Why Storyboarding Matters
When you have between 20-30 seconds to get your message across to your audience, every single second counts. Not only that, you need to make sure the first 5 seconds really, really count if you are running ads on YouTube/Facebook (more on that in a future article).
Storyboarding is driven by strategy.
What's our strategy here? Big picture: we want the word "home" and 'Old Dominion Realty" to have a strong association. That's the 30,000-foot-view. in 2019, we created three, 30-second TV spots from the perspective of three different key demographics explaining to the audience what 'home' meant to them: Family, Neighbors, and Farmers. In 2020, we are doing a deeper dive into Family and having key members of each family tell their story. We are moving beyond the philosophical 'home means' and deeper into 'home is where'. The first two spots are from the perspective of a young married couple and a 9-year-old, connecting key moments we all experience in our homes depending on where we're at in the stations of our lives.
Let's take a look at both of these 2020 ads and dissect them from a both a creative and strategic perspective.
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SpAsMbuaE8&w=854&h=480]
Creative: Why still images instead of motion?
TDC's backbone is photo/video production, so why did we choose still-images for a TV campaign? Isn't that different than everything else on TV? Exactly.
Different can be an important tactic when cutting through to the viewers' attention on a noisy platform like TV. Still images work well because life in pause has a certain characteristic to it that's different than life in motion. Also, still images can stand on their own for other print/digital advertising efforts, so there are a multitude of potential uses for these images in the next 12-18 months (or beyond) that goes past a single TV ad.
I won't bore you with the rough drafts, the pre-production meetings with the subjects to ensure authenticity, the music selection/licensing process, or the post-production/editing. There's a lot of work that goes into making a 30-second TV spot, and all of that effort can flat without a solid strategy-based storyboard.
