Destination Animation: How Smart Marketeers Convey Complex Messages Memorably

Foreword

The UK’s animation sector is known for its quality, humour and inventiveness, as well as leading-edge techniques, creating new worlds and brilliant storytelling. Animators introduce characters that will be the global brands of tomorrow. I’m sure we can all recall animated characters and ‘cartoons’ from our childhood, and the shows that children love and watch repeatedly today. Animation is a huge business. It attracts a global audience and is a means of communication. It is used powerfully in advertising, education and business. The animated John Lewis Christmas advertisement is now an anticipated annual event; the COVID-19 pandemic saw animated educational content used increasingly to support online learning. Destination Animation tells the story of this medium for business-to-business communication. It explores why animation is so compelling, versatile and innovative, illustrating why it is a sharp business tool and how it transcends language and cultural barriers, travels well and converts complex messages and concepts visually. This is incredibly important in our international business marketplace. Christine has deep first-hand experience, drawing on her hugely creative and varied background of founding and running salamandra.uk, one of the leading business animation studios in the UK with an international client base. One of the book’s strengths is that it lays out information to the uninitiated in an unpatronising way, running through the options and applications, the process and production techniques, and the new opportunities through immersive content. Hints and tips and considerations are brought to life by case studies and Christine’s direct experience, making it one of those rare books that imparts considerable knowledge in an accessible style. Aimed at professional marketeers and corporate communications experts, Destination Animation will appeal to all who have a message to get across. Film and animation students and teachers will also find this a helpful text. It gives a clear overview and draws on a fantastic range of examples and personal anecdotes to provide a history and production guide as well as a personal account. As someone who advocates on behalf of this incredible industry, I can say that this book will now become a reference point. I learned from it, will quote from it and highly recommend it. – Kate O’Connor, Executive Chair, Animation UK Council, www.animationuk.org

Introduction

For business, nothing communicates as succinctly and memorably as animation. I’ve worked with multinationals, nationals, small and medium-sized enterprises, startups and their advertising and public relations agencies, client and agency side, in over eighteen industries and three continents. What I have repeatedly seen is how smart marketeers and business owners improve and often completely revitalise their communication of complex messages through animation. It’s an extremely versatile marketing tool which can be used on a variety of platforms. Marketing decision experts in online, digital and events recognise that in this increasingly always-on environment, animation is a vital tool in their arsenal for internal and external communications, sales and human resources (HR). Its adoption reflects innovation, insight and being open to new ideas. To illustrate just how powerful a sixty-second animation can be for business, research company Forrester analysed how many words it would take to describe what you might see, feel, hear and understand if you were to view this animation.1 These words would need to convey all that you experience, including the colours, backgrounds and environments, the narrative or story itself, the denouement, the music, the timbre of voices, the accent, the contents, the emotion conveyed, what you felt and what was memorable. How many words do you think you would need? A few hundred? A few thousand? Try 1.8 million. Forrester’s researcher calculated this number on the premise that a picture paints a thousand words, multiplying thirty frames of video a second by sixty seconds. That’s how much information a sixty-second animation can pack in to get your complex messages across succinctly and memorably. Best yet, images stay in the long-term memory, as opposed to text that stays in the short-term memory. Seeing a gap in the market for a tool that gets business messages across in a snap, I founded salamandra.uk in 2014 to specialise in animation for the business-to-business (B2B) market. Marketing professionals and business owners are always on the lookout for new solutions and ideas to convey complex messages simply and memorably in an environment that is constantly evolving. They need to overcome challenges from over-saturated marketing platforms and the dwindling attention span of target audiences. There are always new things to learn and deal with, while working with the age-old challenges of budget or deadline. Fresh new methods and tools that can be repurposed for a multitude of uses and placed on a variety of platforms will give businesses the best marketing return on investment (ROI).

Businesses need to convey a B2B message in a way that will resonate memorably with target audience(s) and answer their pain points. It needs to positively impact sales targets, bonuses, promotion and budget renewal or increase. By ticking all the right boxes with successful campaigns for online, print, TV, events, presentations and conferences, businesses can create their own marketing halo effect to elevate their status and success. Marketing professionals and business owners will need to identify a trusted animation supplier or partner to fulfil their marketing needs expertly, outline and agree the cost and timeline, explain how it works and make the right recommendations at all the right milestones. Destination Animation is designed to help you with this task. As a marketing or communications expert, you will likely have several goals for your projects, all of which need to sell your business products or services, differentiate you from the competition and make you the authority in your industry. I hope you will learn to love the medium of animation as much as I do. Animation is like ice cream – mention either and people’s eyes tend to light up or it makes them smile. It reminds them of their childhood days. Animation brings joy and fun to those who create it, commission it and watch it. Destination Animation will show you how to make it the best and most versatile marketing, sales and communication vehicle in your collection. Despite its uptake in many industries, animation is still considered something new to help a business stand out from the competition, a nice to have rather than a must have. Essentially, though, ‘cartoons’ can be serious. Many businesses are used to using live film footage as a way of representing themselves. Animation is more of an equaliser for the end viewer because it mitigates humans’ ingrained instinct to make split-second judgments based on people’s faces, as well as the potential woodenness that businesspeople often display on film. Animated caricatures keep businesses’ films fun, present their personality and make the overall message engaging. Animation is visual content that resonates with your target audience(s). Destination Animation will expand on how this works and how to create animated visuals, showing you ways of repurposing and ‘sweating’ an animated asset once it’s created. The tried-and-tested 3Ps process of plan, produce and publish will guide you step by step to understand and implement your successful and multiuse end asset – and how it can be used and placed in a myriad of ways. This book will show you how to distil your message verbally, visually and auditorily, picking out what resonates with your target market, as well as how to convey your solution to your audience’s pain points via your product or services. It will share the different approaches and platforms for marketing and branding visual solutions, static or animated, and how animation is today’s new business jingle. Nothing communicates your business’s message as succinctly and memorably as a well-made animation. Destination Animation will show you how to get it created the right way.

