How animation can make your commercial look tougher and more profitable

Before launching your own commercial, have you ever monitored your reaction to diverse ads you’ve encountered on social media, TV, or websites? What have you skipped, and what did you enjoy so much that you’ve watched it till the end?

And visited the website even if it was commercial for steel or concrete? If you try to recall such cases, you’ll probably notice that most clinging commercials are animated commercials. Let’s figure out why!

What do you see in average, so to speak, “normal” commercials? Mainly successful success (yeah, we got it, let’s just skip it), often flat stories, not enough cinematic too and I can go on.

High-quality commercial videos are rare nowadays, despite the quick technological advancement. And the main reason for that – is financial resources. It’s easy to notice how cool the commercials of big companies, such as Coca-Cola, Mercedes, and fashion brands are. They are just like short movies with fantastic graphics, special effects, plot, and cast!

Who wouldn’t love the commercial with Harry Styles or Scarlett Johansson, or Iggy Pop?! But still – not every company, start-up, or small business can afford this. And here’s where an animated commercial as a fairy godmother comes to the rescue. A good animation even with a low budget will catch the eye of your future client, who (I’m sure) already got bored of commonest ads. 

I’m not gonna lie – animated commercials have gotten increasingly popular, and have become lately a fast-growing branch. But don’t let yourself scare too easily: there are still plenty of possibilities, and potential in creating impressive animation, which will be suitable precisely for you.

As always we took a careful professional look at the market and current trends, and can’t wait to share it with you!

How has animation become such a powerful tool of influence?

You remember watching cartoons as a child, right? Back then it seemed to be an entertainment: funny characters, simple stories, something that could distract children, while parents are busy. Who would suppose that a few years later we will see animation everywhere – from big screens to some details on websites. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

The popularity of animated videos in the branch of advertising is actively growing. So why has happened that animation became such a powerful and common tool for commercials? Let’s try to explain this trend.

Reason 1: Animation advertising is great for explaining all kinds of concepts and ideas. Combining simple and clear visual forms with sound (or in addition using a narrator), you can interestingly explain a really complex topic. It’s like a popular now static infographic, but it’s moving, and you don’t have to dig for information by yourself – the video explains you!

The customer needs a minimum of time to read and understand the main idea. Its simplicity and clarity serve as an effective marketing tool. By creating animations based on infographics, the effectiveness of advertising can be significantly increased.

Disney meant that animation offers a medium of storytelling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world. 

Reason 2: Animation has no restrictions. An animated character can perform any action in the frame, in particular, difficult or impossible to perform as a real actor, and by the way, you don’t have to pay a character for that. So, the quality of advertising depends only on the creative and professional skills of its creator. 

Reason 3: Animated advertising is much cheaper than professional video production. It requires a least a few real actors, a set location, a film crew, appropriate equipment, editing, and post-processing. While for creating the simplest animation you’ll need only a medium-power computer with a special program.

Reason 4: Animation is perceived more as “entertaining” content – bright pictures, characters, and imagery. It attracts attention, increases the time of watching a commercial and is better remembered. 

Animation is crucial if you want to appeal to the nostalgia of the audience, attract people’s attention, and appeal to warm memories of the past, whereas a child watched cartoons. A well-made animated video is not like a commercial: it seems like an interesting and compelling story about a certain person or phenomenon that the audience may relate to in some way.

Everything in the modern world is developing and growing fast. It teaches us that if you want to succeed, you better be rushing right now. Your future customer might not wait, so you got to let him know about you, and your product asap. And here comes the animation, which helps you by launching the product without throwing lots of cash into advertising.

Seth MacFarlane has made a really good point by saying that the success of The Simpsons really opened doors. It showed that if you were working in animation you didn’t necessarily have to be working in kids’ television.

Why does animation remain in demand, despite the existence of videos?

English sociologists, studying the memorization of advertising information through the main channels conclude conclusion about the practical equality of visual and auditory components of perception.

Participants in the organized experiment were able to memorize and reproduce 70% of the information presented in the advertisement through the audio channel, and 72% – through the visual. Importantly, the simultaneous combination of visual and audio series proved to be the most effective, showing the best result – 86%.

