We’re very proud of our two nominations in this year’s East Midlands Chamber Business Awards. It’s our first time entering anything like this, and amazingly, we are finalists for both Marketing Campaign of the Year and Small Business of the Year.
The awards night is now only a few days away, so I thought I’d reminisce about ‘judging day’ before we find out who the big winners are!
On judging day we had the very first interview slot. I knew there would be a panel of judges that would be probing me about the application and marketing campaign, but it turned out to be much less scary than it sounds. It was a laid-back, but meaningful conversation with Dawn and Alison from the Chamber, about a subject that, like many business owners, I could talk about for hours.
The campaign in question was our Derby Festé 2017 video-centric marketing campaign. It was our second year working with Gravity Digital on promoting Festé, but it was our first year having control over the video. We knew what we wanted to do – a couple of short and exhilarating teaser trailers to get people excited talking about Feste, supplemented by a host of stills and GIFs – and we executed it perfectly. And it worked.
We work all over the UK, as well as internationally with companies like Oracle and Microsoft, but we’re proud members of the Derby business community, and we really wanted to create something special for an event that has become increasingly important to the city.
It wasn’t easy either. What makes Derby Festé so brilliant is the number of high-quality international acts who travel to Derby to put on such lavish and unique displays. The downside to that is we didn’t have the budget to travel the world and film them, which meant we were reliant on self-shot, often lower mobile-phone quality footage. So we needed to manipulate everything we received and amp it up to fit within our fast-paced, kinetic video.
The short answer is yes. The long answer is we walked into the interview armed with impressive engagement stats, view-through rates, and a host of positive testimonials from members of the Festé board commenting on the reactions they’d seen (including Deda, Derby Live, Derby Theatre, Marketing Derby, Derby University, Quad, and more). The campaign had been a resounding success.
Before I knew it, we were out of time.
This was the big surprise for us. Not that we didn’t think we deserved it – we work incredibly hard and we are growing as a business – but we knew competition would be high, and many companies would have been established longer than ourselves. Compared to the other companies shortlisted, we were the smallest and easily the youngest. However, at the time of application, we were coming off the back of a record quarter, so we had a good amount of self-belief.
This interview process was a little more intimidating as Dawn and Alison were joined by the award sponsors, Purpose Media. However, it went even better than the morning interview. The conversation was flowing, despite being more in-depth, intense, and running for around 15 minutes longer than the prescribed 10 minutes. Ask me to talk about video marketing and Future Proof Films and I’m not going to stop until you ask me to.
It was great to be talking to 4 people so interested in our business and what we do and what we’re trying to do to push the company and industry forward. After several interruptions to remind us all we’re out of time, I was asked the final question: what project I was particularly proud of. I had two, and both focus on achieving the aims of each client. One was Bulkhead’s Kickstarter video, which received well over 5 million views (almost 1.5m on Youtube alone) and helped them reach their target of £100,000 in just 3 days and go on to raise over £315,000. The other was for a printing company who wanted some videos created to assist with tenders, pitches and presentations. They secured contracts worth over £12million with the help of our videos.
We’re proud of the quality of our videos, but we’re even more proud of the results they get.
