Services Provided:

• Marketing

• UX Design

• Content Creation

• Producing

• Motion GFX

• Content Strategy

Challenge

In Fall 2021, I joined the Amazon Marketing team on a greenfield initiative with a high degree of ambiguity and a start-up feel. This was a brand new solution to Amazon’s wider offering; introducing Buy with Prime.

The goal of this solution was to grow the offerings within the Prime brand by allowing merchants to increase shopper conversion through offering Prime on their e-commerce sites. I was tasked with quickly getting up to speed on what the mission and strategy was for this new offering, (it was revealed to me what I would be working on my first day on the team!)

The most difficult challenge was the fast nature of the ever-changing mission and strategy while simultaneously needing to execute on a visual campaign in lockstep with the greater marketing team; which comprised of technical writers, legal, UX designers, software developers, and branding. I primarily served as a producer and video editor, creating all visual branding for video from scratch in tandem with creating a video style guide. The other challenge in completing this task was, being a newer team within Amazon, our budget was limited and closely watched. In addition, The “site” that is being walked through in the video had not actually been created yet.

Idea

I worked closely with the art director on developing a video strategy and budget proposal. I then worked with leadership to finalize a proposed list of video needs, starting with an introductory video for the launch of Buy with Prime ungated to the public for April 2022.

As a fast follow, we would then share a series of educational, “How to” videos walking the end user through how to use Buy with Prime on their own sites, including installing the button code. For these first few videos, it was clear we needed to embrace frugality. This required keeping everything in-house, including auditioning internal voiceover actors and actresses from Amazon’s volunteer voiceover community as well as partnering with internal audio engineers and providing both with a clear direction despite ambiguity throughout.

Since the “site” that is being walked through in the video had not actually been created yet. Because of this, I needed to replicate the screens with the help of UX designers and rely on an internal recorded video of how the user experience should look. This required pixel perfect attention to detail. I then storyboarded and animated the video, working closely with branding to ensure all colors and text were on brand, despite the fact the brand was also still being finalized. 

After working closely with branding, UX, software engineers and leadership, we successfully launched the first 2 videos for the knowledge library, effectively helping hundreds of early onboarded merchants to install the Buy with Prime button code onto their e-commerce sites. Despite the challenges of budget and not having an actual interface to record for the walk through, the team was able to deliver on time and on budget (which was $0 because I was able to source in-house talent.) What was instrumental to the success of these was:

• Vetting the original script and storyboard through L10 leadership and legal early to align and set expectations
• Partnering closely with UX design to replicate a site that did not exist yet
• Forming partnerships beyond our team, including the volunteer voice over team and internal audio studios