Producing Branded Content in the New Normal

Learn more about brand storytelling and ciorporate video production at Streaming Media East 2022.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Brett Sappington: From your perspective, what are you seeing in terms of how brands are changing and how they engage with content or how they need content?

Nicole Galowski: I'm on the side of producing content for brands. That's more in line with brand storytelling, and branded content. That's more in that two- to three-minute film. What's interesting--to keep with the better-faster-cheaper thing--is, a few years ago, you were able to lock in a great client for a $250,000, three-minute film. And now, for that same three-minute film, they're like, "But can you do it for $40,000?" And it's a very different thing, as people can do that and will deliver that and have the tools to do so. And a one-person band will go out there and make it happen.

Chris Wagner: But they still want the same high quality as the two-fifty.

Nicole Galowski: Oh yeah, of course. It could never be less quality. So that's one thing that's been a huge shift, in the last five years, because everybody got into that branded content game. People didn't wanna just do the commercial ad and sell the product, but they wanted to sell them as a brand, as a company that believed in something more. What we've really been seeing, too, is this shift to to really high-end content targeted towards their own employees to keep kind their employees there and happy to sell their vision and make sure that their company, especially for big companies, that the employees understand their vision. And so inspiring videos of employees whose lives have changed throughout the company and why they got into the work that they're doing, and things like that.

Linkedin is now a really big place for branded content, which we've seen. And then, I think that during the pandemic, particularly--to go back to the question of how normal is the new normal--a lot of brands became okay with more remote shooting and not having that high-end director on set or being able to be remote for, for those things and produce content that was digital or had that kind of Zoom feel. I think we're burned out on it now, but some Zoom concepts for that filming that happened, especially in those early days, in March and April 2020, and then just really adapting to what was possible in the field and understanding the new parameters that we were under, that were not even in the limited sense. We're not 10-15 person crews; we're a 3-person crew, and what is actually possible and creatively conceptual for that.