BP

‘Diary of a business partner’ is a self-shot video blog that documents a learning visit to three BP sites in America [a wind farm (Kansas), a technology campus (Naperville) and oil refinery (Whiting)] by James Bradley Head of Communications – Low Carbon, Technology and Safety BP.

The film provides a deeply personal insight into locations that are critically important to BPs operations but are remote from corporate headquarters (St James’, London); and is a positive and reflective diary that touches on subjects such as culture, people, scale and innovation. Shot in a ‘day in the life’ style the film takes on a very human and authentic style.

The brief was to create a short ‘day in the life’ style film that demonstrated the value of a BP business partner’s site-visit to see several BP operations in action and to communicate the learnings from the trip and condense the reflections into a short video blog.

The film needed to weave together three key messages around BP’s operations and people: safety, excellence and innovation. It was also important to ensure the film demonstrated the sheer size and scale of some of its operations as well as the complicated and impressive technologies involved in producing energy.

The cutaways collected needed to be an extension of what the business partners eyes saw, the language simple, succinct and compelling whilst being easy to understand for a global audience. The film needed to push the boundaries and break the mould compared to previous UGC type film. It needed to demonstrate the power of user-generated content and the effect it can have on its intended audience.

On top of the usual challenges of image and sound quality that a typical UGC project present, a key hurdle was ensuring the correct content was filmed, the correct questions answered at the right time during the trip.

To get around these challenges, we chose to use ‘CREWSTUDIO’ a smart video app created to enhance the quality of content filmed via smart-phones. The app includes in-camera functionality e.g. a spirit-level function to help keep the camera straight and an audio monitor to support good quality sound.

A task list in the app creates a step-by-step guide of what to film, when and where. This allowed us to have complete control over the content to ensure we were able to get what we needed and in the correct style and right quality.

The app resulted in not only very high-quality user-generated content but also thought-provoking and authentic content. We were able to bypass any corporate and/or technical jargon and instead deliver a film that was driven by authentic and human thinking and reflection.

The solution far outdid the expectations for the project. Such was the ease of capturing material that wtv. were able to deliver not only the main film, but additional Instagram-friendly alternatives that concentrated on specific sub-chapters – wind power and new technology. What was supposed to be a closed-audience, Yammer-only film has now been uploaded to BP’s intranet and external LinkedIn (41,000 views) and Instagram channels (2,400 and 2,700 views).

In February 2019, the Diary of a Business Partner film won the gold for Best Corporate Blog content at Communicate’s Corporate Content Awards.