PART ONE THE NEW (VISUAL) JINGLE

A bit of a marketing relic, a jingle is a short song or tune created for radio or TV advertising. Jingles are a form of sound branding and contain one or more hooks that explicitly promote the product or service being advertised, usually through the use of slogans. These marketing tools have now largely been superseded by pop songs in advertising, but it’s hard to forget the ‘baba ba baba’ from McDonald’s ‘I’m lovin’ it’. Regardless of being somewhat dated, jingles remain powerful marketing assets. I’m sure you remember a few jingles from your youth, can still sing them, know the words and, more importantly, recall the brand. Jingles may take us back decades, but still feel fresh in our minds. The power of animation is that it is the modern-day visual equivalent of the jingle. It helps us remember the benefits of a business’s product or service, conveying in a snap what it does. And animation visuals stay in our long-term memory. As soon as you decide to include an animated explainer into your marketing mix, you will see how versatile and powerful this asset can be. And done well, it will have a massive positive effect on your target audiences, as well as your marketing spend, ROI and brand awareness.

Chapter 1

Why Animation Is A Phenomenal B2B Tool

As marketing tools go, there are few more versatile than an animation to help convey complex business and brand messages on any platform. This tool can be localised and translated for any territory or language. It can be used for websites, presentations, conferences, Zoom calls, email signatures, HR training or inductions, health and safety, sales, social media posts, as part of digital promotions, advertising or public relations (PR). And marketeers can really ‘sweat’ this asset, repurposing it for various uses. All marketing budgets are finite. With ongoing pressure for ROI, what better way to spend that budget than on something with so many uses to get your message across successfully, succinctly and memorably?

Often, businesses consider using animation, but don’t know where to start or understand what it involves, or indeed what benefits it brings. Once I’ve taken you through all the various permutations of animation for B2B, you’ll see there are few other marketing or communication assets that tick quite as many boxes to engage with your target audiences and get them to take up your call to action (CTA). Take the well-known online service Dropbox, now a huge company.2 Dropbox had a rudimentary explainer video made when it was a startup in 2009. Ahead of its time, the company placed this on its landing page for a number of years – it apparently got 30,000 views a day and more than 25 million views in total. This animation was monumental to Dropbox’s early growth.

Your guide to B2B animation

Studies have shown that viewers retain 95% of an animated video’s message compared to just 10% when they’re reading text.3 Animation is extremely shareable on all business communications and social media platforms. Including one on your landing page can boost your conversion rate by 80% and increase organic search traffic on your website by 157%. Yet many businesspeople still view animation as light-hearted, reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons. They don’t believe it needs to be taken seriously to help them convey their complex B2B messages to their target audiences.

I don’t want you to make the same mistake. Just as the medium is fabulous for entertainment and storytelling in the Pixar and Disney fashion, it is also incredibly impactful for business messaging and building marketing or brand narratives. Since our cave-dwelling days, humans have been programmed to learn, remember and recount through storytelling. Animation is the modern electronic version. Here are some of the ways you can use an animation in business. Because there are so many applications and approaches to animation in marketing or communications, I’ll mainly be using a standard sixty-second corporate explainer as a benchmark. An explainer animation is a short, usually one-to-two minute, video that explains a product, service or brand in an accessible and engaging way. Besides giving proven benefits to search engine optimisation (SEO) and conversions, an explainer video on your landing page is like being able to give an elevator pitch to every person who passes through your website. You can rely on the video portraying the best impression of your business every time and leaving a memorable message in the mind of the visitor. As a medium of communication, B2B animation can be used in many ways, including as a corporate explainer video for your executives or sales team, brand content in marketing, presentations and at events, internal or external training, education and communications, HR or health and safety inductions, to name a few. You can place or post your animation front and centre on your website’s landing page, or as part of a series of animations explaining different products or services on other parts of your website. As an induction tool for new and existing staff members, animation enables HR to deliver your elevator pitch in a snap. And remember, your internal team is your best brand ambassador when it comes to evangelising what you do and how you do it. If your people grasp all the facets of the business from your animation, they can articulate this clearly to others while at work or play. Animation is a marvellous tool to explain all your products or services to new, existing and past clients, potentially introducing them to the whole gamut your business offers, not just what they already know. Current and new suppliers can fully understand what you do and how you do it via animation. You never know, they may turn into clients, too, or refer your services by sharing your animation. As part of a sales presentation, animation ensures uniformity of brand message across divisions, territories and geographies. Include animations in email campaigns and on all your social media platforms to promote your company and brand. Snippets or looping video sections of the animation are especially useful to highlight particular aspects of your business or service. Why not use snippets for a digital white paper, magazine or blog? And, of course, animation can form part of your credentials deck to send out to prospects.

The possibilities appear endless, which shows the power a standard sixty-second corporate animation can have as a communication asset.