Woohoo… we won!

It’s an understatement to say that the team at Storyman was pretty chuffed to see the 24 Hours in the UK campaign we produced for Visit Britain won the World Travel Award for Europe’s Leading Marketing Campaign.

Everyone loves for their work to be recognised with a nomination for an award, especially when the competition is as strong as ours was, but it’s always amazing to actually win!

The premise of the campaign was to highlight the best activities to do at all times of day in the UK and for these short-form videos to be shared across social media platforms.

Working alongside Visit Britain and influencer agency iAmbassador, last summer we sent 10 international Instagrammers and bloggers to 120 stunning locations all over the UK to capture their round-the-clock stories and experiences throughout a 24-hour period.

The campaign was rolled out on 15 January, aka Blue Monday, with a different promo released on the hour, every hour for 24 hours, followed up longer region-specific films for London, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It was both a real joy to work on and extremely challenging. The thought of producing video content over which you have no real control over how it’s being filmed is enough to break any producer into a cold sweat. To throw another spanner in the works… the content was filmed by influencers who had little, or in some cases no filming experience. Eek. Welcome to the world of User Generated Content.

User-Generated Content can have its pitfalls but having produced several UGC campaigns of late, we’re loving it. The unpredictability of it is both terrifying and exhilarating and although we gave our influencers tight briefs, they each inevitably end up with their own unique styles of capturing the action. Receiving content with such a wide range of filming styles was really refreshing and made our job in the edit a lot of fun.

When producing broadcast content our hands can often bound by convention. With UGC, editors are compelled to break away from continuity and traditional techniques, sometimes because the medium is forgiving enough to try things out and sometimes because there is no choice.

Sure it’s raw, aesthetically rough and at times, can be abysmal quality, but it’s honest and engaging and can deliver messages straight from the source.Producing UGC can make you feel like a conjuror, creating something cohesive from nothing. It can be incredibly rewarding and incredibly powerful for the client.

The campaign took four months to edit, including several 14 hour days, and in the end, we were delighted with the result. Seeing the campaign win Europe’s Leading Marketing Campaign is the icing on the cake.