At Dell World 2013, the second general keynote was to be made up of the five leaders of Dell’s lines of business. The events team was faced with infusing the keynote with excitement and energy to avoid the hour-long session feeling like it was a so-called “parade of presidents”. The proposed solution was to weave in upbeat and energetic interstitials of customers responding to questions about business and IT. The challenge was that with a few weeks to go, there wasn’t enough time or budget to shoot new interviews with customers.
Enter Willis Collaborative, who undertook an in-depth audit of all of Dell’s customer video assets for the last 18 months or so in order to understand the responses already available. We quickly determined that we could easily produce the five needed interstitial videos for the keynotes with existing footage. After producing paper edits, we set out to gather the source materials of the video case studies, including b-roll, much of which were produced by the same few production companies in the last few years. With the footage in hand, we compiled the interstitials adding in motion graphics elements to energize the videos and ensure interesting cuts between speakers. The final product was exactly what was needed: short, high-energy montages comprised of compelling customer testimonials that perfectly punctuated the live keynote content.