Challenge
Sainsbury's reached and entertained millions this Christmas with their musical, stop-motion animation, 'The Greatest Gift'. But after the TV ad, how could they keep the brand and its message that ‘Christmas Is For Sharing’ front of mind throughout the brand-crowded Christmas period?
Solution
'Story Studio' is a free stop-motion movie creation app that helps kids and parents alike spend time together, creating their very own Christmas film – with director’s tips and tricks, and a wealth of creative functionality.
Activity
Working as an agile team of UX, Tech, Design and Copywriting our first step was to workshop existing film-making apps with groups of kids, to find out what the key principles and features of ours should be.
From when and how the app should feedback to users, to which core creative functionality was most popular with our audience, we were able to build Story Studio with an accurate idea of the user at the centre of the apps development.
The design included cues from the Christmas activity including of the TV ad characters, but to ensure the longevity of the app we needed a campaign neutral art-direction. Bright, bold colours and simple friendly typefaces sit alongside endearing iconography and animation to give Story Studio a simple and fun aesthetic that will appeal to kids but isn’t so childish that it will put off adults. Every element of design plays a key functional role so there is no visual clutter to complicate the user experience.
The end product was a very easy-to-use, powerful and animation fun tool, that significantly outperformed (paid for) rival apps.
Result
We saw over 1.9 Million new movies created over the Christmas period with an incredible average session time of 15 minutes. Furthermore there were 175 thousand new movies created on Christmas Day itself, making up 11% of total shares from the app, putting Sainsbury’s at the heart of the most important family day of the year.