One of the most successful public awareness campaigns of all time was Dumb Ways to Die, promoting public transport safety in Melbourne. You’ve likely seen the videos, even if you’ve never set foot inside a Melbourne train or tram. The ad has over 320 million views on YouTube – and best of all (for me!) it’s an animation.
The advertising agency that created the campaign, McCann told The Age in 2012 it “estimated that within two weeks, it had generated at least $50 million worth of global media value in addition to more than 700 media stories, for ‘a fraction of the cost of one TV ad.”
Of course, not every piece of content goes viral just because it’s animated. However, if businesses and brands want to really unleash their imagination and go for broke creatively, it makes sense to at least consider animation.
The results of a month-long research project by Breadnbeyond found that 22.4% of marketers in the US use animation to improve audience engagement rates. 40.8% of marketers who used animation deemed it “fairly effective”, with 24.9% saying it was “extremely effective.”
If you ask a marketer why they chose animation for their campaign, they’ll likely reply with this: Because it gets results.
Why is animation so compelling?
Making The Complex Simple With Animation
Though they seem quaint (and culturally offensive) by today’s standards, the U.S. Army hired the animators at Warner Bros. “Termite Terrace” to produce animated shorts during World War II. Their mission was to explain extremely complex geopolitical conflicts in simple to understand terms (some soldiers may not have spoken fluent English.) Remember: the average person had a fraction of the resources available to follow world events than we do. Radio, newsreels, newspapers, or nothing at all.
Though we have more avenues to draw information from in modern times, explaining a new concept using jargon, technical terms, or abstractions doesn’t get any easier as a marketer or salesperson.
Looking at the data from Breadnbeyond, the plurality of marketers surveyed (35.1%) said it was better at visualising concepts, while 22.7% said it uplifted audience engagement.
This helps solve the complex explanation problem. Animations can (sometimes literally) walk viewers through a sophisticated idea or novel product – and even show animated products or services in action before they’re actually developed in the real world. Some of this is made even easier as we can take CAD drawings or 3D printer files and manipulate them in our software.
As an animator, it’s part of my job to “explain something like the audience is five” without coming across as condescending, yet keeping the content entertaining and memorable.
Research has shown that almost half of our brain is involved in visual processing. Simplifying animation styles (line-drawn, 2D art, or vector art), it reduces the cognitive load for the viewer, which means more of the message is retained. It can keep us interested in a topic long after the written word or even a lecture has tired our attention spans. This is part of the reason why many brands and businesses incorporate animation as part of their eLearning or onboarding strategy or as part of their ongoing internal communication strategy.
Defines Your Brand Identity
Creating a marketing animation also helps define your brand’s visual identity. The line-drawn animation style of Red Bull gives you wings ads have become iconic and distinct to that brand. Though he’s been reinvented many times over, Mortein’s Louie the Fly has entertained almost four generations of audiences. It expresses a brand’s values, message, and cornerstone communication style cleverly and uniquely. Animation literally sets your brand in motion.
Deploy Strategic Marketing At Scale
Animators were used to creating clips as short as 15 seconds about 10 years ago – but it’s not uncommon for us to communicate ideas and ads using clips only 6 seconds long – or even shorter! Developing a 60-second explainer video in a strategic way, where a brand can chop up short clips for deployment on TikTok, Instagram/Facebook Reels, or YouTube Shorts (and associated advertising platforms) means you can produce one piece of catch-all content that can be repurposed many times over. It makes animation much more cost-effective than producing equivalent live-action content – or even worse – the cliché “talking head sitting in a car” type of video that LinkedIn seems to be awash with these days.
Since even modest desktop computers can run decent animation software without chugging, the cost of animation has also come down over the years. Though AI isn’t quite there yet, businesses can take advantage of automated tools to create their own simple animations or hire professionals to really bring their vision to life.
If You Think It, You Can Make It
At the end of the day, marketing is all about creative ways of capturing attention. With animation, there’s no limit to what you can think of and what animators like us can create. If you want your cute pig mascot to sprout wings and fly to Mars, animation can do that. (We don’t recommend you do it in real life.) It allows you to stand out from the competition far better than other styles of visual media because animation can accurately capture how your brand is different, how it creates value, and what it means to work with your business. You can achieve it with humour, irony, nostalgia, cuteness, engaging storytelling, or something so off the wall and weird that people will have no choice but look on in awe!
Enjoyed this Marketing.com.au article on video and content production? You may like these other articles:
- Four Ways Addressable TV Will Disrupt the Ever-growing Video Landscape
- Top Tips to Boost Instagram Video Views
- What Are The Steps Of Video Post-Production?
- How Effective Is Video Content Marketing Really?
- Top 6 Writing Tips For Content Marketing
- How Many of These Video Marketing Mistakes Are You Making?
- Why Do Short Format Videos Work?