Corporate videos are sometimes caught under fire for their questionable truths. Just how honest should your campaign be?
In marketing, there is a fine moral line between an honest ad and a deceitful one.
We’ve seen it before; mass billboards implying certain truths that we no longer think twice about anymore. We assume that what we’re being told is correct, because, well, it must be if it’s on TV, right?
We’ve moved out of the late-night infomercial age and onto mass billboards. Heck, we consume everything on a mass level. Mass followings. Mass amount of tweets, shares, likes, and comments. Massive-sized TVs. Massive iMacs.
We live in an age where the bigger is better, though often times it’s unnecessary. We’re told we need to go big or go home, and that we constantly need more. Ironically, this makes us live less.
What we lack is the ability to be honest.
Honest in our campaigns, intentions, our integrity and with ourselves. We tell audiences what we think they need to hear, instead of choosing to let them actively come to their own conclusions. Our consumerist culture urges customers to buy rather than to think, and we create the narrative.
Steven Presserfield, author of The War of Art, once said, “I once worked as a writer for a big New York ad agency. Our boss used to tell us: ‘Invent a disease. Come up with the disease,’ he said, ‘and we can sell the cure.'”
Marketing is less about informing the public of alternative solutions or possible side effects as it is about differentiating one brand from another or highlighting exaggerated benefits.
But now? Brands are beginning to see the benefits of coming clean with audiences. And we appreciate them for it. Audiences now are more brilliant than ever, and with so much agency in what to wear, eat, consume (and how we can do it), brands often find themselves asking how they can aid in doing what we want, and not the other way around. Chevy recently tapped into this model with its car commercial:
Because no one is that happy.
So how honest will your company’s video campaign be?
Here at Key West Video, we work with clients to create the best corporate videos. For more information on the services we provide, visit our website today!
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