Why are branded videos so important?
The content of your video is of course important, but it is not as important as being completely on point when it comes to your brand. Having a strong brand is hard to achieve, but absolutely imperative so that your audience know who you are and what you are selling straight away. You only have to see an advert containing the colour purple and you immediately think ‘Cadburys’.
So, how do they get such strong branding into their videos? Well that’s where we, as video makers, can help. Embracing a company’s brand guidelines is something we really pride ourselves in. We understand the value of branding and always keep it at the forefront of our minds when creating graphical content.
When we are sent a copy of a company’s brand guidelines, they are often meticulous 30-page documents that explain fully every possible way you can or cannot use their logo, font, colour palette and accompanying graphical elements, but they tend to overlook the key element for us – how to apply their brand within video or animation. So, that’s where our experience comes in, to turn simple brand guidelines into something visually dynamic.
A couple of tricks we may use are to show your logo throughout the production, subtly displaying it at poignant moments, animating it, and turning it into an animated ‘sting’ at the start and the end of the video so it is the first and the last thing the viewer sees.
Creating an animated lower 3rd (showing someone’s name/job title etc at the bottom of the screen) is also a great way to lift a production by giving information in a non-static, visually interesting way.
As the lines between video production and animation become more blurred, the inclusion of complex graphics in the videos we produce has risen, so adding an animated logo at the beginning, overlaying footage with motion graphics, adding animated text; all of these are great additions that help tell your story and underline key messages.
Adding other brand elements such as the font and splashes of the company’s colour palette continually throughout the production all help to reaffirm the brand identity. Next time you see a video for Cadbury, you’ll see the subtle elements that they add in (all based on the above) that make their branding as strong as it is, but the main thing that makes their brand so strong is consistency. Their colour is that constant purple, their tone of voice is consistent, their logo never changes; all of these subtle things mean that their message is repetitive and therefore you, as a viewer, recognise it.
To help our clients keep their brand strong and consistent when it comes to video, we have often created brand guideline packs for them that detail how to keep consistency when they/we use their fonts, logos, colours etc and keep that continuity going, and their brand strong.
Now this is all just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to branding in video, so if you are thinking of using video to promote your brand then please get in touch – we’ll talk you through it!
