COMPANY
Meta (Facebook)
CHALLENGE
With over 200M businesses using Meta’s business products, it’s hard to scale empathy and understanding for the product managers, engineers, and designers building behind the scenes – especially for businesses in vastly different economies and cultures.
SOLUTION
A 7-minute 360° film loop using the company’s technology (Oculus), debuted at a product summit for the target audience. Putting on the headset, eventgoers felt like they were in a pottery store in Turkey’s Grand Bazaar, a carpet store in Nairobi, and markets in India – witnessing real commerce happen. The film served as an intimate empathy-building experience as well as an activation channel for a long-form documentary.
APPROACH
Already on the road in production, capturing real business interactions with a 360 camera wasn’t much extra effort. I had a long-standing hunch that VR was an untapped channel for product teams to build connection with customers. When I learned the entire global team was headed to headquarters for a summit about Emerging Markets, I knew the time was right to try it.
On a tight budget, I produced, directed, and edited the film myself as a personal growth project. Finally, I developed process documentation for on-site colleagues to load and manage the video and event booth.
RESULTS
The bet paid off. As buzz began to grow, event attendees lined up and waited for their turn to be wowed. Even though it was a downtime activity, the experience ended up being the second highest-rated segment of the summit.