COVID-19 has fundamentally changed the status quo overnight.
The enforced isolation brought on by the pandemic has accelerated the future of work, some say by as much as two to five years, as companies across all verticals adapt to remote work and social distancing. One company that has been helping the advertising industry cope with these new challenges, and grown in the process, is Catch&Release, a Cervin portfolio company.
Catch&Release is a first-to-market creative licensing platform that allows advertisers to source and license photos and videos from anywhere on the Internet. By utilizing existing content rather than creating their own, creative teams can cost-effectively service the volume of projects required for an industry that needs to be quick, agile, and ahead of the curve.
In Q2 2020, the company saw rapid growth, accelerating the vision of CEO Analisa Goodin. She aims to build a product that enables and revolutionizes the future of work for the $35+ billion commercial video production industry.
As a result of COVID-19, brands and advertisers had a massive problem. They couldn’t shoot commercials on location or in a studio, in the traditional manner. They had to find alternative, more flexible and fast ways to source video footage for commercials. Now more than any other time in history, brands had to communicate with their customers and let the world know that they were there for them.
Enter: Catch&Release. Virtually every COVID-19 response ad, including those from Facebook, Apple, Walmart, State Farm, VW, and many more, was created with footage that was sourced and licensed using the Catch&Release platform.
One spot, in particular, stands out as a model example of the creative range that is possible with “found” footage. In response to COVID-19, one social media company launched a new community support feature through a stunning short film that paired spoken word poetry with sobering visuals of social distancing.
Because of the inability of creative teams to undertake live-action shoots, and the fast-changing news cycle, their team had to adapt the creative brief in real-time. Using the Catch&Release platform, they were able to pull in content from a variety of sources and edit it on a rolling basis. Ten members of the creative team curated content and tracked the status of shots as they cleared, to inform what would likely become the final edit. The spot was produced, edited, and shipped in just five days.
COVID-19 offers a glimpse into the future and affirmation that advertisers need what Catch&Release is building: a scalable way to create campaigns from anywhere, at lightning speed, on budget, and relevant to current events. In a platform user survey, one respondent said, “We consider you guys critical to our creative process. If we couldn’t use Catch&Release, we would not be able to execute projects for our clients.” The surge in Catch&Release users marks a new era for the advertising industry, one that is powered by game-changing technology to streamline and scale traditionally slow, manual processes.
How has your organization had to adapt to COVID-19? Leave a comment and share your experience.