In the world of corporate content creation, it often happens that the work is evenly lit, the sound is good, and the music is canned. It’s workman like but lacks dynamism. The work can feel like a forced march through a shot list vs delivering a story. When I see work like this it’s almost always the case that the story is equally flat and not all that interesting. Gut check: is your film ample payoff for the time invested by your audience to watch it?
My best advice to clients, if you don’t have anything important to say then don’t spend money on film production. If you have something important to say, then say it with gravitas, employing all the appropriate tools of the trade.
“In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior, and we sculpt light.”
– David Fincher
Invest the money and the time commitment needed. Make sure the story direction is strong, clear and communicates with intention. Don’t sell your goal short. The most important thing is the arc and clarity of the story.
Lots of quick cuts and irrelevant B roll are poor substitutes for a real story. It’s very easy to distract your audience, especially if your story is not crisp. A drone shot is a distraction unless it is elevating the story.
Creating tension in the frame with contrast ratios is essential to supporting the story, scene, and talent with appropriate dimensions of light. Light that helps motivate the action, that creates visual tension in the frame works to keep the audience engaged. Don’t be afraid of dramatic lighting. Embrace an unmoving camera and focus on the performance, the telling of your story. Move the camera, only if it helps tell the story in a more effective manner. Build interesting soundscapes too. The ears perceive more than more than you may realize. Embrace all the tools. Focus on a complete multi-dimensional telling of the story.
Even though your cast may not be professional actors, doesn’t mean they cannot be compelling on screen. With the right preparation and coaching, you’ll be surprised at what your team can do.
Telling something truly is more work but the payoff will be a more engaging and compelling story, a story that heads for the heart.
It was the second meeting. The first was a year ago. The client asked for the second meeting to discuss an update to their business challenges. The first meeting seemed to go well. The indications were positive.
During the first credentials meeting, the client was highly engaged, asked tough questions, agreed vigorously with the answers. They seemed sincere when they stated their intentions to move ahead. Over a period of weeks, a scope of work was defined and agreed. Timing was agreed. Before the engagement could begin in earnest, there were things the client needed to sort internally first. We stayed in touch. It’s not unusual.
The sorting took time. At the second meeting, it became clear that not only did the client agree with many of the ideas put forward in the initial scope, but they also implemented some of them. There were struggles of course. They realized they needed more specialized talent. Some of the internal sorting and prioritization of business challenges remain. Regardless, they’re ready to commit. Handshakes all around. Let’s get started. We dig in and start brainstorming.
During the meeting, an accounting was made of effort against the prior year’s scope. They had made little progress. Certain aspects of their business and the competitive landscape had shifted. Their business is a highly profitable emerging industry, extremely competitive with little differentiation in brands. The opportunity is ripe.
A stack of empty coffee cups indicated we’d been at it for hours when we arrived at a new plan. During this meeting, we employed proprietary methods and worked out preliminary strategies to their top challenges. At the client’s request, we agreed we would send over our strategy and planning slides the next day, including the scope of work and timing we just outlined.
We shook hands and said our goodbyes. We followed up the next day as requested.
The client for their part did not return a single call or email. Crickets. Ghosted.
Clients milking agencies for ideas free of charge is nothing new. The new business model, be it pitching ideas based on a client supplied brief, written RFP, credentials presentation or some combination thereof, has corrupted the industry over many decades. Agencies put forth tons of time and effort and expense to demonstrate their skills with little to no comparative investment required by the client. The bigger the client, the bigger the investment, the bigger the risk.
There was a period when budgets were large enough and the cost of delivery manageable enough that, while painfully unfair, the winning agency had a chance of doing great work and making a decent profit too, even after absorbing new business costs. These days, the margins are razor thin, the cost of delivery extraordinary.
The agency world needs a contemporary model of new business engagement, one that respects both parties equally. It has been my experience that while procurement can do an amazing job of minimizing some of the risk of the agency selection process, in some cases, they have elevated the take.
Let me explain: A group of say 6-7 agencies are asked to respond in writing to an RFP. This is an extraordinary amount of work. It takes countless staff hours to do effectively. From the written submissions, a passel of agencies, say 4-5, is selected to come in and give a credential presentation. This is also a heavy lift and not something you just pull out of the drawer. Finally, a subset of the group, say 3, is then asked to make the final pitch. This is a scorching amount of work. The total time invested across all agencies is almost incalculable.
It’s nothing for agency costs to run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it all happen. By the time an agency is selected, the client is in possession of extraordinary amounts of work and critical, creative thinking from the best minds in the business. All for the cost of lunch and perhaps travel accommodation.
Clients should expect to pay for this work. Period. At a bare minimum, the agencies not selected should be compensated commensurate with their time and effort for each phase.
This would improve the agency selection process for both parties. The agencies will recognize value from their efforts. In recognizing the value, clients will engage more proactively in the process. And in the taking the work will have paid, at least nominally, for the all the ideas now informing their thinking.
That’s an outcome that offers a margin of comfort for everyone involved.
To the untrained observer, walking a tightrope seems like a high-risk activity. To the well-trained acrobatic artist, the tightrope is a platform for their creativity. The risks are well-calculated and the practice so refined, that confidence brings buoyancy to their work.
In the world of ideas, clients and agencies must come to a mutual understanding of well-calculated risk. The goal is break-through creative that challenges norms, animates the brand and motivates the audience.
