Microsoft Store Anthem Video

Swirl was voted Best Ad Agency in 2015 by SFWeekly, and since starting there in 2014, I've been a senior writer on the agency's largest retained account, the Microsoft store. 

In 2015, our creative team was asked to concept and produce a video that would showcase the impact the store had on Microsoft's overall sales, key milestones in its international growth, and the executive team's vision for the future. It would be showcased to a crowd of over 12,000 Microsoft employees at their biggest annual internal conference of the year, MGX, to inform, inspire, and celebrate the team's unprecedented accomplishments. 

My role on the project as content lead was to help drive and facilitate creative development end-to-end—from concepting and scripting in pre-production to shoring up the narrative, pulling soundtrack selections in post, and providing feedback to our offsite production company in Los Angeles.

This all entailed applying ongoing "big-picture" and strategic thinking, providing input, and incorporating feedback from multiple high-level stakeholders along the way, including our Chief Creative Officer, Creative Director, Account Director, and top Microsoft retail executives.

The video was a notable departure from Microsoft's previous videos for this event, with a less of a focus on dry data points and more emphasis on the human, inspirational side of the story behind the store’s growth. The end result was so successful that Microsoft chose to show it twice instead of once, and the video served as a model for all others that would follow.