Brand anniversaries can be a powerful hook to grow your business and communicate about the future of your organization. When brands celebrate an anniversary, it’s a significant opportunity to not only look back but to look forward.
We help clients get media coverage of anniversary celebrations using video and help them understand the best practices for implementing this medium into their anniversary planning. Before starting, there are three key things all brands should consider:
1. Aligning Your Campaign Strategies
One of the most common mistakes is to first develop a campaign strategy and then assess how video can be used to achieve your goals. How you create and share content and engage key constituencies has to become a part of your overall strategy. If the campaign strategy is developed in a separate silo leading to multiple RFPs, you’ll often miss out on opportunities as well as limit the potential value of video to the overall campaign.
The most effective strategies leverage the anniversary to inform key constituencies of where you’re headed as an organization. An anniversary is also a fantastic platform to raise the influence of your key leaders, such as your CEO and heads of different divisions and locations.
Another important element of the strategy is knowing how to communicate with your internal audiences and engaging them in the process, as well as how to reach key target audiences and the media.
As part of your strategy, you’re going to want a consistent theme. Silos have been broken down, so it’s harder than ever to tell different stories to different audiences. Make sure everything is part of the larger whole in terms of graphics, style, music and messaging.
2. Determining The Types Of Videos You Want To Create
There are many types of video to consider, including:
• Anchor Piece/Brand Documentary: Though often larger endeavors, these can be tailor-made for the anniversary and shown at events throughout the campaign. Because archival material will play such an important role here, I’d suggest collecting these materials and securing rights early.
• Content For Media: Anniversaries make news. You’ll want to create content to maximize your reach and to help control the messaging. Many brand anniversaries are global events now, and it’s less costly than ever to create international broadcasts that transmit content live from multiple locations around the world. Additionally, this content can be distributed through multiple social channels and provided to broadcast outlets globally to maximize coverage. Video content for media might include b-roll of big events, live broadcasts and satellite media tours.
• Thought Leadership: If available, include footage of panel discussions involving your key leaders addressing critical issues affecting your industry or how your industry will interact with public good going forward. Thought leadership videos are an opportunity to feature prospects, partners and employees building relationships and show appreciation for the people who are making a difference with their hard work.
• Campaign Retrospective: For a campaign retrospective video, you’ll want to capture behind-the-scenes footage of major events. This can be shared on internal and social media channels and combined into a post-anniversary video to create a historical record to share with audiences in the future.
Other categories to consider are commercials and third-party-generated content that can be taken from partners, employees or consumers.
3. Maximizing Your Resources
At the start of planning, put your campaign leader in place. If you choose to hire an external resource, like an agency, for this work, it’s critical that you identify your lead internal resource and find an external consultant that’s experienced outside of the scope of your team’s capabilities.
If an external resource tells you they can handle all aspects of your video needs for your anniversary campaign, don’t hire them. If your internal video leader expresses similar bravado, consider reassigning them. The reality is it’s going to take a team effort to deliver the results you’ll need. It’s also imperative that your internal teams are kept up to date on the progress of the anniversary campaign.
Internal resources need to be involved, but you also need to take a realistic look at what they are capable of accomplishing. Do they specialize in content for news? Are they strongest with internal messaging? Are they excellent writers and producers? Are they best when they’re executing others’ plans or coming up with full strategies themselves? Perhaps they can cover social media content but will need to be supplemented for a brand documentary, for example.
These are the questions that need to be weighed when considering outside help. It makes sense to look toward partners you’re working with for fresh input and creativity. Interview a number of people and find those who are willing to provide guidance for the overall plan without having a significant impact on the budget. They can work with your players internally to provide a reality check to the likely effectiveness of each part of the plan.
A key factor when bringing outside resources on board is their willingness to work with internal resources. It’s often telling if they refuse to engage with your people and need to go their own way. For the anniversary celebration, it’s going to take an extensive team. You want to make sure everyone will work and play well together for the best results.
By integrating your teams while aligning campaign strategies early in the effort, you’ll be able to create multiple purpose-driven videos to achieve your goals.
