idea, we developed a short brief, a sample script, reference imagery, and sample storyboard frames. Ideas ranged from a straight-forward talking head explainer video to creating a medieval office cubical to redaction with a robotic arm. Ultimately, we landed on a simple idea: “DatasiteOne can’t redact ____, but it can redact your due diligence documents.”

What can you accomplish in one day of filming? A lot. We pulled together an awesome cast, built four stages, lit them all to feel like unique environments, and efficiently moved throughout a busy day of production.

We started with a dolly shot moving across all four of the sets, then filmed eight unique scenes redressing each set for a new scene. The result? A polished and stylized look that matched the comedic tone of the concept.

Sometimes clients have very tight timelines. This was one of those times. We had two weeks to edit everything, add visual effects, add sound effects, color grade footage, and create all additional elements of the campaign. No easy task.

Working closely with the client, we stayed on track with efficient review meetings. The clear planning during concepting made post-production much easier as we were simply executing everything discussed earlier in the process.

Our video-first approach allowed us to leverage everything we captured as assets for various aspects of the campaign. We architected an A/B strategy with both creative ads and straightforward functional ads. Everything was packaged in a clear campaign playbook to make the launch a breeze.

We leveraged email to reach audiences already familiar with the platform and used .gifs and creative imagery to lure in clicks. Similarly, display, video and social ads leveraged retargeting and look-alike audiences. In addition, organic social posts helped spark engagement with the audience. Everything pointed back to landing pages designed for the A/B test.