Marching Penguin has won the first West Coast Story Hackathon for their entry HeartBreak Dating Insurance. Shutterstock co-sponsored the event.
The Hackathon competition, held at Createasphere’s TransVergence Summit on August 7-8, in Hollywood, is designed to provide exposure to content creators and storytellers who can effectively harness new technologies and use them to develop a cohesive narrative across multiple platforms. Five teams of four hackers, selected from hundreds of online submissions, were given 24 hours to design a cohesive narrative spanning three or more technological platforms, executing a finished product on a single one.
Marching Penguin’s winning entry used an online video for the launching point for the story, also providing a microsite to host the video and a unique Facebook integration that supplemented the video. “The video delivered engagement in a supplementary way to what we've come to expect of broadcast,” said Jordi Matsumoto, founder and CEO of online video agency Marching Penguin.
Marching Penguin's team included a lead developer, Stan Dyro, from their partner and client, PK4 Media (pk4media.com). Dyro was responsible for creating the Facebook integration that helped propel the winning entry by seamlessly pairing with the video experience.
For its winning entry, Marching Penguin made heavy use of stock footage from Shutterstock. “We believe that stock photography and video provide strong support to digital creators and story tellers,” said Matsumoto. “In the case of this competition, Shutterstock's curated library was invaluable in saving time and helping us to re-deploy valuable resources in this time-critical adventure. Shutterstock's library is tagged in a way that helps cut through the clutter.”
Matsumoto contrasted his team’s Shutterstock experience with others they’ve found when searching for stock footage, "Rather than spending time sifting through a library of images that were not relevant to our story, we were able to spend time deciding between a handful of images that were inherently relevant to each story point. As a result, our audience understood where we were going every step of the way."
Marching Penguin (gomarchingpenguin.com) is an advertising agency that puts online video at the core of client initiatives. The agency focuses on content, and not promotional material, to win over audiences. Since its founding in 2012, the agency has produced some 400 videos.