Hi! I’m Matt Bijarchi, Chief Content Officer and founder of Blend, a creative agency & production company based in Los Angeles. I’ve spent over 25 years producing branded content, including stints as Head of Integrated Production for Y&R, Executive Producer of Media Arts at TBWA/Chiat/Day, and as a marketing agent at the Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
As a part of our series on creating branded video content, this video outlines the three main steps needed to develop and write a creative brief for video content.
Step 1: Creative Brief Development
The creative brief lays out expectations between your brand’s internal stakeholders (the marketing team, sales, executives) and the creative team or agency creating the video concept. It is crucially important to define a creative brief prior to writing the script for the project. The brief ensures everybody is on the same page in regards to “why’ and “how” of what you’re doing. Anytime you feel off track or there is disagreement, you have the north start of the creative brief to come back to. The brief should be concise and pithy, with clear answers to who we’re trying to reach and what problem we’re trying to solve. This is not the script or even the concept– it’s a summarization of your intentions and goals. The brief must also contain information about your target audience relevant to your product or service as well as any key performance indicators or success metrics. You can’t gather data about your project unless you’ve established markers to measure against. Finally you need to lay down any brand constraints or issues that need to be avoided.
Step 2: Story Development
The next step is developing the story for your video. It’s no easy task to create a compelling brand concept that engages your audience and stands out amongst the glut of content from your competitors. First, it’s necessary to create an outline– you’re answering the questions: What’s the scenario? What’s the context? After that you need to craft some kind of emotion hook, ideally something that grabs the audience within the first 5 seconds of the video. If you hook them upfront, the audience is far more likely to attentively watch the full spot. This hook also needs to be tied to your core marketing message and goals. Finally, it’s essential to end with some kind of call to action– be it a direct sale or conversion, visiting a website, or anything that drives the consumer to the next phase of the purchasing journey.
Step 3: Scripting
The final step of the creative concepting process is scripting. With more platforms and channels than ever before, consumers are exposed to seemingly endless amounts of video marketing content. In order for your content to be effective, the script needs to be polished and engaging. While many of us might consider ourselves creative types, the best way to achieve this is by working with professional copywriting– they’re experienced in constraints and challenges of branded storytelling.
As you enter this process of finally putting the story on paper, best practice is to create three separate fully finished scripts. Next you’ll have to do the hardest part– choose the best and trash the rest. Then the writing team will tighten the selected script and it will go to all the internal brand stakeholder for final approval. Now you’ve done it! Once the scripted is finished and approved you’ll move into the storyboarding process and all the intricacies of pre-production.
If you have an idea for a project or need for marketing video content, reach out to blend by clicking below.