Interview with Tom Brandhorst
We sat down with newly-signed Movidiam Talent director Tom Brandhorst to get an insight into his work and creative process.
Hey Tom, you started your career as Editorial Producer before overseeing content creation at COPA90. How do you feel this has influenced your directing style?
I’d say that it’s mainly influenced my desire for originality.
Having witnessed and overseen the vast volume of branded and editorial online content that is produced on a daily basis, so much of what’s out there is creatively uninspiring. Content is played safe, churned out, homogenised, ticking the minimum required boxes to appeal to an audience. Not enough of it provides people with something fresh that they aren’t expecting. My motivation as a director is to create films that stand out in this overly-saturated sea of content.
My background has also influenced my ability to think strategically when approaching a project. General digital expertise means that a deep understanding of platforms, audience behaviour and data insights are at the back of my mind when making content, leading to optimisation that helps content land better with its audience.
Football clubs have become their own broadcasters and gathered huge followings. What examples have you seen of brand partnerships utilising this opportunity?
The number of brand partnerships in this new age of modern football is truly staggering. The six big English clubs — Liverpool, United, City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs — have a whopping 131 brand partners between them. This means there’s the potential for 131 content series to go out on the clubs’ platforms as part of each brand’s sponsorship contract. In another overwhelming sea of content the challenge is therefore, once again, to create something that stands out while also resonating with the fanbase.
There are some straight forward creative routes that brands tend to go down — interviews, challenge videos, surprising fan stunts — a chance for the audience to see more of the players they love in familiar content formats.
However there are also some brand partnerships that abandon any sort of marketing subtlety in order to create straight out adverts with their football talent. Whether it’s a deal between United and Fox leading to David De Gea & Wayne Rooney being spliced into an X-Men trailer, or Arsenal’s latest Lavezza eco-coffee sponsorship which has Aubemeyang, Ceballos & Kolasinac shouting “COMPOSTABLE!” to camera — we’re in a marketing era where anything is possible. The floodgates have opened and big brands are now pushing through mad, parodical adverts under the guise of brand partnerships.
From my perspective the opportunity is best utilised when you take your allotted top tier players and create something that looks like a uniquely crafted film, and less like an access opportunity squeezed in on the brand partnerships day.
Returning to the ‘Big 6’ and looking back over the past few months:
Chelsea and Beats’s ‘Callum Hudson-Odoi’s Road To Recovery’ film was a beautiful artistic telling of an intimate, lesser known area of a footballer’s career. Product and brand ethos naturally integrated as we get a glimpse into the mental struggles of a premium athlete. Man City & Gatorade’s ‘Science Of Success’ Documentary utilised club access to provide football fans with a thorough insight when it comes to nutrition and physical conditioning at the top level. It was also good at developing Gatorade’s positioning as a nutritional brand backed by sports science. And lastly, don’t underestimate the power of the aforementioned simple routes when they are done right. Take Nivea’s recent Dear Liverpool FC series in which Virgil Van Dijk stunned a disabled life long Liverpool fan and showed him around the training ground. An example of the surprising fan genre executed brilliantly, leading to a viral hit.
What inspired you to make the move to directing and what do you think your experience can bring to clients and their projects?
The move to directing was based on a desire to more effectively bring my ideas to life by being more hands on when crafting films. It stemmed from an overall passion to inject uniqueness into content, that is often only possible as a director.
I believe my experience can bring clients an inherent, extensive understanding of their world: their strategic aims, the objectives of the content they are looking to create, the landscape that it is to be posted and promoted in. This knowledge means we’ll be better aligned throughout the production process and serves as a useful backdrop for us to go ahead and make something of the highest quality.
You’ve worked alongside Tee Byford on a number of projects. What are the advantages of working as a creative duo?
It is, of course, brilliant having someone to bounce ideas off of, to inspire creativity in a natural way. Particularly someone who approaches things differently to you. Tee’s artistic background and conceptual way of thinking works well with my affinity for narrative and dynamic storytelling. With the right balance of people you can get an amazing blend of styles and ways of thinking that results in highly original output.
Your latest work is a short documentary about footballer Wilfried Zaha — with the growing trend towards shorter content have you seen a resurgence in audience wanting longer form content?
There is certainly a time and place for longer form online content, it just depends on the audience and the story you’re trying to tell. A younger audience may naturally have a viewing behaviour that is conducive to watching 30–45 minute content. An older audience that care passionately about a topic or a story may commit to 3x30 min documentary episodes. There’s definitely something to be said for longer films having the potential to be more worthwhile and impactful, to possess longer term appeal because of how deep they can go.
For me ‘long form’ in this Age of the Short Attention Span can even be 10–15 minutes. A recent film I made about football in South Africa for EA Sports ended up being just under 12 minutes because we wanted to do the story justice. We could have settled for a 4 minute montage piece that looked great and was incredibly punchy, but where would the deeper connection for the audience be in that? It wouldn’t have as much long term appeal as a comprehensive mini-doc that has time to breathe and unfolds a story in front of you.
Of course from a filmmaking perspective it would have been great to have told the story in 30–45 minutes but the strategic nature of the campaign and the audience it was targeting meant a dynamic 12 minutes was an ideal compromise — a meaningful film facilitated by EA Sports that grows greater brand affinity than a quick dynamic piece that looks more like an advert than a documentary.
How effective do you feel they can be at selling product? For example Antony Joshua’s ‘The Next Move’ won numerous awards but in terms of brand awareness might have lacked the impact of a 3 second pack shot. How can you justify the ROI of long form branded content to budget holders?
