Let’s Get Creative: Holiday Video Ideas for Your Brand This Season
It’s that time of year again: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are around the corner, and now is the perfect time to start conceptualizing and executing your branded holiday content. Consumers are in the festive spirit and are particularly paying attention to what brands and services are offering. So, a great way to get ahead of your competition, reiterate your values, and increase brand awareness, is to incorporate seasonal content into your marketing. The good news? It doesn’t have to break the bank. But, as with all content, the key is to lean into strong brand storytelling and plan ahead. To lend inspiration, we’ve compiled the creative ways Storyhunter freelancers have tapped into the holiday spirit to make videos, from branded hashtag challenges, bumpers ads to animated shorts.
Short Form Videos
Short-form videos have taken over social media channels like Instagram and TikTok. You can create your holiday content using the latest trends, hashtags, and filters on each of these platforms, as well as user-generated content (UGC). You can use this short-form video format to start your social media challenge that resonates with your brand’s voice and customers’ expectations.
For Halloween, Chipotle runs its TikTok #Boorito challenge, in which users participate by posting a TikTok video featuring their festive before and after Halloween transformations. Top submissions win free burritos for a year. (The #Boorito event also offers discounts to customers who wear a costume while visiting one of its restaurants on Halloween.) The video challenge, in-store participation, and (delicious) grand prize make for a highly engaging marketing campaign.
Bumper Ads
A bumper ad is a bite-sized and memorable video ad that helps you reach more customers. (In a study of 122 bumper ad campaigns in 2017, Google found that 70 percent of these campaigns led to a significant increase in brand awareness.) These ads are six seconds or less in length and run at the beginning of YouTube videos. Storyhunter freelancer and motion graphics designer Khrystyna Boyko created a spooky Halloween bumper ad for SWAN, a mobile shopping and delivery service.
Luis Alberto animated this bumper ad for Disney Junior:
Stop Motion Short Films
A way to set your brand apart from all the hours of video uploaded everyday to the internet is using animation. Stop motion is an animation technique in which “a camera is repeatedly stopped and started, frame-by-frame, in order to give inanimate objects and figures the impression of movement,” according to VMG Studios. Los Angeles-based Storyhunter freelancer Pete Levin specializes in stop motion animation and has brought to life everything from puppets and paper to LEGO bricks. He directed and animated “Saving Thanksgiving,” a short film for LEGO’s YouTube channel that has garnered a whopping 86 million views (It’s one of the most popular videos on the toy company’s channel.)
“Brands can create spots that really stand out with stop motion because there’s an immediate accessibility to it, knowing that these are things that exist in the real world, but are made to do truly fantastic things,” Levin told us. “In a world of computer generated effects and animation, the handmade, tactile feel really speaks to people. If a viewer sees a thumbnail that’s a scene from a stop motion animated spot, they’re much more likely to click on it.”
Corporate Videos
Corporate videos are an effective way to communicate brand awareness and company culture. You can create them to forge a closer relationship between you and your customers. Antonio di Cosola, a Storyhunter freelancer and documentary DP, created an uplifting Christmas video for CANARUTE, a hamburger restaurant in Bari, Italy.
TV Commercials
TV commercials generate brand awareness and familiarity across households. Pennsylvania-based cinematographer Raffaele DiLullo created a Christmas commercial spot for Honest Amish, a company that makes hand-crafted beard products.
If you already have a holiday campaign in the works, you can think of cost-effective add-ons such as Instagram and TikTok filters, music trends, or you can spruce up your logo to give it some cheer. Post your project today to find creative professionals on Storyhunter who can make your holiday marketing wishes come true.
By Shivan Sarna, head of stories
