How to get your organization to make a brand anthem
Typical scenario: A marketing person comes to French Press Films with a big idea to do a brand anthem video. She’s super excited! She knows she’s got a budget for video! She wants to know whether we’re available, and would we be able to produce something in time for their big upcoming event! Then she says she just has to pitch her basic idea up the chain, and she’ll come back to us and we can start on scripts!
Then, a week later, she’s back, downtrodden. Maybe we should just make an explainer video about what the product does, she says.
Selling a brand anthem video to your organization can be tough. What can you do during your initial internal pitch to help make sure this doesn’t happen to you?
Check yourself. Do you really understand your brand? Does anyone at your organization? Is there a clear differentiation between the brand and the product? Have branding exercises been done, and were formal guidelines created?
Immerse yourself in the brand and whatever materials exist about it. If you weren’t involved in the branding exercises, find people that were and talk to them. Take notes and write yourself a creative brief. Become the most knowledgeable, most enthusiastic brand ambassador at your organization. Make it clear that you’re the org’s best person to be spearheading this effort to tell the brand story.
And be realistic. Is your brand ready to tell its story? If the brand concept isn’t fully formed, it can be a difficult emotional journey to create a brand anthem. You may decide it would be a smoother road to create an anthem for the product, for example, that still tells an emotional story and sets the stage for a broader piece to be created about the brand as a whole.
Anticipate the arguments. The most likely reason your company isn’t interested in doing a brand anthem piece is that there’s no direct ROI you can measure through sales. Instead, you’re trying to build brand awareness and excitement. So be clear about what metrics you’re looking to reach when you talk to stakeholders about making a brand anthem video: for example, increased hits on your website, earned media and links, and more engagement on social media. Set hard targets and make sure you have a way to know when you’ve reached those targets. Write a clear explanation of this and put it early in your pitch deck. When you’re pitching a brand anthem, the why is more important than the how and the what.
Another likely reason execs may not be excited about doing a brand anthem is they think it will suck up money that should be used for other things — especially video explainers for new and complex products. To allay those fears, be prepared to talk about how the existing video budget can serve all the organization’s content requirements. Emphasize that explainers and testimonials can often be done more cheaply than anthems, and show a breakdown of how all of the video budget will be used for the period.
Get your production company to help you! At French Press Films we love it when we’re brought into the process early. We want to know as much about your brand as you do. We can help create decks for these internal pitches, research and provide references and case studies, provide initial budgets for any type of video and content work, facilitate workshops to help your stakeholders hone in on concepts for the piece, create proof-of-concept videos that help show how the idea could eventually come together, and more.
Our goal at French Press is not just to make great films but to make our clients successful. We want you to look great, and we’re here to help! Don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
Finally, don’t get discouraged. Check out this piece on the making of the Apple “1984” commercial, which one could say is the original brand anthem. Lee Clow, who was at Chiat/Day at the time, mentions a couple of times that the board didn’t like this spot because it was too conceptual and didn’t show the product. And that commercial ended up changing advertising forever.
