Seven steps to the perfect Commercial
A TV-commercial is intended to seduce your target audience into taking action. They should be buying your product or service, visit your website or store, request a brochure, or remember your company or brandname. How it takes seven steps to get to the perfect commercial is described below.
Step 1
Determine what message you wish to convey. A commercial tends to be a flighty medium. Think hard on what you want your viewer to remember or which action they should take after having seen your commercial. You’ve got about twenty to thirty seconds to get your message across. Be clear, be brief and be to the point. Images speak more than words do, so keep it straight and reap maximum effect.
Step 2
Which emotion do you appeal to? Image is a means to challenge your viewer. You may do this in many ways. Determine which emotion you mean to appeal to. Will you choose, for example, involved, secure, vital, original, pleasure or surprise? Get involved in the world of your target audience. To help you out with that, Four Corners cooperates with BLOOM© bureau for strategic marketing innovation, who help to innovate with large brands such as Bacardi, ABN AMRO, Becel, Philips and the Postbank. We find out which of the 8 BLOOM ConsumerWorlds© fits your product or service best and with that knowledge in mind, we determine the commercial’s tone-of-voice in a brainstorm session.
Step 3
Pick a production company that suits you. Producing a Corporate flick is an intensive process. Better to find a creative counterpart that’ll think along your lines, and feels instinctively what you want. People with whom you can grab a beer in a pub, but who are there to make the best of your commercial. If you happen to have millions at your disposal, get in touch with Thed Lenssen, one of the world’s top 10 commercial directors, as soon as you may, or choose the traditional track of hiring some way-overpriced advertising agency from the Amsterdam canal-district to while some costly hours away. In case you’re looking for a creative and enthusiastic club with whom you can spar and who will go all the way to produce your perfect commercial at a fair fee, simply get in touch with the guys at Four Corners.
Step 4
Determine your style. Tune in on your target audience and your product. An eye-pleasing commercial may sound good, but doesn’t necessarily get the results you want. And vice versa. Think, for example, on the detergent-commercials and the Teleshop and shop-at-home shows. Annoying as hell, but effective as well… You could use humour, like in the Cup-a-Soup or Centraal Beheer commercials, or you might choose a more ‘serious’ commercial, like those of l’Oreal or Microsoft. Perhaps you want a trendy commercial, such as those by Martini Bianco or Bacardi, or maybe it just needs be clear, like Becel or Duracell. Is it important to you to have a celebrity promote your product, like Ruud and Estelle Gullit in the De Telefoongids-commercials or Martine Bijl for the Hak vegetables, or is it just as well if a less famous actor stars in your commercial? Or maybe you can go the other way around, and turn a complete unknown stranger into a national icon through your commercial, as happened with Jochem de Bruin from the Rabobank and Cora from Mora. In short, do some brainstorming with your producer and director with regard to the style of your commercial.
Step 5
Let’s get to it! After the brainstorm sessions, your production company gets to work on a script, storyboards, locations and actors. They secure possible permits that are needed, make a production planning as well as a general planning, callsheets and a shotlist. All of this falls under the pre-production stage. In the production stage, the actual shooting takes place. As a commissioner, you might find it worthwhile to be present, here. After the footage has been shot, the post-production stage kicks in. The commercial is edited and possibly some music that was composed especially for you is added, as are the voice-over and animations. f
Step 6
Test your commercial. To make certain your commercial hits right on the mark and your’re on the right track, you can test your commercial-concept at different points in the process of the production. You can begin as early as in the storyboard stage. After the script for the commercial has been written, the production company designs storyboards: situation drafts of scenes from the script. You can present the drafts to a panel that consists of people from the target audience. There are special agencies who perform this kind of research. In this way, you test whether your message appeals and reaps the proper effect. Once your commercial is nearly done, you may also choose a pre-test. This could be performed by the STER, for example. They will measure the quality of your commercial and link it to your advertising-goals. This tells you precisely how effective your commercial will be. Another option is to choose a post-test, which takes place after your campaign.
Step 7
Launch your campaign. Make sure that all other communication-means are in order and start your TV-campaign. Research shows that a TV-campaign combines very well with an internet-campaign. A large organisation broadcast 240 TV-commercials within a single month and found out that in the very same month, it resulted in 75% extra conversion on its website. The effect lasted longer, still, because in the two months following the conversion was increased respectively with 37% and 25% compared to regular conversion. So, despite the seeming distance between TV and the internet, the twain most definitely influence one another. Especially if you insert your commercial in a rectangle banner and present it as a streaming banner on websites that are frequented by your target audience.
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