The challenge
Getting financial advisors to meet the people at Equitable
Equitable’s refreshed brand had a new look, and the next step was putting faces to it: getting financial advisors to meet the people who actually work there. The hope was that more advisors would get to know Equitable, and the ones who already did would keep recommending them. It was also Equitable's first big paid digital campaign, so first impressions mattered.
Equitable’s thinking was simple. Plenty of insurers sell similar products, so the real difference is the people you deal with when you pick up the phone. Moments Matter would put those people on camera, talking about their work in their own words, with no script. Fittingly, one thing they kept bringing up on camera was that Equitable’s client care team doesn’t work from scripts either.
Most corporate video starts with a drone shot of the head office, then cuts to a CEO reading a teleprompter. This series needed something else. Unscripted only works when people forget the camera is there, and most of the people we filmed had little or no experience on camera.
Equitable teamed up with Stryve Digital Marketing on the refresh and the campaign around it. Ryan Burgio, Stryve's co-founder, led the campaign side of the series. We took care of production and post: the look, the shoot, and every edit.
Act 1
Filming 15 employee interviews for Moments Matter in three days
Act 1 was three days of interview video production at Equitable’s head office in Waterloo, Ontario. Our six-person crew filmed 15 interviews, each 30 to 60 minutes long, with people from across the company, from client care reps to Equitable’s head of distribution and three of its vice presidents.
The plan going in was 8 to 12 short videos of about 30 seconds each. Once the interviews were in, there was clearly more there, and the series became 15 episodes of about 90 seconds.
Equitable’s head office had just been renovated, which made it the perfect place to shoot, with plenty of fresh, modern spaces to choose from. It also stayed open for business the whole time, so we scouted weeks before we shot anything. We wanted real depth behind each person, and enough variety (a couch, a booth table, a lounge area) that 15 interviews wouldn’t all happen in the same chair. Every spot also had to be quiet enough for clean sound, away from air conditioning hum and foot traffic.
We ran four cameras on every interview, and each one had its own job:
A-cam: a nicely framed wide of the interview
B-cam: a tighter shot on the person talking
C-cam: a wider behind-the-scenes angle that catches the crew, the lights and the room
A handheld B-roll camera: documenting the whole process, rolling before the other three ever started
C-cam and the handheld are what give the series its raw, behind-the-scenes feel. You’re watching a real conversation in a real office, crew and all.
By the end of Act 1, we'd delivered:
15 interview episodes in English and French
Horizontal, square and vertical versions of every episode, 90 exports in all
Captions, thumbnails and motion graphics for every episode
We also made one thing nobody asked for: a blooper reel. It was Equitable's first video project at this scale and the whole company was excited for launch, so we cut the outtakes together for the team to share internally.
Acts 2 and 3
Turning one docuseries shoot into a year of new films
Moments Matter didn’t wrap when Act 1 did. Over the next year, the same footage kept finding new jobs. Once Act 1 was out, Equitable came back with an idea: let’s reuse what we already have and make a trailer. Act 2 became a 90-second trailer and a 30-second teaser that pulled moments from all 15 interviews and sent people to the full episodes.
Every project that I’ve done… the outcome has led to let’s do more… every project I work with, Oak + Rumble, the quality was there, the service was there… and it actually performed.
Then the trailer turned into Act 3. Equitable and Stryve wanted to pull the series together around a few big themes, so we recut the same interviews into four short films:
Proudly Canadian
Human First
Advisor Focused
Client Experience
Proudly Canadian went first and set the template for the rest: an opening line, quick staccato cuts, a montage of three or four real lines from the Equitable team and one strong closing statement, all in 30 to 45 seconds. Ryan’s thinking was that in a montage, the music and movement carry the feeling, so no single clip has to land a big moment on its own. That’s how most of the project worked. Ryan brought the big idea and a lot of passion; we talked it through and sent back ideas and reference clips, and once he was excited about a direction, he trusted us to build it.
Here, building it meant taking interviews shot a year earlier as long, sit-down conversations and making them land in 30 seconds: cuts that hit the music, a staccato section fast enough to feel energetic without losing who’s talking, and a structure the next three films could follow without starting over.
None of it needed another shoot day. Three days of interviews carried all three acts, and across the whole series that came to 126 video assets.
They're all in the kit below, sorted by act, with French alongside English.
Working together
Keeping a growing series on track, in two languages
A series that keeps growing is a good problem to have, but it still has to be run well.
We talked budget before doing the extra work
Going from 8 to 12 short videos to 15 episodes three times as long is a big change. We raised the budget impact with Equitable before doing any of the extra work, so the bigger series was a decision they made with the numbers in front of them. Act 3 came with its own clock, too: Proudly Canadian went from brief to Canada Day launch in about four weeks.
Up to an hour on camera, for people who’d rarely done it
Each person spent up to an hour on camera, in their own building. Stryve prepped everyone ahead of time, and Ryan asked the questions on set. We coached both the people on camera and Ryan through the video side of it. Ryan knew exactly what he wanted out of each conversation, and we helped with the guardrails any on-camera interview needs. If you've got a few nervous subject-matter experts of your own, we've written about helping people look natural on camera.
Every video in English and French, with captions in both
We sent Equitable's translation team full transcripts of the selects, then built the French versions to match. When an interview mentioned a real client, we cut anything that could identify them before it went out.
We tried the new on-screen text on one episode first
A series like this has a lot of people invested in it: Equitable's brand team, Stryve and everyone who appeared on camera. The first couple of episodes took a few extra rounds while everyone found the tone, and the rest moved faster. When the team wanted to add a new on-screen text treatment, we tried it on one episode before rolling it out, so a first attempt never had to carry the whole series.
What came next
From one docuseries to an ongoing partnership
On top of the reach in the numbers up top, Act 1 alone brought in 100K+ clicks and 100K+ page views. But for us, the bigger outcome was the relationship that came out of it.
On a separate project afterwards, we also built Equitable’s Brand Toolkit for the refreshed brand. It covered everything from branded video transitions and lower thirds to logo stings and full hero logo animations, in English and French, with light and teal versions to choose from. We built the motion pieces as templates that lock the design but let Equitable’s in-house video team change the text themselves, so the brand stays consistent without anyone calling us for a title change.
These days, Equitable is part of our Acorn + Rumble video partnership, so we’re still making video projects together.
Moments Matter and Equitable’s Brand Toolkit put us even deeper inside their brand, their culture and how approvals work. We understand each other, and that’s what makes ongoing video so easy for both teams.
For Stryve's side of the campaign, from the strategy to the results across every channel, see Stryve's case study.
Behind the scenes
Three days, 15 interviews and one very patient head office.
