The Gen-Z PROBLEM
the bits I did were: content creation, direction, filming & editing
To understand The Dawn Project, first have a little read of the tiny little Super Bowl commercial I made for them. But to summarise like super quickly - They want to make computers safe for humanity. This was headed up by their effort to take Tesla’s horrendous ‘Full Self-Driving’ software off the streets.
At the start, the majority of the effort was through lobbying regulators and lawmakers and raise awareness to a wide audience. This awareness raising was primarily (exclusively, really) done on Twitter through short informative videos with really slow pacing.
TikTok was an untapped audience, but to reach them required different approaches. I spent some time looking into what compels Gen-Z. Our previous content, slow and informative, would’ve flopped, so I needed another solution. Tapping into the world of suspenseful hooks & trending audio, I created a number of snapshots of our silliest footage soundtracked by whatever earworm I was sick of that week, and saw what I could make from it.
Virality, apparently. After testing the waters I posted a video that hit a million views in a day. I kept up this momentum, focusing on making content relevant to the platforms and audience, fitting the very square peg of the content filmed for informative videos to the round hole of a Gen-Z audience’s desires.