Responses by Luca Gonnelli, cofounder/executive producer, illo

Background: Bloomberg asked us to work our data-driven video magic again for an automated video campaign analyzing the Futures market. The goal was to help Bloomberg journalists generate a weekly video mixing live financial data and human curation in a simple way, in order to provide a clear picture on the weekly evolution of the Futures market. We wanted it to be both eye-catching and insightful, offering a concise financial recap that would be published every Monday right after market closure. The campaign was created keeping a broader audience in mind, but also addressing the Retail Traders interested in the Futures market performance.

Reasoning: Since it was a project that had to bring automation, data and creativity together, it was perfect for Algo, our cloud platform that creates real-time, data-driven videos starting from tailored design templates. However, for this project, we wanted our technology to disappear. The videos would rely on human curation to tell viewers about what happened in the financial world on any given week. Concerning the design, we wanted to get the two sides working together, so we developed five different graphic themes and seven color palettes to create hundreds of different visual options. In the end, the video doesn’t seem to be created by software at all, and that’s the most important goal for us.

Challenges: Striking the balance between precision, versatility and accuracy, keeping everything in perfect sync, especially since we were giving data a voice and adding customized voiceovers to the mix. Incorporating the audio layers and getting them to go hand in hand with the video content was a challenge. The other challenge was making sure that whatever the content from the dashboard, both visuals and text would adapt to the template, maintaining the ratio and look.

Favorite details: Introducing the customized voiceovers and quotes by a range of financial experts. It’s that essential human touch every automatized project needs. We’re also glad we can offer the Bloomberg team a tool that transforms human curation and live financial data into high quality videos at scale. Graphic variety is another thing we achieved with this project, both in terms of style and distribution. The countless videos we generated are also social friendly and versatile, switching between different social media formats without losing any of their features along the way.

Specific demands: One of the first requirements was that every video would include a chart coming from the Bloomberg Terminal. Being so retro and incredibly distinctive, this forced us to adopt a style where our designs and screenshots from the terminal would live together.

Visual influences: We tapped into the legacy of great Italian designers of the past, like Bruno Munari and Massimo Vignelli, to come up with a style that would look timeless enough to make the old and the new coexist.

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