It’s mayhem out there! How can you be seen or heard when we’ve got content, good and bad, assaulting us from every glowing rectangle in the world? Animation Director, Alex Mallinson, explores the ways in which brands are earning adulation for their animation.

In January this year Alex Moulton, Chief Creative Officer of Trollback+Company, in an interview for Design week, said that animation and motion graphics design will play a bigger part than ever in brand strategy to stand out on social channels (thanks to CamCreatives for posting the article!)

As an animator, and an Alex, it’s hard to disagree. Animation has a hotline to our hearts thanks to childhood memories of cartoons. However the market has changed since I wrote my first Sookio blog on using visuals to explain complex subjects and viewers have become more savvy, and harder to engage.

When to animate

Animation is perfect if you need to tackle a subject that is complex, such as a new traffic layout; painful, such as the law surrounding bereavement and inheritance; or a little bit icky, such as a medical procedure. Animation can help, but it has to be the right kind of animation, and not necessarily the most obvious kind.

The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse have energised cinemagoers. Crucially, they’ve stepped off the familiar and reassuring path of Pixar and Sony films to create a whole new visual identity, so they share much more in common with your brand. On TV, Steven Universe has crafted a unique and instantly recognisable visual identity while She-Ra and Carmen Sandiego combines dynamic animation with elegant backgrounds.

Effectively using animation for your company

How is this relevant to your service or product? Their verve and dynamism are infectious. Their use of distinctive visuals, fast pacing and humour entices us and holds our attention. They are fiercely inclusive too, we all want to be a part of the future, so seeing ourselves, whoever we are, in educational or promotional animation is essential.

Munich-based design studio and YouTube channel Kurzgesagt is absolutely smashing this. Their style is immediately recognisable thanks to their wild colour scheme, wry voice over and the consistent presence of a happy duck. I can watch these until bedtime and then some.

There’s so much going for animation as a medium - the clarity and sense of fun it can bring to social issues, complex problems and abstract topics in engineering, legal and medical fields makes it an obvious choice.

Animation will stay evergreen long after video

The bad news is that good animation takes both time AND money. But like the eternal optimist I am, let me turn that into good news. Work with a designer and/or animator over time, to fully realise your idea, add humour, the gift of storytelling, great artwork and you’ll get an evergreen piece of work that long outlives video content, and that could potentially drive traffic in the millions to your site, kick-starter or product.

Get your animation to bring in the views

Or it could just sit there, your dazzling content, ticking slowly into double-figures because it didn’t have a distribution strategy. I’ve run into this before, it’s heartbreaking when the work I’ve poured my soul into (and the client their money) languishes on YouTube at 26 views because it wasn’t publicised, lying unloved, like unmined ore.

To get your animation to work for you, it needs to be starting conversations. Blogging, posting, re-posting and sharing across your social channels is the next step. If the animation is good, and fun and all the things I’ve mentioned, then that will help, but a social media strategy gives it that crucial momentum.

This ridiculous piece of animation is now on 7 million views thanks to being a unique, friendly vision of dinosaurs, grounded in fact but allowed a bit of poetic license.

We made it to entertain, but the momentum came when it struck a chord with various blogs that we submitted it to, and other blogs picked it up, and before long, we had a hit on our hands. That’s the power of word-of-mouth.

But it needs to be worth talking about, so when you turn your attention to your advertising strategy, make your animation the star, propel it into orbit, and it’ll light up your feed for years.

Animation at Sookio

For more animation tips like animating your ads or using animation to explain complex concepts then why not read our previous blogs on the subject.

Get in touch and contact Sookio to see how we can propel your content into orbit with an animated ACME rocket!