The Mood Film
These days clients, particularly big clients, like a mood film.
I’m sure you have all come across them, but for the uninitiated they usually consistent a bunch of stock footage edited together with titles or a voiceover in such a way that a client or their new campaign/positioning is somehow encapsulated for easy digestion and a nice warm feeling in Mr Client’s tummy.
They tend to be loved by clients for five reasons:
1. They are cheap.
2. You can screw around with them forever. A film with no narrative that is composed of lots of interchangeable bits of film and V/O is there to be pulled apart and rearranged until absolutely everyone involved is happy. Or at least not sad.
3. They are usually two minutes of ‘stirring’ guff about one thing only: the wondrousness of the client.
4. They spoon feed those stricken with even the lowest IQ so no one can fail to understand them.
5. They are cheap.
So you make one of these puppies and the client fucking loves it for the reasons mentioned above, then the bad thing happens: the client loves it just a little too much. They want to run it on TV as your ad (for the reasons mentioned above). When faced with a budget of £500,000 and a delay of three months to make the real thing, some of them reasonably ask the question: ‘why don’t we just run this one that we all love that won’t cost us a bean?’
Hmmm…
That’s a tricky question to answer. After all, they can be good, like this one for AOL.
Then again, they can be…um…less good, like this one for Renault:
Or this one from BMW:
The good/bad news in these straitened times of client arselicking and no money is that they are here to stay.
How you persuade your client not to run one (if you are so inclined) is up to you.