If you want the short answer, it’s official, science tells us that brand building is critical for long term profitability and growth and that emotive video creative is the best vehicle through which to build your brand equity in the minds of consumers. Here’s the evidence:

Earlier this month two of the world’s leading authorities on advertising effectiveness, Rob Brittain and Peter Field, and globally-acclaimed researcher in media science, Professor Karen Nelson-Field, launched a new major report on measuring advertising effectiveness, Australian Advertising Effectiveness Rules: To ESOV and Beyond.

The report further reinforces the importance of long term brand building and developing mental availability (the propensity of a brand to be noticed and/or thought of by consumers in buying situations), continuing Peter Field and Les Binet’s ongoing work into the ineffectiveness of too heavily favouring short term sales acquisition tactics over long term brand building.

In 2018 a report authored by Field and distributed by the Communications Council of New Zealand, titled Why Aren’t We Doing This, How Long Term Brand Building Drives Profitability, explored the differences in effectiveness between short term sales acquisition tactics and long-term brand building.

The report determined that “short-termism” was a highly attractive proposition due to its fairly immediate results and metrics that demonstrated short-term ROI but that it didn’t offer any potential for growth over the long term, whereas brand building exercises took much longer to generate results that outweighed sales activations (typically 6 months) but retained gains over much longer periods, continuing to build growth and profitability over the long term.

In this study, Field offers his solutions in the seven rules for brand building effectiveness:

1. Focus on building mental availability for your brand.
2. Use advertising to create distinctive assets for your brand.
3. Get emotional. Emotional advertising primes behaviour more powerfully and over longer periods of time.
4. Get Creative. Original advertising is more distinctive and more likely to get talked about: both boost mental availability.
5. Be consistent. But allow for innovation around a consistent theme.
6. Reach wide with advertising. Do not be seduced by the idea that it is wasteful to talk to people who are not about to buy. It is vital to do so.
7. Balance media. Brand building and sales activation spend should be approximately 60:40. Choose the media best suited to each role.

Per rule seven, Field explains that brand building and sales activations work most effectively in tandem with a typical budget ratio of 60% towards brand building and 40% towards sales activations and describes the best method of delivering brand building messages as being through story-driven and emotive video.

Hmmmm, if only there was an agency that was really good at that.

Creative agencies. You get them in all shapes and sizes with all kinds of specialties and strengths. The traditional capabilities of creative agencies include strategy, design, branding and creative copywriting. This traditional model would usually dictate that when video assets are required to execute a creative brief (like for a TVC or online ad) the creative agency contracts a production company to collaborate. This is still the prevalent model at the highest level of advertising in New Zealand.

Of course, in recent years, video has become far more accessible to the masses with advances in technology meaning that highly cinematic commercial productions can be achieved for tens of thousands of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands or even millions. Gone are the days of huge film cameras and lights with a crew of 50 to capture a few nice looking images (my iPhone 12 has the capability to capture beautiful images when in the right hands). Advances in internet speed have made video streaming not only practical but dominant and the world’s leading authorities on advertising effectiveness definitively point to emotive video as the most effective way to build brand equity with audiences and drive lasting profitability.

So it’s no wonder that a number of the emerging and fast growing creative agencies across New Zealand (with some prominent examples in Auckland and Wellington) and the world are now structuring with in-house video production capabilities in mind, utilising new technologies and merging creative talents to provide a vehicle for the most effective communications under one roof. This model provides for a far more synchronised dynamic between strategic, communications, creative and production units and offers greater efficiencies, meaning budgets go further…with the added value of client communications and the customer journey being greatly simplified.

That’s not to say it’s easy. The reason many creative agencies don’t offer in-house video production services is that it’s a big old beast of its own with it’s own complex structure of skill, technical capability and regulatory requirements…not to mention the financial outlay required for the substantial technology infrastructure needed to produce and post-produce the highest quality video content.

At Shotover Media we evolved from a production company into a creative agency with some highly skilled talent acquisitions in brand communications, strategy and design, so we inherently possess everything needed in the production space and I can genuinely say I don’t believe there’s another creative agency on the South Island with our in-house production capabilities. Our Queenstown studio is stacked with the latest camera, drone, sound, lighting and post production equipment and our team are highly experienced in Strategy, Creative Development, Creative Copywriting and Communications, Screenwriting, Scriptwriting, Directing, Cinematography, Sound, CAA 102 Certified Drone Operations, Art Direction, Production Management, Editing, Sound Mixing, Colouring and Motion Graphics. That’s a pretty end-to-end service.

In a world where communications are dominated by video and where leading media scientists point to video as the the most effective form of communicating with audiences to build last profitability, I can only see this model of combining potent communications and creative services with robust production services becoming more and more prevalent. Some might say it’s the future but I say it’s now.

P.S. Sorry about the cheesy ending.