Starcom Melbourne and its client Snooze were the first and only Australian representatives to be invited to attend a renowned Facebook Asia Pacific ‘Hackathon’ held in Singapore last week that developed optimised mobile creative for Snooze.

‘PockeTVC’ is a program developed by Facebook’s Creative Shop, established to solve the challenge that not every TV commercial is optimised for the mobile environment.

The Hackathon saw Starcom and Snooze collaborate with the Facebook team to produce mobile-ready videos based on the social media giant’s global creative best practice principles, with the goal of ensuring that there was both learning and output which could integrated into future campaigns.

One of the challenges for Snooze was that it struggled with the notion of creating mobile specific content and how it could achieve return on effort and investment.

Starcom identified that this could be easily solved through Facebook’s PockeTVC Hackathon and ensured that its client Snooze could be included in this transformative business session.

The day started with a showcase of global best-in-class examples of mobile-optimised creative and tips on how to apply this to Snooze.

Starcom and Snooze were paired with a member of the Facebook creative team and given three hours to produce five new assets for mobile, including 15-second video, six-second video, still image, GIF and cinemograph.

This saw the team storyboarding and cutting current TVCs to make them effective for the mobile environment.

By applying these techniques to the Snooze TVCs on the day, the team was able to create a formula to use for future mobile creative. Snooze is now able to share this formula with the rest of its team and start to produce more mobile ready assets.

Sarah Baxter, national marketing and brand manager at Snooze, said: “The Hackathon session led by Facebook APAC in Singapore in conjunction with our media agency Starcom was really worthwhile.

“It is often difficult to justify creating bespoke assets, especially across screens, as ascertaining the return, both in effort and investment, can be challenging.

“Via a superbly structured working session, the Facebook team showed us how we could easily take our current assets and ensure they are mobile-ready.

“We now have screen assets we can use in our upcoming campaign, and importantly, have a formula which we can apply which will undoubtedly improve our effectiveness in this channel.”

Starcom Melbourne group business director Anna Camuglia said: “Whilst we are privileged to attend many great events with our valued media partners, this one produced some great initiatives for our client Snooze.

“Through a tried and tested framework, we worked together to create five mobile-ready assets, and importantly, the knowledge and skills to ensure we increase our chances of delivering positive business outcomes across our future mobile campaigns for Snooze.”

Facebook client partner Alex Brandler said: “It was an absolute pleasure having the Starcom and Snooze team over to Singapore as the first Australian advertiser to participate in a PockeTVC Hackathon run out of Facebook APAC HQ.

“There was some fantastic ideation on the day from the team. We look forward to seeing the assets in action.”