For many clients, there’s also an additional objective; “not to do any worse than the past brand manager or campaign.” There’s nothing wrong with a good dose of self-preservation.
To the unprepared client, work that appears as if on a tightrope is going to incite fear of doing worse. To the agency, it’s the platform from which to demonstrate their hard-won skills and highly developed talents.
It takes a trusting client-agency relationship to explore boundaries and push the limits of creativity. The goal is to see the tightrope not as a high-risk activity, but as a well-calculated and desirable achievement that will deliver growth for their brand.
Confidence is the glue that binds us to big ideas.
When I put the camera on my shoulder and the brief is in my head, I’m looking for the truth. The deeper story, the stuff beyond mere words and pictures, the stuff that reaches the heart. Truth in performance; the essence of the idea to be communicated. The process starts again in editing, to polish the delivery of the idea, the emotion.
The brief is the framework, it establishes the context of creation. It impacts everything downstream; concept development, script, directing, photography, casting, location, tonality, mood, lighting, the entire production design…the works.
The brief is the springboard for ideas to take flight. A great brief is also anchored in the truth of the brand. The brief is a contract with the creative. The brief is also a contract with the truth. Not “truthiness.” The truth.
Occasionally, attempts are made to exploit “truthiness.” Savvy marketers know that great ideas communicate beyond the execution. They know the right ideas generate emotions that cannot be measured through any single ingredient that goes into execution. Truthiness can be tempting.
You can imagine the dismay when the client says, “The idea will not work because we cannot actually communicate that.” Discussion ensues.
It’s a mistake for anyone to use the brief as an opportunity to manipulate the creative work to communicate something that’s not entirely true. Creativity is a powerful tool and can certainly be made to imply things that are not the truth. Clever creative work, not anchored in truth, may achieve a temporary spike in sales but it’s a short money game. Disappointed customers, misled by “truthiness” will flee. Nothing sticks to a brand like the voices of unhappy customers. Truthiness does not build better brands.
Try making a better product.
Agency process is a balancing act. Too little process, and an agency will eventually fail to deliver and will go broke in the process. Too much process kills the creativity of the organization.
Having recently been a fly on the wall during client-led agency reviews, it is easy to spot the winners and losers. The winning agencies tend to lightly dance with their process, intermingling it with their work as evidence that the outcomes were not pure luck.
The losers spend more than half their allotted time banging on about their process, segmenting it from the outcomes and boring the client team to no end.
Good clients expect and respect strong agency process. They are not hiring agencies for their process. But if you question a client about why they are considering switching agencies, they very often cite poor process as one of the primary reasons. Of course, the other big reason is the work.
Strong process will not win you the work, but poor process will sure as hell will get you fired.
An agency that over-indexes on process in a client presentation is probably over-indexing on it back at the shop. Nothing will destroy an agency creative culture faster than legions of people armed with process hovering over the creative work.
Process is important. Properly executed, agency process infuses the creativity of the organization with insight, curiosity and a general esprit de corps that has everyone working to produce the best possible work.
If done poorly, agency process becomes a dividing line between those doing the work and those who believe it is their job to demand the work.
The highest purpose of agency process is to liberate its creativity.
Smart Brand Managers are forever scrutinizing the value they are gaining from their agencies.
The ad industry is forever trying to accurately respond to the old quip, attributed to John Wannamaker, “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Recently, Marc Pritchard of Unilever announced their “People First” initiative. As stated in CampaignLive; “a structure in which talent from roster agencies across holding groups are brought together under one roof to service the FMCG giant’s North American fabric care business.”
This is a client doing everything he can to unlock value from these relationships for his brands. Multiple agencies, multiple brands, massive media spend, redundancy and not enough of a payoff; or at least that’s what we can infer from the directive.
I don’t know Marc Pritchard, but really appreciate his efforts not to throw the baby out with the bath water. In the article he talks about bringing all the various agency creative together as a new model effort to find value by uniting the agencies in one collaborative effort.
I’ve run huge global brand development sessions with agency partners and client brand teams from all over the world. The largest initiative included participants from 16 countries. The approach can work miracles in ideation and equally important in getting everyone on the same page. Getting everyone on the same page with a big brand idea requires great talent in the room, a hugely collaborative effort, and egos left behind.
Believe it or not, it is rarely the creatives who do not play well with others.
The minute the big idea is agreed, it’s the agency business leads who start tearing at the budget like lions on a kill. Unless a client is willing to address the budget and compensation in an equally unilateral manner, it is very tough to make the collaboration stick.
I’ve worked on both Unilever and P&G brands and these are smart people with massive resources and still they are struggling to realize the promised value in the age of “new media.”
A big culprit is the industries’ addiction to its own hype.
The ad industry did not invent Google, or Facebook or any of the other super creative things that are reshaping the world; all we do is figure out how to monetize these things to our advantage and now clients are finally asking; How do all these exciting pieces of content you create make me money and build my brand? Clearly there is benefit; but how much return is in that investment? Spending less on creative and eliminating this redundancy is helpful to a brand if all the collaboration works out; but this is a client-driven attempt to solve an industry problem. We need to get better; showing and proving our value in context of the media and not just the execution itself.
Possibly one of the worst things to have happened in the advertising industry is when media was cleaved off from the agencies and became independent. It is not a matter of church and state; it is a matter of execution of ideas, and ideas cannot be separated from the media that gives voice to their expression.