It’s been a given for some time now that we only work with real entrepreneurs in Telekom’s B2B campaigns, but this year we raised the stakes even higher.

Instead of merely introducing small business owners, this time the experts involved in the campaign actually intervened in the running of the companies to improve their day-to-day operation. We helped transform them with various digital and material upgrades, so they could become the best in their profession.

Along the way, we got so far from the classic, TVC-centered mindset that the backbone of the campaign ended up being a reality program: our makeover show followed Gábor Wolf and Telekom’s experts as they helped the entrepreneurs improve. This experiment provided a number of valuable lessons for us too. Here are the three most important ones:

TV instead of TVC

No matter how much we talk about campaigns which are not centered around a television ad, when developing a large campaign, usually we still come to the point where we ask “okay, but what’s gonna be the TVC?”

Since in this case, the core idea was to transform entrepreneurs, our vision right from the start involved a longer, TV-native format: a makeover show, which would be distributed online.

This is how our TVC ended up in a decidedly secondary position, as the 30-second spots were cut together from the 15-20 minute-long reality episodes. But since reality shows cannot be totally scripted out in advance, the TVC’s script only included a rough outline with an approximate idea of the scenes. We could only hope that the result would be usable for the short spots too.

All of this required a lot of trust from our client and us towards the production company, Paprika Short Form, (and even towards us from our client), because only they could tell whether we would be able to record the scenes the way we wanted. As a television production house, they had more expertise with the format we were working with, so we thought: if they guarantee that the scenes will work, then let’s do it!

Natural talent instead of a seasoned veteran

In direct contrast to our production company, our host, Gábor Wolf, didn’t have any experience to speak of. From watching his own content we knew that he moves well in front of the camera, and his expertise made him a perfect fit for transforming small businesses – but he had no experience in being a show host.

Even though we didn’t record a screen test, the longer we talked with him about our plans, the more enthusiastic he became, which was enough to establish full, mutual trust. And we did not regret our choice, because Gábor moved so naturally at the shooting as if he’d been doing this for years.

Longer but faster

Working in advertising, our brains default to 30 seconds when it comes to producing films. But in this case we had to cut together 20-minute-long films after two days of shooting, so we had to re-calibrate our thinking for this length. We could not record an endless number of takes, not only because of the reality format, but also because we had to shoot many more scenes in a day than usual. There was no “enter again from the right but now hold your chin higher” or “let’s do another one where he puts more emphasis on the article.”