How Nespresso Woke Up & Smelled the Coffee

In recent years, crowdsourced video has taken off in a big way – and there’s no sign it’s going to let up anytime soon.

Video crowdsourcing is, for the uninitiated, individual filmmakers around the world who use a video production platform to create short films for major brands.

Userfarm, the first video crowdsourcing platform having launched in 2009, boasts a crowd of more than 120,000 filmmakers and is a highly respected leader in its field.

Using a platform such as Userfarm, the brand will submit a brief – typically fairly basic and short – and the platform then asks its members aka ‘the crowd’ – to produce their interpretation of the brief. The best films will win rewards which are often around the £5,000 mark – sometimes more, sometimes less.

To better understand the medium, here is a closer look at the recent Nespresso campaign that actually helped shaped the way mobile and tablet video is now viewed and filmed.

It seemed predestined that crowdsourced video and Nespresso would always get together at some point – it just had to happen and far from being a marriage of convenience, it was a romance that continues to blossom. And here’s why.

Nespresso have become synonymous with embracing technology and finding new ways of promoting their brand subtly.

As an official partner of the Cannes Film Festival for the past nine years, Nespresso were constantly on the lookout for a way to combine film, innovation and further enhancing their reputation for doing things shall we say, a tad differently.

They even sponsor their own Cannes award – the Grand Prix Nespresso – which has become something of a coveted prize at the festival, awarded to the director of the best debut film.

Nespresso wanted ordinary people with imagination and the ability to create something fresh from a simple brief.

After choosing chose Userfarm’s platform to host the contest, they hoped to focus on the brand’s younger audience in the process.

Younger audiences are watching more mobile content than ever before, and, thanks to social media apps such as Snap Chat, they were viewing content vertically.

For so long landscape video has been the social media tool of choice, particularly for Twitter and Facebook, with vertical video often considered the work of uneducated amateurs. Yes, vertical video had to fight its way out of a corner, but Nespresso were on it and, sniffing an opportunity, launched Nespresso Talents, a challenge to short filmmakers the world over – to ‘tell their tall stories in an innovative and surprising way’ – and so a vertical video contest launched on Userfarm. 

Nespresso Talents 2016 was launched at the Berlinale Film Festival, amplified online with an exclusive content partner and the promise that the three winners’ efforts would be showcased at Cannes later in the year.

After the deadline closed on Userfarm, Nespresso were thrilled to find that there had been 384 submissions from 38 different countries – they knew before they even viewed the entries that the contest had been a runaway success and the varied backgrounds and ideas behind the competitors made it a tough call to judge just three winners.

So what was gained by all of this?

Nespresso enhanced their credentials in film, building on innovation and engaging a wider audience beyond physical platforms. They also rubber-stamped the emergence of vertical video as a credible medium, completely changing the snobbish attitude that had been prevalent for so long.

Much has been learned in the first year by Nespresso, who will again turn to Userfarm to promote their 2017 contes. And it promises to be bigger and better than last year, all the while associating Nespresso with innovation, creativity and, yes, that old chestnut… thinking outside the box.