1. What were your goals with this video, and how did you decide to center the narrative around the people of Amsterdam?
Veloretti is a small bicycle brand from Amsterdam. They sell their bicycles online throughout Europe, shipped in boxes that read ‘F*CK CARS’. The goals was to profile the brand for upcoming bicycle markets such as Germany and Scandinavia. With a positioning that stays relevant for the place where most
Veloretti Bicycles ride: Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
As Amsterdam born and bred girls and guys, we knew as no other that the city of Amsterdam is the ultimate test area for a bicycle. This makes the Amsterdam cyclists and their mad bicycle behavior, the perfect test panel.
These factors helped us in shifting the perception of a Veloretti; which was perceived as a designer bicycle, not as an everyday city bicycle.
2. What was your greatest challenge? How did you overcome it?
This sounds lame. But. Budget. Working for a young brand such as Veloretti, gives some “creative space.” Whilst on the other hand their budget gave less space.
But with a story that felt so close to a lot of people from Amsterdam, we were lucky to get a lot of favours done. Shout out to all the people that cycled (and worked) their ass of, helping us with this production.
3. “An Amsterdam Bicycle Story” won the Silver and People’s Lovie Award in Internet Video (Lifestyle). What did it mean to you to win this award? How has winning the Lovie impacted your work?
First of all, the Lovie Awards was the first show that honoured us with silver. Although it got recognized before, in the film category at Cannes Lions for instance, actual metal is very special for a project that we love so much. Forever proud.
And as we said in our 7 words speech: It’s amazing to realize all the places and new amazing clients our Veloretti bicycle brought us.
4. As a Lovie Winner, what’s your one piece of advice for anyone working on online videos?
Create surprising content for a brand that doesn’t come as a surprise from that brand.
How it’s been filmed, the music, the voice actor, the manifesto of ‘An Amsterdam Bicycle Story’, everything is a perfect fit to the Veloretti brand.
If we created this campaign for a bicycle brand that was a more traditional, which sells bicycles via brick stores and not in a ‘F*CK CARS’ box, the always critical residents of the World Wide Web would probably not accepted it.
5. Anything else you’d like to highlight about this project?
The burning scooter is the shortest shot in our career, which took by far the longest clean/wrap up time.
6. What Internet trends are you most excited about this year?
As inhabitants of the World Wide Web, we’ve been spoiled. More and more is moving content. It looks like still images, let alone just text, do not do the trick anymore. On social media the click through rate is higher on simple stuff like Gifs for instance. This pushes us as advertisers to create more moving content, whilst intrinsically every shot needs to be on fleek as well. For our latest project for Marie-Stella-Maris, we made sure most of the shots were strong enough serving as stand alone shots. Basically the same way as we created the shotlist for Veloretti.
Don’t miss your chance to join winners like Lemon Scented Tea in The Lovies this year. The Extended Deadline is Friday 13 September 2019. Enter now.