Billboard Explainer Animation

Creative Direction, Copywriting

 
 

 The Brief
Get Cedar Fair’s various communications professionals who want to reach in-venue customers and employees to utilize the company’s digital signage platform by demonstrating a new technology that empowers users to create and schedule their own messages.

Background
Cedar Fair had invested millions of dollars into FunTV, a network of hundreds of digital screens throughout its North American parks. Despite the network’s ability to reach millions of customers, producing and scheduling content was a complicated, manual process.

Cedar Fair’s Media Networks team worked with technology firm Reflect Systems to develop a new content authoring and management app, Billboard, to integrate with FunTV. This new app streamlined the messaging process by putting more control into the hands of local users.

Explaining this new development would be a challenge for an audience with a wide range of tech aptitude and familiarity with the current platform. FunTV had also fallen by the wayside for local stakeholders who had come to perceive the platform as difficult to understand and use.

Task
Animated explainer videos have become a keystone format for helping users understand new software. As leader of the Media Networks team, I proposed producing our own explainer for Billboard. I drafted a script and shot list and requested proposals from vendors. Epipheo was chosen to produce the piece. I provided direction to the Epipheo team from casting the voiceover artist, through storyboarding and animating the final piece.

The video was then shared with the local stakeholders to introduce the new capability and kickoff their access to the platform and training sessions.

Results
Cedar Fair stakeholders have used Billboard to distribute thousands of messages to customers. The user experience illustrated in the explainer video became a ‘North Star’ for the Media Networks and Reflect teams as they developed Billboard’s functionality further.