Celebrating Halloween with an ambitious animated video has become essentially tradition for Lenovo’s social media team. Much like that “one neighbor” we all have every October (you know the one) – each year we strive to out-do our previous efforts, growing the scale and scope of our ideas.
As our team sits within Lenovo’s corporate marketing group and has a fully in-house production team, we asked ourselves in 2023 – what’s next, and how can we do something bigger? Our answer was to grow our resources and our vision, and what better way to do that than to tell a full-on, jump-scare filled, spooky story?
As with years before, this animation was designed to be a brand-level piece of content that could be shared internally company-wide and externally on our social media handles.
From the start we knew that our goal was to continue spotlighting the famed ThinkPad TrackPoint (the little red dot in the middle of our keyboards) – so we brainstormed new spooky settings and situations to place our little friend. Inevitably we concluded that our new story must begin with the classic framework of “It was a dark and stormy night…” integrating a “jump scare” narrative motif.
We began with an establishing shot of a suburban household, at night, during a torrential rainstorm. Next, we transition into a shadowy childhood bedroom filled to the brim with dolls and other toys. With the return of the TrackPoint, we decided a group of them would “awaken” to play seasonal tricks on each other. Using a Motorola phone’s flashlight, they begin creating a series of creepy shadow puppets – a witch, a t-rex, and a pumpkin. Then suddenly, with a flash of lighting, an enormous ghostly monster appears, terrifying everybody involved. As it turns out, while our protagonists are distracted by their festivities, a rogue group of TrackPoints decided to capitalize on the moment – creating a scary seasonal shadow of their own on a nearby windowsill. Doubled over with laughter, they relish in their trickery…providing just enough of a distraction to introduce our final jump scare - a terrifying living doll, outside in the rain…right behind them!
We knew accomplishing this vision would be no easy task, so we set out to answer 3 questions – What do we already do well? What else would we like to do? and What else is needed to realize that vision? For one, we know how talented our animators are, so we decided to build on that and grow their repertoire of tools and skills. Therefore, we invested in additional plug-ins (Such as X Particles for the rain) that would truly elevate the special effects within our 3D animation tools.
The response and performance this year were fantastic! We brought in 5.5 million impressions, 2.7 million engagements, and an engagement rate of 49.2% -- which was more than 4x the performance last year’s Halloween asset.
With results this successful we knew that we made the right call to invest more into our in-house 3D animation capabilities. This also proved that longer form content can genuinely succeed on social media if the idea and execution is on-point, so we have doubled down on developing holiday content – with dedicated resources helping to source and ideate future creative.
