Prior to this project, I had no idea how companies like Grab, Burger King or Nikola go public in the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ. In fact, the entire investment world was extremely opaque to me. 

So when an opportunity for a project related to going public on a stock exchange came along, I challenged myself to understand the concepts better. In a series of videos, this client wanted to break down one of the 4 methods a company can go public. Of course, by going public, or initial public offering (IPO), one of the ways was to do it through the Special Purpose Acquisition Company. 

Content Research: 

In my research for the project, I needed to find out what SPAC is and why some companies decided to choose SPAC over others. 

These are the pointers I took note, some of which I decided it is worthy to share in the video later: 

1. There is an exponential increase in the number of SPAC IPO interest in recent years. The amount of capital that flows through these companies is as high as $83.3 billion USD in 2020.

2. SPAC IPO’s popularity has far exceeded expectations in 2020, and this period is often referred to as a “blank check boom”.

3. A company will take less time to go public should they decided to go with SPAC than a traditional IPO.

4. SPACs usually have a slightly lower risk profile than traditional companies, so this makes it very attractive to investors. 

Among others, these 4 pointers constitute my key research surrounding SPAC, to which got me to plan my narrative better. 

Constructing the narrative: 

The target audience for the videos are going to be prospective business owners who want to lead their company towards IPO. Yet, despite the hype of getting publicly listed, they have no clue what SPAC is about.

Thus, the objective of the video is to make it so simple for these business owners to understand what SPAC is about and allow them to engage with the company for future consultancy services. 

I wanted to break the contents down into 5 bite-size portions, each no more than 4 minutes long, so that any prospective business owners will be able to select the video they want to watch first, starting with a broad overview of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. 

The 5 videos, after breaking them down, are:

1. What is SPAC

2. How to Set up a SPAC

3. Who can Go for a SPAC

4. Why should you consider a SPAC today

5. What are the Pros and Cons for SPAC Listing 

Planning the contents: 

After breaking down the video into Who, What, When and Why components, the next part is to communicate each video in a simple manner.

This meant that emphasis had to be placed on simplifying the choice of words during the script writing process. Words such as “Blank Check companies” had to be switched with “Shell companies”. “Escrows” could be simplified by saying that they are “third-party companies that hold money”. We also knew there isn’t a simple way to explain what warrants mean. So we had to explain via graphics and animation how they come together with shares of common stock, giving the shareholder the right to purchase more stocks at a fixed price at a later date. 

The process of breaking the video into simple words was meant to educate these business owners a difficult concept, most of them have little to no familiarity with these financial jargons.

Sharpening the angle:

Even though one of the web-series objectives was to educate the business owner, the other objective of the video was to ensure that the business owner will consult with the company. Hence, some videos purposefully adopted a selling angle that is inline with the company’s sales strategy. 

However, knowing that the company traditionally approaches sales via hard sell tactics, there was a potential risk of losing our audience who only wanted educational content. The only way to compromise was to increase the level of urgency among these business owners by taking a “Why today?” instead of “Why not today?” approach, and to qualify businesses who traditionally do not believe they can become successful via SPAC listing. 

Production

Production took 2 days to complete. With a lean crew and a prepared cast, the video consists of the top executives of the company, including the bosses, the CFO and the management team in the company. 

Editing took about 1 week to complete. Emphasis was placed on the animations to keep the audience engaged, while making it visually simple for the audience to understand.