Assembling Creative Talent For Big Projects
Amazon UK Seller Fulfilled Prime: A Case Study
One of the inevitabilities (and joys) of copywriting is working with people outside of our own team. We collaborate with all sorts of people, from the client to industry specialists to creative talent. The fact is, in some of these instances copywriting only plays a small part in the whole process.
So why recruit copywriters?
The short answer is, as Liam Neeson put it, we “have a particular set of skills.”
This is the thing about teams. Every member of the team brings something useful and unique to the table. With copywriters it’s often our ability to communicate that people are really after. It’s common for us to express that in social media posts, ad copy, blog form, or any of a dozen other ways. But as you’re going to see in the following example, we can play an even more direct role in teamwork by being the communicators.
From Partners To Producers
You might have already seen us talk about Amazon SFP in our portfolio, so we’re going to get into a bit more detail here so you can see how the process worked and what each of the players on our team were doing.
Back in 2017, Amazon launched Seller Fulfilled Prime in the United Kingdom. Before they could do that, they needed a series of tutorial videos produced to help sellers learn how to use the service and Amazon’s Seller Central platform.
The head of the project came to us because we had previously delivered projects for Amazon UK. They also knew we had trusted partners we work with whenever we need specialists. And they knew we could communicate clearly and concisely.
If you’ve ever been part of a team of diverse talents who work independently, you know how important it is to keep everyone on the same page (literally). So for us this meant having an eye for detail that went beyond proofreading and editing into the realm of production management. We could even say we became producers (which our colleagues in the film and television industry might tell you isn’t an uncommon destiny for writers).
On projects like this, every email we send has an important job to do. It has to set the topic, include the relevant team members, give clear updates and call for specific actions, attach the right assets, and strike a tone with the right levels of urgency and encouragement.
So we knew our role. Now we had to assemble the team to get the job done.
The Project “In Brief”
We immediately reached out to our trusted partners with the brief to gauge their availability and gather quotes.
Since these videos were being made from scratch there was a lot of groundwork to be laid. We helped develop scripts with Amazon UK’s team, but that was only the beginning.
To make videos you need a visual plan. This is called storyboarding and we had just the person for the job. Steven Williams is a filmmaker with over 20 years of experience. Our creative director, Paul Nolan, has known Steve for years and he’s worked with Rocksalt on a number of projects (he even created our own promo video–absolutely pro). When we came to Steve to help us literally draw a roadmap for each of the individual videos we knew he’d knock the project out of the park.
Next up, we needed to take Steve’s vision and translate that into reality. For that we needed animators. Seed Animation, based in Soho, has been making flat out incredible visuals for small indie companies up to major corporations since 2003. You might not realise it but you’ve probably seen their work for the BBC or the NHS or Coca-Cola. They had exactly the talent and experience we needed to bring SFP to life.
The last spot on the team was for voice talent. Amazon needed narrators. Yes, as in, more than one. Oh, we didn’t mention? We weren’t just helping them with a UK version. This series was being developed in four other languages, too. Lucky we had just the agency in mind to give voice to the vision. Matinee Multilingual is a comprehensive voice talent and video translation agency with thousands of voice talents in over 80 languages. If anyone could help us find the voice of Amazon it was Matinee.
Creatives “Assemble!”
Once we had everyone on board, we got to work coordinating. Now you’ll have to forgive me for simplifying here. Even with a fast-paced, well organised business like Amazon things don’t always turn around or get delivered like you might expect. They’re working on tons of things all at once, managing a global powerhouse with a massive marketing scheme. That’s why it’s our job to keep the project on track.
We gathered all of the documents our partners needed to move forward. As questions arose, we went back and forth between Amazon and our partners to resolve areas where more information was needed. Problems really boil down to a lack of information in a lot of cases. Sometimes we were able to clarify things ourselves because of our familiarity with the brief. Other times we put together a smart email looking for a specific response like a missing guideline, a preference, or a document.
Another aspect of developing a project is managing expectations. It’s fairly common for us to have requests for ETAs (estimated time of arrival) for some part of a project, usually a major component that the client needs to review. This creates an opportunity to get an update from a partner, to find out if they need anything to move forward, and then bring it all back to the client in one go, a kind of “omnibus” email with the goal of saving everyone time and preventing threads from running long.
I should mention that it wasn’t always emails, either. As I said before, there was a lot of groundwork to lay since we were creating the videos from scratch, so there were phone calls and conferences along the way. Once we got through the initial phases, and especially once the UK version was complete, things started to move more smoothly and quickly. The design decisions had been reviewed, the wording was tweaked to be just so, and all that was left was to translate that for each country to be clear.
So Steve completed his storyboards which we reviewed to make sure it matched with our script. That became the template for the whole project.
An example of one of Steve’s storyboards
Then Seed drafted their designs for Amazon to approve, which became the signature look for the entire series.
Meanwhile, we gathered voice demos from Matinee and made our recommendations to Amazon based on the style and tone they were looking for. Amazon decided their preference, then we scheduled recording sessions with the talent through Matinee. We often dialled in to the recording session to give live feedback. It’s really a pleasure to hear a great narrator work through a script and become “the voice” for a piece you’ve had a part in creating.
Once Matinee sent us the recordings we forwarded them to Seed to edit the audio into the videos. Once that was done, Seed sent us the first complete drafts of each video. Using a shared Google Drive folder we were able to gather everything together and send it to Amazon as it developed. Everyone was able to track specific comments and feedback. This is so important—ambiguity is the absolute enemy of communication.
And this is basically how the process continued until we arrived at our finished product, a series of tutorials in five language variants that took about 6 months to complete. And we couldn’t have been happier.
The Aftermath
Since that major video production project, we’ve worked with Amazon on subsequent updates to their SFP series, as well as other videos that highlight new features and programs. Thanks to all of that team building and initial groundwork, these projects often move a lot more quickly. A well defined framework, a strong brand-based design, and a sense of tone and style allow us to get development underway in a fraction of the time. That’s the power of an agile team with the right talents brought together by clear communication.
Keep an eye out for future Amazon UK projects on Day One: The Amazon Blog.
For more of what we’re working on here at Rocksalt, check out our portfolio. You can follow us on Twitter at @rocksaltnews and on LinkedIn.
