THE BACKSTORY: 

The average Vox Explainer is about five and a half minutes long, built for the YouTube audience. It’s a far cry from the 60 seconds to which Ford asked us to limit ourselves. But it was a challenge I wanted our studio to undertake — reengineering an entire format to make it more appropriate for Facebook and Instagram consumption. Know The Road was, from the beginning, a challenge of ideation. I had to find questions that were not only interesting to the audience, but that could also actually be answered within our time constraints. (And it’s amazing how quickly 60 seconds can pass.) 

We ultimately landed on three ideas — with a few more still in the pipeline. It took many rounds of whittling and trimming scripts to get them to meet our time limit. But because what we wrote felt almost like “Micro-Explainers,” it somehow clicked that we should take our visual cues from toy cars like Micro Machines. 

I knew we had made something good, but the audience’s reaction surprised even me. Between three videos, we racked up 11,000 likes, 10,000 shares, and 3,500 comments.