Social Feed Disruptors

The Brief

The endless social feed has become a given on nearly every platform. See, swipe, repeat… see, swipe, repeat. So how do companies manage to capture attention and provide their viewers with a memorable experience in the middle of some of the most pre-programmed, automated actions?

The Solutions

For a handful of key Disney and Pixar films from 2021, I worked with the Disney Music Group marketing team to solve that problem. By using provided toolkit character animations and thinking of ways to “break the interface,” we were able to bring Disney magic into targeted user’s Instagram feeds.

For Encanto, I took inspiration from the character Luisa’s super strength, and had her literally lift up what I call the “false feed” - the decoy images used to initially help the video unit blend in to the feed.

The treatment for the film Luca is much more playful, using a lighthearted animation of the three underdogs dancing across your feed.

And for Raya and the Last Dragon, Sisu shows off some of her character’s personality by popping in from the edges of the screen, eventually taking over the piece with a blast of dragon breath.

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The Takeaway

While not every campaign has such wonderful animated assets available, there’s no reason a similar thought process can’t be applied to ads for a wide variety of clients and products. The goal of these kinds of treatments is surprise, and you get there by paying special attention to your available assets, the interface you’re working within, and how far you can push both.