When I Dance, I Look Like A Tube Man Balloon 🎈
There are a million ways to re-envision brand storytelling, as YouTube, Facebook Live, and Instagram stories drive our social engagement.
With the trends in recent years of social networks, the marketing experts are encouraging brands to combine ➕ narrative with social video features.
According to Cisco’s annual Visual Network Index (VNI) forecast, 82 percent of Internet traffic will be video in four years. We are watching videos more than we are doing anything else as video marketing drives purchase behaviour and creates strong 💪 customer engagement. Video and other creative marketing ideas 💡 are being embraced by brands whose products benefit most from visual engagement.
Brands as different as Kenzo (designer fashion) and Under Armour (fitness apparel) have made use of dancers 💃🕺 in one recent campaign because dance can tell a story and carry a message across platforms. “Dance is so much more than entertainment. It makes you think 🤔, it provokes something in you, and I think that is what a designer wants to do - they want to provoke a thought 💭, to make you feel something through what they are wearing,” explains dance choreographer, Jermaine Browne, in a recent Business of Fashion article.
Make Sure Your Visual 👁 Storytelling Translates Across Platforms
In 2016, fashion house, Kenzo, hired Oscar-winning indie-film director, Spike Jonze, to direct a short film 🎥 to announce the launch of perfume, Kenzo World. Jonze chose classically trained ballet 🩰 dancer and Leftovers actress, Margaret Qualley, as the star. Poking fun at the usual melodrama of perfume ads, it ushers in a new era of visual collaboration. As a result, a four-minute short that owes more to music video and avant-garde dance than to a fashion shoot - My Mutant Brain.
Choreographed by Ryan Heffington, the performance alone is surprising, fun, and exciting 😆 to watch. Evoking both empowerment and whimsy, the video features a woman (Qualley) attending a formal awards ceremony who loses interest and ventures out into the foyer of LA’s modernist Dorothy Chandler Pavilion music hall, where she proceeds to dance as if she has been embodied by a spirit - part animal and part human.
It was a smart move by Kenzo to bring together so many arts, culture, film, and fashion touch points 📌. It was not simply about the product. The commercial created a cultural moment as shareable for its performance as for its content - an attractive woman quite literally breaking out of a common fashion trope. However, it is the collaborative 🤝 aspect of the creation of the video and its message that helped it gain traction across the many digital platforms - from video to an interactive brand website to social media shares 🗣.
It is a brilliant multiplatform content marketing strategy, and the story of the video’s creation received coverage in Indiewire, Vogue, the Guardian, and AdWeek. Within a day of the campaign launching, the Kenzo World spot had over one million views 👀 on Kenzo’s YouTube channel, over 50,000 people had mentioned it on Facebook, and on Twitter, the hashtag #KenzoWorld had 277,000 followers and 448 tweets. Watch it here 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Qrv4Rg8Gs
Create a Cultural Conversation 💬
As Nike and Adidas have proven time and again, fitness brands and short films involving athletes are a match made in heaven. Under Armour struggled to connect 🔗 to the female market, so their brand storytelling centered around starting a conversation and changing minds 🧠.
The decision to launch the campaign with a one-minute video of Copeland, the least well-known of the athletes - paid 💰 off handsomely. Not only does the video feature her stunning physique, it features her dancing, really dancing with close-ups of her calf muscles 🦵, her shoulders, and back-all straining to achieve (and, of course, wearing Under Armour).
The powerful voice-over inspired by rejections based on her body type played while she danced, and starting a conversation about changing perceptions by actually doing so in their own campaign is very different from merely making a statement. The “conversation” that the I Will What I Want campaign started was a story about female strength, athleticism, and perseverance 👊 in the face of adversity.
Within the first week, the one-minute ad featuring Copeland went viral 🦠 on YouTube with four million views. The campaign included TV 📺, print, and digital, as well as scheduled appearances on network TV, where Copeland performed. What looked like an organic cultural moment was in fact a brand story designed to start a conversation and be shared. Watch it here 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeTyNnALV4c
Images Should Move 👋 with Your Message
The huge success of I Will What I Want led to Unlike Any campaign, which featured a group of rebellious female athletes: Zoe Zhang (actress and taekwondo black belt), Jessie Graff (professional stunt woman), Alison Desir (Harlem Run founder), and Natasha Hastings (track and field Olympian).
The campaign includes short films on each athlete as well as print and digital media and over 100 unique assets for social media to highlight the products. With nearly three million views 👀 on YouTube, the message continues to resonate. Just a glimpse of the poses Copeland strikes in the still shots-part ballet, part Cirque du Soleil - underscores both the message and the unspoken idea that you can literally do anything in this athletic wear. Using a combination of poetry and movement, the Unlike Any campaign depends on our ability to watch anything for a minute, and to share it.
The messaging of both campaigns is powerful - you may not belong, you will face adversity, yet you will triumph. What makes the one-minute dance spot so powerful is how it connects to athleticism and the brand, Under Armour. Watch it here 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YVjaJhu8Vs
As brands evolve beyond simple interrupt advertising, AK47™ believes that visual brand storytelling, like dance, engages an audience across many channels. While we understand the punishing physical and mental stamina it takes to be a professional dancer, there is an undeniable beauty in watching the precision of movement whether in a video or an image captured in an Instagram square. Most importantly, brands are not simply creating videos because it is all the rage. The message and content suits the format. There is a reason fashion and fitness brands are drawn 🧲 to the athleticism and beauty of dance in their campaigns - it is versatile, it speaks to perseverance of mind and body, it is entertaining, and it is definitely eye-catching 🤩😎.
Reference:
O'Neill, S. 2018, February 19. The Emotional and Visual Power of Dance in Brand Storytelling. Skyword.
