Why Most Brand Films Feel Like Ads (And How to Fix the Brief)

The Brief Starts With the Brand Instead of the Audience

Most brand-film briefs begin with information the company wants to communicate. Product. Purpose. Features. Market position. Campaign message. The creative team is then asked to turn those ingredients into a film people will care about. That order is backwards. A film does not become interesting because a brand has many things to say. It becomes interesting because someone on screen has something worth experiencing, losing, discovering or changing.

1 Look at the strongest branded films and the product is often not the first thing you remember. Google’s Year in Search films are built around human events and emotion before they become statements about Google. Nike’s strongest storytelling rarely begins with a product specification. The brand enters through the meaning of the story. That is the distinction a brief needs to establish before a filmmaker writes a single scene.

If the first page of the brief contains five paragraphs about the company and one sentence about the audience, the film already has a problem.

You’re Asking the Film to Prove Too Many Things

A common brand brief wants awareness, consideration, differentiation, product education, emotional connection, social engagement, cultural relevance and conversion. Sometimes all before the two-minute mark.

The result is predictable. Every department gets a sentence. Every sentence becomes a visual. Every visual needs screen time. The film becomes a meeting where nobody was willing to leave their point behind.

A useful brief makes a choice about what the audience should remember after the film ends. Not six things. One central shift. Maybe the audience sees the brand as more human. Maybe they understand a problem differently. Maybe they recognise themselves in the story. Everything else can support that shift, but it should not compete with it.

The filmmaker’s job is not to squeeze every business objective into the runtime. It is to find the one human idea capable of carrying the business objective without announcing it every thirty seconds.

The Product Should Enter the Story, Not Interrupt It

There is a particular moment in many brand films when the story stops behaving like a story.

The characters have been moving naturally. Something has been building. Then the product appears in perfect light, usually accompanied by a line explaining exactly why it matters. The emotional contract with the audience has been broken. We have gone from watching a story to watching a presentation.

That does not mean products should be hidden. The opposite is often true. The product should be present when it has a reason to be present. Apple’s Shot on iPhone work is a useful example of this principle. The camera is central, but the audience experiences what the camera makes possible rather than sitting through a demonstration of its specifications.

2 The brief should therefore ask a better question: What can only happen because this product, service or brand exists?

That question creates scenes.

“Show the product’s new feature” creates a product shot.

Stop Writing the Message Before Finding the Story

Creative teams are often handed a finished message and asked to make it emotional.

That sounds reasonable until you try to write the film. “We believe everyone deserves better access to technology” may be a perfectly good brand belief. It is not a story. It has no character, no pressure, no decision and no consequence. It tells the filmmaker what the company believes without revealing what the audience gets to experience.

A story needs someone who wants something.

That person needs a reason they cannot simply have it. Something has to get in the way. A choice has to become uncomfortable. Something changes by the end. The brand can then become part of that change.

This is where the brief becomes useful to a filmmaker. Instead of dictating the final sentence, it defines the human territory in which the filmmaker can discover it.

If the brief says, “Make people understand our commitment to sustainability,” the creative team has to invent the story and the strategy at the same time. If it says, “Show the moment when a family realises that wasting less can change how they live together,” there is something to direct.

The Best Briefs Leave Room for the Filmmaker

A brief should create boundaries without building the entire film before the filmmaker arrives.

This is where many brand teams become nervous. They want to protect the message, so they start prescribing the opening shot, the dialogue, the product appearance, the music, the final line and the emotional beat. By the time the filmmaker receives the brief, there is almost nothing left to discover.

Control feels safe. It is rarely creative.

3 The better approach is to be extremely clear about what cannot move and deliberately open about what can. The brand truth should be firm. The audience should be specific. The emotional territory should be clear. The business objective should be understood. But the story, visual language and route into the idea should have room to breathe.

The filmmaker should receive a problem worth solving, not a finished film disguised as a brief.

Rewrite the Brief Around a Human Tension

Before commissioning a treatment, strip the brief back to a few questions.

Who is this film actually for?

What do they currently believe, feel or do?

What do we want to change?

Why should they care?

What can our brand credibly contribute to that change?

The fifth question is where many briefs become honest. If the brand cannot naturally belong inside the story, forcing it into the final scene will not solve the problem. The audience can usually feel the difference between a brand that belongs in a story and a brand that has been invited because the media plan requires its logo.

A good brand film does not hide the brand. It gives the brand a role.

That role might be the enabler, the witness, the challenger, the tool, the community or even the reason the story can happen. Once that role is clear, the creative team has something much more valuable than a list of mandatory shots.

They have a dramatic problem.

And dramatic problems make better films than marketing instructions.