The Challenge
The World Gold Council is the global authority on the gold market, known for providing data, insights and education on gold investment. In 2019, they surveyed 18,000 people worldwide to understand buying patterns and attitudes towards gold. They wanted to bring this quantitative study to life with real stories and real faces, creating video content that would draw more people into the research and make the findings feel human and relatable.
Because attitudes towards gold vary significantly by culture, religion and life stage, the project needed to span four key markets – China, India, the USA and Germany. The brief was ambitious: create a series of marketing videos, filmed in local language across all four countries, featuring six individuals in each market and captured in 4K for long term use. This raised immediate challenges around recruitment, logistics, data management and consistency of quality across a large, international production.
The Approach
We began by defining tailored recruitment criteria for each country. This included the types of gold products respondents owned, their level of wealth, age, life stage and motivations for buying or holding gold. Each filming day was built around spending three to four hours with every participant: roughly one hour for an in depth interview and two to three hours capturing rich, contextual b roll of their lives, homes and cities. Working with trusted recruitment partners in each market was essential to finding the right people efficiently and ensuring they were comfortable sharing their stories on camera.
The technical scope of the project was equally demanding. Shooting in 4K across four markets meant handling up to 24 hours of footage per country and around 512GB of material per respondent, leading to more than 3TB of data generated in each location. To keep the overall timeline on track, fieldwork in India and China ran in parallel with filming in Germany and the USA. We also took the opportunity to capture additional city footage in every market, following a shared shot guide developed with the client. These sequences were delivered as both graded edits and raw assets to give the World Gold Council a broader bank of material for future campaigns.
The Impact
Despite the scale and complexity of the brief, the final films were delivered on time and were extremely well received. They became a central part of the World Gold Council’s communications around the 2019 research study, helping to amplify the findings across social channels and owned platforms.
By pairing robust statistics with intimate, personal stories from real people in four very different markets, the videos added a powerful emotional layer to the data. The high production values and 4K capture also mean the content will continue to feel fresh and visually relevant for years to come, giving the World Gold Council a long lasting asset to sit alongside their reports and presentations.
Need help on a project?
Our team are here to help – get in touch for a free consultation or quote.
