Animate your fate: How to increase the success of your strategy with animation

4 minute read

It’s mayhem out there! How can you be seen or heard when we’ve got content, good and bad, assaulting us from every glowing rectangle in the world? Animation Director, Alex Mallinson, explores the ways in which brands are earning adulation for their animation.

In January this year Alex Moulton, Chief Creative Officer of Trollback+Company, in an interview for Design week, said that animation and motion graphics design will play a bigger part than ever in brand strategy to stand out on social channels (thanks to CamCreatives for posting the article!)

As an animator, and an Alex, it’s hard to disagree. Animation has a hotline to our hearts thanks to childhood memories of cartoons. However the market has changed since I wrote my first Sookio blog on using visuals to explain complex subjects and viewers have become more savvy, and harder to engage.

When to animate

Animation is perfect if you need to tackle a subject that is complex, such as a new traffic layout; painful, such as the law surrounding bereavement and inheritance; or a little bit icky, such as a medical procedure. Animation can help, but it has to be the right kind of animation, and not necessarily the most obvious kind.

The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse have energised cinemagoers. Crucially, they’ve stepped off the familiar and reassuring path of Pixar and Sony films to create a whole new visual identity, so they share much more in common with your brand. On TV, Steven Universe has crafted a unique and instantly recognisable visual identity while She-Ra and Carmen Sandiego combines dynamic animation with elegant backgrounds.

Everybody asks "WHERE is Carmen Sandiego?", but nobody asks "WHO is Carmen Sandiego?" The iconic woman in red returns for new international capers and a peek into her past. Featuring Gina Rodriguez as Carmen and Finn Wolfhard as Player, Carmen Sandiego infiltrates Netflix on January 18!

Effectively using animation for your company

How is this relevant to your service or product? Their verve and dynamism are infectious. Their use of distinctive visuals, fast pacing and humour entices us and holds our attention. They are fiercely inclusive too, we all want to be a part of the future, so seeing ourselves, whoever we are, in educational or promotional animation is essential.

Munich-based design studio and YouTube channel Kurzgesagt is absolutely smashing this. Their style is immediately recognisable thanks to their wild colour scheme, wry voice over and the consistent presence of a happy duck. I can watch these until bedtime and then some.

The first 1000 people to use this link will get a 2 month free trial of Skillshare: https://skl.sh/kurzgesagt4 Out in the vast coldness of outer space, there are planets that travel alone through darkness without the boundaries of a system. Here's how this can happen - and why these frozen deserts might secretly harbor alien life.

There’s so much going for animation as a medium - the clarity and sense of fun it can bring to social issues, complex problems and abstract topics in engineering, legal and medical fields makes it an obvious choice.

Animation will stay evergreen long after video

The bad news is that good animation takes both time AND money. But like the eternal optimist I am, let me turn that into good news. Work with a designer and/or animator over time, to fully realise your idea, add humour, the gift of storytelling, great artwork and you’ll get an evergreen piece of work that long outlives video content, and that could potentially drive traffic in the millions to your site, kick-starter or product.

The BBC came to Weare17 with a brief full of interesting facts and circles, for a series of brand vignettes for BBC Knowledge. I was really pleased to be involved from the start right through to final delivery, illustrating and designing motifs and concepts about the earths history and how far we have come as inventors and as the human race in general. The animation was really fun to do. Fast paced, snappy, fluid & rhythmic. It was selected to be part of this years PromaxBDA State of Design session, an international showcase of "the most inspiring motion work from the past year" Hope you Enjoy.

Get your animation to bring in the views

Or it could just sit there, your dazzling content, ticking slowly into double-figures because it didn’t have a distribution strategy. I’ve run into this before, it’s heartbreaking when the work I’ve poured my soul into (and the client their money) languishes on YouTube at 26 views because it wasn’t publicised, lying unloved, like unmined ore.

To get your animation to work for you, it needs to be starting conversations. Blogging, posting, re-posting and sharing across your social channels is the next step. If the animation is good, and fun and all the things I’ve mentioned, then that will help, but a social media strategy gives it that crucial momentum.

The name 'Dinosaur' literally translates as 'Terrible Lizard'. In our world, they really are terrible. In fact they are absolutely useless. Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/user/rathergoodstuff?sub_confirmation=1 Get your epic Dino t-shirts from Amazon here! http://amzn.to/1U4XnW7 All the dinosaurs featured really existed. Dinosaurs: Terrible Lizards is an animated comedy nature documentary in which an unseen narrator guides us through the lost world of these majestic morons.

This ridiculous piece of animation is now on 7 million views thanks to being a unique, friendly vision of dinosaurs, grounded in fact but allowed a bit of poetic license.

We made it to entertain, but the momentum came when it struck a chord with various blogs that we submitted it to, and other blogs picked it up, and before long, we had a hit on our hands. That’s the power of word-of-mouth.

But it needs to be worth talking about, so when you turn your attention to your advertising strategy, make your animation the star, propel it into orbit, and it’ll light up your feed for years.

Animation at Sookio

For more animation tips like animating your ads or using animation to explain complex concepts then why not read our previous blogs on the subject.

Get in touch and contact Sookio to see how we can propel your content into orbit with an animated ACME rocket!