In 2D video commercials, the animation is used almost everywhere in one form or another: from its simplest representation today (such as the animation of the appearance and disappearance of inscriptions or brand logos) to full-fledged video commercials with well-thought-out plot and staging. It is clear that to create the first type of animation, which is only a small element of the material, the advertiser needs to spend much less money.

Expensive commercial videos that we all see on Youtube and television are usually cool: large-scale scenes, many actors, 3D graphics, and special effects just like by Michael Bay. 

But what to do, if your budget is not as large, as Coca-Cola’s or Unilever’s, and you want to start an advertising campaign with video advertising, and save on quality is not an option. The animated commercials would be a great solution if you are starting to advertise yourself for the first time, but it all also depends on the specifics of your products and the goals of the advertising campaign.

Nowadays, you need to be in constant contact with the user. So that you don’t forget about your business tomorrow, you need to constantly broadcast yourself, talk to your audience, and solve people’s problems.

How can you use animation in your business?

The undoubted advantage of animation is based on flexibility and diversity. There is always a good decision for your idea, no matter what product or budget you have got.

Walt Disney once said: Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive.

And it is so! For instance, one of the most popular inquiries that customers ask is an explainer video. This trend appeared a few years ago, replacing articles and boring letters. Explainer videos clearly show where to click or what the company’s project is about. Animation is often used for such videos because ordinary videos cannot show what does not yet physically exist.

With animated video, you can basically show anything you want and need – space, micro details, different places, and the most important – future! It means not just metaphorically that animated videos will become the main trend in advertising, but that you actually are able to show the client how your product or service will look once they buy it.

You can show them how they will feel about that – happy, pleased, and delighted. NGOs also prefer animation due to the dimension of such organizations touching global issues that affect the entire planet.

To shoot such videos on camera, you would need a large team and send them on a business trip to different countries. Animation, on the other hand, allows you to solve this problem in a much shorter time, saving clients thousands of dollars Another advantage of animation became apparent during the pandemic.

Animated videos can be made by a team located in different parts of the world. And this team doesn’t have to be big. For instance, a regular commercial would require 30-40 people on the site. Instead, an animated video could be made by three people or even by one person (who must be a genius, but who knows, maybe you’ll find yours). The team could be working from the office, but also stay at home as well – the working process wouldn’t be interrupted.

What else could be animated? EVERYTHING!

Presentation of a new product; loyalty program; educational material; instructions; voluminous research. There always will be a solution for your case. So, let’s say, we already convinced you to arrange an animated video for your commercial.

What’s next? Don’t forget that there is a lot of creative work around, so we collected for you a few ideas which may help you to get a better picture of your future commercial, and what it might look like.

Glitch effect. Create a broken image with the addition of noise. Such effects were popular last year and still remain in trend. 

Hyperminimalism. An example of this trend is Google’s visual language. It is very simple and consists of geometric shapes: line, point, triangle, and circle. Using the right frame composition and animation, even such simple figures can demonstrate a variety of situations, emotions, and decisions.

Mixed media. Combination of 2D illustrations and collages. For example, you can crop photos of people or objects, throw them behind, and mix them up.

Resource: Pinterest

Cyberpunk. It’s a specific dark atmosphere, neon light, and a bunch of computers and interfaces. Resource: wccftech

Diversity. Now there is a constant demand for diversity among customers, especially international companies. Characters should be tall, short, old, young, gay, straight, women and men, someone with glasses, someone in a wheelchair, and all skin colors. Animation makes it very easy to satisfy this demand for variety. Whereas there would be difficulties with casting.

You can choose everything about your character and the world he lives in. Isn’t it great?! In the daily flow of news and advertising content that pours in on us from all channels, the brain uses a defense mechanism, blocking “unnecessary” information and showing what you like. In 2D animation, the artist needs to draw each frame, but it looks more vivid and cartoonish.

Many brands use the pencil technique of frame animation – it looks concise and atmospheric. Red Bull went further and patented a new technique of “shaking line” – Squigglevision.

Final thought

Don’t hesitate to hire a young indie-artist! You can often meet artists who will draw you a cartoon yourself, without company. In addition, there is now a trend toward ugly – something scary and incomprehensible, but exciting.

New, fresh, terribly cool indie artists are emerging to create such interesting content. And they are starting to break into animation because brands see their work and want to do something similar to themselves.