Animation in Video Marketing

Animated videos are a hit for marketers. More brands are turning to animation for their video marketing. And while part of that shift stems from pandemic-related restrictions and precautions, brands also recognize the numerous advantages that animation and motion graphics have to offer.

Benefits of Animation

Increase your storytelling depth

In those moments when it becomes difficult to physically shoot your marketing concepts, animation can become a worthy substitute that allows your team to tell more complex stories without the expensive footage. It allows you to tie complex brands, businesses, and associations together using interesting or fun graphics that can help keep your audience engaged while delivering your brand’s message.

A social media-plus

Animation-style videos are also well suited for social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook. This is because it’s easy to adapt an animated style video to create different variants for different social media channels, and because they can be designed to catch a viewer’s attention while scrolling through their social feeds. 

Use of text on screen to tell the story also helps with many social platforms that are primarily viewed with the sound off. 

The diversity equation simplified

Getting the gender and diversity equation right in your brand videos is also easy to achieve without the talent recruitment and auditions needed for a live action video shoot. Animation simplifies the process, and helps ensure your video reflects the diverse audience you are catering to. Diversity is a hot topic, and is increasing in importance for all brands not just global multinationals. For example, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, in collaboration with friends from Google and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, published a report indicating that calls for improved gender representation in advertising are slowly coming to fruition and are showing results. 

Screen time by gender between January 2015 and March 2019 reveal that male characters were seen more often (56% male versus 44% female) globally in all videos — all verticals and all markets. The report analyzed more than 2.7 million YouTube videos from advertisers and accounted for the number of times they were viewed over the last five years, according to the research. Ensuring you remain ahead of the times, rather than behind, may be key to your audience engagement and for your brand. 

Marketers also need to integrate people from a broader mix of ethnic and cultural backgrounds: Black, Asian, Indian, Indigenous Peoples, and more, to ensure they are able to properly tell their story in a representative way to their target audience. 

Compliance & adjustments are easy

Animation also allows for brand compliance to be met when using brand colours, fonts and treatments. Animation style videos can also help simplify your overall messaging and keep your audience entertained. It’s easier to update or refresh the colours, icons, and messaging in a video, than it is to re-hire actors, props, or book sets for re-shoots. It’s a simple solution to a logistical headache. Animation also provides an opportunity to storyboard the project in advance and ensure the final product meets the demands of the client. 

The opportunities and benefits of using animation in your marketing video are broad. The pandemic has forced many brands to turn to animation by necessity, but now that consumers are more used to brands telling their stories this way, we expect animation style videos to only grow in popularity in the coming months and years.

Contact our team to learn more about our animated video content and to see what we can do for you!


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