Mastering brand collaborations as a filmmaker
Here’s me directing the lovely Sarah Jane Adams near Sydney, Australia, for a short film for Mercedes-Benz. Photo by Annie Mangen.
Can you successfully manage a collaboration with a big brand as a small filmmaker or content creator?
The answer is possibly maybe.
Lost in translation
Over the past twenty or so years I’ve been working with medium to large companies both on the corporate side, agency side and as a creative freelancer and I’ve seen the difficulty that in-house marketeers have communicating with external creatives and creatives hired by them struggling to understand where their clients are coming from.
There is great satisfaction in seeing a creative project and one’s own ideas come to fruition but a collaboration also always means that different people from different backgrounds and communications styles - and different objectives come together.
The other person‘s shoe
Here’s a skill that we all need to learn or improve: being able to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. That applies to business just as much as in our personal lives. As a creative you are there to solve a problem. To be able to solve their problems, you need to get into their heads, behind the scenes and out of your comfort zone. You have to think like them, know their story, know their audience, know their culture. You need to know where the pain is.
There is no point in creating a beautiful film (for a brand) when it does not help fulfill marketing goals.
And btw, if you’re someone working in-house on the company side: no one is interested in your product. Your audience will not connect with your brand, they will connect with other people, with their stories and if your product is part of that story then that is what you want. If it’s the star then you have a conventional commercial. You hired outside creatives for their fresh input and vision and being closer to your audience than you can ever be on the inside.
On a more practical level, beware that a lot of large companies have their in-house creative teams and/or only work with established agencies. To come in and pitch as a one wo/man show or even team will be hard if you do not have connections. It’s also nearly impossible to handle the demands and risks that a big brand job brings with it on your own. There are complex quotes to calculate, hideously long contract to check (and from experience, even lawyers don’t always know what they are doing), insurance to get and you’d definitely need a really flush credit card as often you have to pay some stuff in advance. I once tried organising a road trip across New Caledonia without my own credit card and it was a giant pain.
But if you do find yourself pitching to a brand like this, it helps if you have past experience on either of those sides. It has been my personal advantage over the years that I have spent much time both on the corporate side as well as the agency side. So when a company says they want a video, I know that what they really need is to solve a problem. It could be an image problem, a marketing problem, they may want to launch a product to new audiences, tap into a new market etc. Very rarely do we get lucky and just get to use their budget to bounce around a beautiful place and shoot a beautiful film or even a photo production. Or take their money and run, Casey Neistat style - and it’s safe to assume that that was one of Nike’s most successful campaigns.
Now that your expectations are hopefully suitably low, let’s dream big.
If you do your homework, have networked, sherlocked the heck out of the client of your dreams and actually end up with a foot in the door aka a response, phone call or even meeting or request for a proposal or treatment —what’s next?
Congratulations, you will now not sleep for a few weeks.
There are two key elements to any successful project, no matter who the client is but in particular with big scary brands:
Good communication and transparency.
You want to build trust. I have encountered a lot of in-house people who mistrust literally everyone working for them as if they will somehow be able to rip them off and run away with the company safe.
It will also make the whole process much easier and more enjoyable. And safer. The more you communicate and include the client in the process, the less room for running in the wrong direction is there. Any disagreements or doubts can be dealt with straight away.
The more creative freedom you have, the more responsibility you have resting on your shoulders. I thrive on complete freedom but I have to admit that the burden can be intense. What if you come back with the finished content - let’s say a short film - and the client does not like it? This has only happened to me once and it was an easy fix but can be stressful.