Valid point. We’d like to think that content such as ‘The Next Move’ achieves an objective of growing brand affinity — strengthening the positive affiliation in consumers’ minds as they watch this motivational, inspiring content that the brand has facilitated — which later leads to product being bought.
However it’s very hard to measure the impact that this has. At the end of the day brands will always need their ‘3 second pack shot’ in order to sell product, and that’s one of the first things that the marketing and media budget will address.
But for the smart brands who appreciate the gradual difference this simple marketing tactic makes in consumer’s mind, branded content can be seen as a way to stay relevant, stay front of mind in the places that the consumer lives, in a manner that is less disingenuous than a YouTube pre-roll or a promoted Instagram carousel.
It’s about getting the balance right and hitting all the different touch points in a consumer’s ecosystem until they are more likely to purchase. Lucozade have created an amazing film that utilises their talent to make people feel something. It probably won’t sell product. But combine it with a life-size cardboard cut out of Anthony Joshua tactically positioned by the vending machines in every Puregym telling you to ‘hydrate’…and perhaps it will.
Since your time at Holler how have you seen the social media landscape change and what do you think the next five years look like for branded content?
(An opinion from what I’ve seen on the content frontline, lacking the concrete stats:)
- Millennials and Gen Z in the UK now see Facebook as dead platform. However it’s still a hive of activity for older people and there’s still a huge global appeal.
- Twitter seems to have had a resurgence over the past couple of years — the content there perhaps a bit more appealing than elsewhere and it’s still the best place for (live) news.
- Instagram addiction has been successfully ingrained into our thumbs and should have us scrolling for a few years yet.
- Snapchat is a hard one to pin down but seems to still be massively popular among Gen Z as a messaging platform.
- TikTok is becoming a bit of beast and will probably slowly steal Instagram users and develop the platform until an entire generation are on it.
- And lastly YouTube still has a sizeable Gen Z + Millennial audience with their favourite shows and their set channels, filling evenings and bus rides with hours worth of video content.
I can see branded content continuing in the same vein over the next 5 years. If new tech / a platform / trend / audience behaviour comes along, brands will simply adapt and find a way to subtly market to people in this new form with branded content. Perhaps a shift might be to stop spreading budgets so thinly and achieving small, unquantifiable cut-through. Instead brands can pool resources to create one big content splash each year that really makes a dent in social media, as opposed to many things that don’t achieve much.
You subsequently moved over to Leo Burnett that acquired Holler in 2011. How did you find that big agency structures and the creative process differ from more agile independent agencies?
I think big agency structures can often be equated with slow, stifling bureaucratic nonsense. While that is definitely the case sometimes, there’s perhaps a level of creative rigour that is highly valuable, that you don’t necessarily get with smaller agile agencies. The big agencies that have spent decades refining their creative process get it right when their creatives are allowed the time and space to find inspiration and develop ideas before feeding into the wider team.
Saying that, the benefit of smaller agencies is that their agility means good ideas can be conceived and turned around quickly. No stuffy thinking; fresh ideas from young creatives given a chance. The creative process is much more fluid, though very fast paced due to less resource and the nature of fast turnaround projects. It often swings between stimulating and chaotic.
It depends on the project. A huge ATL ad may need the proper love and attention that a multi-stage internal creative process provides. Quick hit social media content might be best conceived in a simplified free-flowing environment.
When you are asked to create a content campaign what do you think is the most important questions to ask and why?
What’s the budget? To see how just how ambitious the creative is allowed to be.
Who is the target audience? To ensure we’re creating something that resonates properly.
What platforms/channels will this sit on? To know how the audience will actually be consuming this. Is this to be an active viewing experience where we can take our time and craft something artistic and beautiful, or does this need to be a sharp shot for an audience with a 15 second attention window?
With so many channels, versions and sizes how important do you feel having experience as a strategist is in shaping the over all creative direction for the project?
It’s extremely valuable if the project is a cross-platform campaign with an even focus across every channel. It’s very useful to understand the wider landscape and consider the many different aspects in which the overall creative will manifest itself — from platform optimisation to social copy, or the way a film works vertically on IGTV to how it looks best as a 10 second ad on Tik Tok.
At the same time some projects are just looking for that single hero film that will work across all platforms with minor resizing tweaks. In which case the pure creative needs to be of the highest quality to engage an audience, no matter how or where they watch it.
In a recent Kantar report one of the key strategies for brands is to do fewer things, but excellently. Brands have more ways than ever to reach consumers. However, to maximise ROI, brands should identify the key touchpoints that deliver the majority of brand impact, and learn from competitors to optimise these touchpoints. As a filmmaker, how important do you think quality over quantity is?
Yeah massively important. One of the main reasons that the digital space is polluted with so much average content is because brands, publishers and alike are being pressured into posting as much as they can. Unless budgets and resources are adjusted, which they often aren’t, this ends up leading to an inevitable drop in quality. And to what end? Repeatedly hitting your audience with average content in an attempt to stay relevant will only cause them to lose interest over time.
What’s next for Tom Brandhorst?
Working with like-minded brands that see the value in pushing the boundaries of what audiences are expecting. Bringing new ideas to the table — drawing on artistic and comedic inspiration to keep branded content fresh. Hopefully, as with the Zaha film, leading the way with examples of how branded content can be made original and innovative with the right scenario and the correct approach.
