How To... Craft Content for the Small Screen

How much time do we spend on our mobile phones? Unsurprisingly, it's a lot. We spend almost 3 hours scrolling through some 178m of content every day. That’s about 86 hours – or 5km – of rigorous thumb exercise every month. 

That's an intimidating amount of content to compete with. At least with a Shoreditch billboard you have fixed, independent space to beam your message to the masses. But on an Instagram feed or Snapchat Story, messages can get lost in an endless stream of vibrant imagery. How can you get your viewer to pause, consider, and pursue your advertisement? 

Take a 'premium social' approach

Traditional practices don't cut it anymore. Like a diamond under pressure, $500,000 television adverts have become bite-sized online haikus. Brands deliver expansive ideas in miniscule time frames. You need to break the mould if you want to generate content for a vastly altered digital landscape. You need to get integrated. 

At The Operators, we've coined the term 'premium social' to describe this emerging production style. Premium social means delivering high-end, high-volume, highly customisable images and video developed specifically for social media. This is an overarching, holistic approach that, from the outset, considers all end requirements and possible outputs.

It’s all about an integrated mindset, or at the very least a diverse team. Creatives must combine every discipline, every approach, every experience to create something that doesn’t just look good, but is delivered efficiently and within budget. In addition, you can incorporate traditional elements into your social media campaign – publish articles, TV commercials, host podcasts, and much more.

Today’s huge surplus of content must allow for this flexibility. When the curve balls come, do you want to perform an expensive reshoot? Or do you want to have that content ready, already captured in such a way to allow for immediate editing? That’s the real crux of the matter.

Manipulating a multimedia landscape

But Premium Social is about more than the end product. Indeed, how you get to that end product is just as important. 

Working in social media, you must view the inherent restrictions of each channel and format as a benefit, rather than an inflexible limitation. Don't feel reigned in by the five second YouTube skip or Twitter’s megabyte limit. Use everything you have learned over the years – and find something that works. 

For example; Heineken’s Wild Lager campaign. Our team at The Operators was brought in to create a custom visual toolkit, enabling CG scene customisation across a range of social platforms and local markets. Production led us on a short, three-day studio shoot. But the result was over 30 unique films tailored to different audiences.

Creating for social media isn't like creating for a television advert where the format is set. "Social media" means Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and beyond. It means last-minute requests for a new format, or a new framing, or a new image ratio.

To top it all off, social media is a continually changing landscape. Regular updates to algorithms mean that mobile content remains in constant flux. You must enable your content to change with it. Marketers need to think about formats from day one. From Instagram, to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and beyond; if you're making social content, you need to plan ahead.

Small-screen TV is here to stay

Mobile is fuelling the growth of a new type of  social TV. Audiences all over the world tune into their favourite YouTube videos on a whim, or grab animated gifs on the go. Although faced with tighter production budgets, brands continue to pour money into this ever-evolving channel, which continues to redefine itself on an almost monthly basis. 

If an asset is not up to high-quality broadcast standards, than a high profile brand is not going to accept it. In a recent project for Costa, we got to work building an hourglass that contained the exact amount of coffee beans to trickle out in one minute. The shape, texture and lighting of each tiny, individual coffee bean had to be completely photorealistic. 

Brands want achieve true broadcast quality, no matter where their imagery is hosted – whether that campaign is launched across the small, big or silver screens. 

If you're going to create for this new Wild West of digital advertising, you need to adapt your processes. You must find a new way to create that combines quality, flexibility, and process.