Commercials are Dead
Those of you that know me well know that in many ways I built my career off TV commercials.
Joining SNHU in 2011, I was quickly promoted into a role where I got to concept, write, art direct, and produce the university’s national advertising campaigns.
This included coming up with the idea for SNHU’s 2013 “See Yourself Succeed” cross-country bus tour campaign, a project that saw me spend nearly two months traveling the backroads of America in a branded tour bus.
But over the course of my time at SNHU, we kept running into a problem:
As great as the commercials were, our increasingly digital-focused marketing efforts meant our in-house marketing team increasingly needed more than just a 30-second TV ad.
From display advertising to paid social, search, streaming, and web, we were finding ourselves facing a reality that…
Digital-First Marketing Requires Dramatically More Creative Assets
But making that happen can be a lot harder than you might think.
We started out trying to cut up our commercials into smaller chunks, relying on high resolution screengrabs for digital ads, and basically decoupling our TV content however we could.
But decoupling a commercial isn’t a strategy, it’s a last-minute solution.
And even when we ensured we had a photographer on every shoot, we still were only capturing the “set ups” (locations + talent) related to what we needed for the commercials themselves. Meaning - for example - that if a nursing student wasn’t needed for TV, we didn’t end up capturing any assets to support that program at all.
Production after production, we just couldn’t escape the reality that relying solely on TV commercial shoots for creative content was figuratively shooting ourselves in the foot.
Introducing Content Library Productions
It wasn’t until years later that I came to the realization that the problem was that we shouldn’t be doing commercial productions at all. We should be producing content libraries.
On that realization, I made a change. And moving forward, rather than setting out to film a commercial, we’d set out to film everything we needed for an entire year.
By mapping out the core offerings of our business, and aligning that with the platforms, channels, strategies, and tactics used to promote them, we’d create a content matrix that captured all the content we anticipated needing over the course of an upcoming year.
Depending on the partner, this often still meant traditional TV commercials, but now it also included everything else they might need, such as updated photography and digital ad assets for all digital channels used to support their marketing efforts.
The result?
Where in the past a 3-to-4-day shoot might produce a single 30-second spot, now we were capturing that 30-second spot plus thousands of high quality, high resolution images; as well as dozens of hours of usable video content, which could be cut and recut to meet the needs of marketing as the year progressed.
Long Live Content Libraries
So while commercials may not truly be dead, I’d argue TV commercial production should be.
Because if you are going to invest the time – and money – needed to gather the right talent to tell the right stories to truly elevate your brand, you better make sure you are doing everything you can to capture everything you need.
For me, the transition from TV production to content library production has literally represented a 10x multiplier in value. And we’re never looking back.
So the next time you’re gearing up to produce a new commercial for your organization, I’d encourage you to stop and ask yourself:
Should We Be Producing a Commercial? Or Perhaps a Content Library?
About the Author
Seth is the founder and CEO of Kanahoma, a San Diego-based performance marketing agency on a mission to build a better agency for organizations building a better world.
You can learn more about who we are and what we do at www.Kanahoma.com.