You may have seen these GIFs and not known they were ads. 

In an effort to appeal to teen girls heading back to school, Converse set out to position their Chuck Taylors as the go-to-apparel of choice. To reach this teen audience, we knew we needed to get in front of them in a way that was authentic and in a visual language that teens actually use.

We turned to Stranger Things star, Millie Bobby Brown, to deliver the message in 32 original reaction GIFS. 

Back-to-school is a cluttered and extremely competitive time of year for brands to reach a 14 to 17 year old audience. 

We knew that in order to reach them, we knew the content had to be inherently shareable. We saw reaction GIFs as a perfect way for teens to organically share our content with their friends on their own terms, through both public and private social channels. 

Using data from Twitter, Giphy, and Tenor, my team and I mapped the most frequently shared reaction GIFs across the internet against First Days Feels and the Converse brand. This led us to develop 40+ prompts to elicit each emotion from Millie during a very short shoot day.

My role in this was as a pro memer.

In order to make the most of the time we had with Millie, my task was to come up with the 40+ scenes and emotions that would make for the most GIF-able moments on set. 

My team and I started by establishing emotions, then scripting out how we'd see them used in an actual conversation (to prove they'd be worthwhile to capture), then building a scenario that would evoke the right response from talent on set. 

Once we'd captured all the photo and video content, I was then tasked with building the GIFs into actual meme formats, a first for the Converse brand. 

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