Sausage Goes Big: Writes & Directs Interactive Yahoo! Mobile Campaign

To showcase its latest mobile apps, Yahoo! is taking interactivity to a new level by installing giant phone kiosks in high-profile movie theaters. For this unique engagement, Yahoo! tapped kaboom productions’ directing duo sausage (aka john benson and ward evans) in a dual capacity to write and shoot content for the bigger-than-life phones. Each phone has a 40-inch touch-screen that plays a series of videos featuring apps including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Fantasy Football, and Yahoo! Search. Viewers can interact with the screen to toggle between videos and learn more about the apps. Creating content for this new media posed a number of challenges: In addition to being fun and eye-catching, each piece had to be telegraphic enough to work without audio, and be able to play in a 9:16 vertical format (a 16:9 wide-screen rotated 90º). “We’ve been shooting for digital for years now, but this was a chance to try something new,” says sausage’s benson. “Creating for this aspect ratio was definitely a head-scratcher in a good way.” In one vignette, geared-up football players surround a bus commuter as he manages his fantasy team; another shows a woman literally & figuratively connected to her friends and family during a day out. A floating news desk follows a dog-walker in a third, and a series of waiters and chefs cater to a young woman who is searching for a place to eat. sausage has been on something of a roll lately, with a string of jobs for Yahoo! in 2010—but this was a rare case where the directing duo was also the creative team. This was an unusual but not unfamiliar twist to the process for sausage, as both are former agency creatives. “It’s both liberating and terrifying at the same time,” admits evans. “As the directors, there’s no blaming the creative when you were allowed to come up with it.” In addition to their recent work for Yahoo!, sausage’s resume includes spots and content for Microsoft, Time Warner, TiVo, Kawasaki and the San...

Channel: Vimeo Video Length: 3m 5s Date Found: Sat, Oct 30 2010 3:33 AM Category: Home Video Date Produced: Thu, Sep 16 2010 2:33 PM View Count: 0