As media consumption on mobile devices becomes a preferred – rather than secondary – activity, our opportunities to produce branded content increase accordingly. Our audiences consume more media than ever before, and on an increasing variety of platforms: video, audio, image, and text.

But as our opportunities to reach people increase, their attention spans decrease. The proliferation of mobile media limits our ability to get the undivided attention of our audience. This means that branded content needs to be simultaneously more compact, and more compelling. Quite the tall order.

Vine was developed to record short segments of content, not stop-motion animation. So in order to record the video frame-by-frame, we had to very carefully tap the screen (Vine’s “record” function) 120 times per six-second video to record a single frame with each tap.

Unlike most video editing applications, Vine has no “undo” function. All videos were shot start-to-finish with no backtracking. So as you’d expect, when we missed a frame, we started the video over. While it made the process slower than a normal shoot, it forced us to be deliberate in our animations. And most importantly, our true-to-the-medium approach earned us respect from the Vine community.

At the outset of the campaign, the press recognized Lowes Fix In Six as the first branded effort to “crack the code” of Vine, using it as a strategic communications device rather than a novelty. Dozens of articles and press mentions hailed Lowe’s as the first brand to bring meaning to a platform so often associated with trivial content.

Users showed their enjoyment by sharing the content like crazy across Twitter, Facebook, and Vine; roughly a week from launch, the campaign had generated 28,000 mentions across social media.