There are no shortage of articles on the legacy of this company leading up to the launch of their flagship luxury EV. In fact, the voyage for this startup has been nothing short of an odyssey. Recently, I banded together a number of internal and external teams to meet a large task ~to help produce a feature length global auto launch in a challenging amount of time. This timeline was measured in days not months and was targeted on a date that had already gone public.
Challenge taken.
When you don’t have the luxury of time for production you have to build a big team fast, and that is what we did. We had four production teams doing pre-production, and production simultaneously with a centralized editorial team working internally. My focus was on writing scripts, managing casting, pre-production, production days playing the “client” for external production companies and (in the end) assisting with the editing -making sure scenes looked on brand, executives were directed, speaking to the camera with the right level of enthusiasm and directness -and making sure the edit made sense for the U.S. market.
On average, there were three separate shoots happening each day, editorial, post-production, and sound was ongoing. The final program was just over one hour and forty minutes and was broadcast live to Chinese and American audiences two minutes late due to a last minute correction to the captioning (we produced both Mandarin and English subtitles), which I firmly place in the WIN column from a production point of view. Recent metrics and reporting have the viewership for this global launch event at over 165M+ people.
Global Launch Social Media Effort
Simultaneously, I was providing forward momentum to help us create essential buzz and excitement and begin standard brand awareness campaigns for this much awaited launch. Aside from determining the right hashtag strategy, timing, and messaging points across global channels and official accounts we sourced and contracted social media agency, the Bastion Agency (OC), and influencer agency, Wefluens (Houston/OC) to collaborate with FF to get mini, macro, and mid-level influencers down selected, contracted, prepped, and scheduled for an initial push and ongoing campaign across a variety of targeted categories (luxury, auto, lifestyle, et al.).
I worked with a cross channel team to land on on-brand influencer engagements and activations, write the influencer facing program up and manage moving parts. This was initially designed to fit into the global social media content schedule that I was managing. This campaign includes negotiating logistics and schedule for available FF 91’s for the influencers, activations, and talent schedule and interest. Concurrent with this effort which is ongoing, we launched a strategic and hyper-targeted paid media campaign, SERP, and SEO effort. This was coordinated and shared with the sales, online and FF app teams understanding landing pages were being created and managed to support experiments and testing.
