Modern branded content production frequently uses film content to engage viewers and expand brands' reach through social media, product pages, and other media. However, the market is continuously demanding more from brands, making it challenging to stand out or protect your investment.
Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) and other marketing leaders are turning away from traditional production methods that slow them down and instead turning to modern solutions, such as virtual production studios. Virtual production services allow teams to complete full, months-long campaigns all within a single sound stage in significantly less time.
Read on to learn how virtual production for CMOs has completely changed the branded storytelling game.
Modern marketing and branding are defined by the digital landscapes of social media, streaming services, and distributed work models. Many of the most effective brand strategies use strategized social media reels and paid ads to reach audiences where they're already at. They use five-second hooks, cinematic visuals, and familiar imagery to immediately grab viewers' attention, encouraging them to watch the full film instead of scrolling to the next post or clicking "Skip Ad."
Though much of the market is oversaturated with content, many brands distinguish themselves from the noise by building emotional connections and loyalty with key audiences. More and more organizations are actively shifting from product-centric ads to value-driven storytelling, embracing the human connection to virtual production.
These strategies often prioritize "branding" over "marketing." Marketing your product's low price point could benefit your short-term sales goals, but if you teach your audience to value price above all else, you run the risk of your best customers leaving for another product or service as soon as something goes on sale. Branded films, on the other hand, share our company's values, story, and key differentiators to give customers memorable reasons to keep coming back.
Many brands are also switching to studio-led production over traditional location shoots when managing brand campaigns. Virtual production and other studio services can minimize production logistics, maximize your creative potential, and establish a sense of cohesion across your brand content.
Examples of branded content include:
Virtual production studios like Forge Virtual Studios have revolutionized branded content production. These production services use massive, curved walls built with hundreds of bright light-emitting diode (LED) screens to allow crews to film in front of realistic-looking virtual backgrounds.
This brand storytelling technology offers a significant advantage over green screens. Green screens and other practices require crews to edit the footage on set or wait until post-production to see how their footage will look in the finished product.
On the other hand, LED volume production lets teams see exactly how the "Final Pixels" will look while still on set — no on-set editing required. This expands creative potential by letting production teams make adjustments to lighting, blocking, framing, or the background elements as needed. Virtual production can also reduce post-production uncertainty and speed up the approval process by letting CMOs and directors see the finished product immediately.
Filming at a physical location requires producers to manage several types of logistics, including permits, insurance, location scouts, travel, transport, and crew accommodations. Location is one of the main reasons that "Hollywood" became such a massive hub for film production. Production teams wouldn't need to travel far, whether they needed to film in an urban landscape, by the water, in a forest, or in front of a gorgeous mountain backdrop.
Virtual production services offer more diversity for your setting with even more convenience. Now, you can easily move from a desert to a cityscape (or even to an animated world) in a matter of minutes. With a long-term partnership with a virtual production studio, you can even reuse the same background locations and assets to elevate recognition and recall.
This production strategy can increase your return on investment by lowering your overall production costs. Reduced travel logistics mean you can capture footage that previously would've taken at least a week in a single day. Similarly, you can capture a year-long campaign's worth of content in a fraction of the time.
Many filmmakers like to shoot during the "Golden Hour" or "Magic Hour" — the brief period of time right after sunrise or right before sunset when the waning sun emits soft, warm, and stunning shades of light across the sky. Filming during this time can drive emotional themes, make talent look more flattering, and give establishing shots gorgeous color schemes.
Unfortunately, the Golden Hour strategy has a couple of problems. First, the time window is very brief, giving crews usually under an hour to capture footage before the sky changes again. Beyond that, the sky during the Golden Hour is rarely consistent. Weather can quickly change how the sky looks between takes or prevent the Golden Hour from happening at all, leaving you with gray skies and limited natural lighting.
Virtual studios resolve the Golden Hour problem — along with the other issues of outdoor filming, such as inconsistent lighting and continuity errors — by providing 24/7 access to perfect lighting. This level of quality ensures brand films maintain a premium, consistent look across campaigns.
The controlled environment of virtual production for CMOs enables greater creative brainstorming, experimentation, and risk-taking. For instance, if you previously wanted to film in a forest with a specific type of tree, your creative direction would be limited to the number of available locations (and whatever backgrounds those locations offered). Now, you can use pre-production planning and real-time rendering to create a custom forest location with any type of flora or fauna you can imagine.
From a strategic marketing perspective, this level of creative potential allows CMOs to carefully strategize every aspect of their films around their unique target audience and brand goals. Consistent, high-frequency studio films can build brand memorability and recognition to continuously push consumers further down the sales funnel. Having more room for creative experimentation allows teams to lean even further into pain points, customer motivations, and shared values.
Many marketing production teams follow the 3-7-27 rule when creating brand films and campaigns to bolster their potential impact on audiences. This rule states that the average viewer will need to encounter your brand three times to notice it, seven times to remember it, and 27 times to effectively build trust. Understanding this rule and knowing where your target audience falls in the sales funnel can help you craft the perfect story and message to reach key consumers where they're currently at.
While LED volumes debuted in the TV series The Mandalorian, this technology's usage skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, many productions had completely shut down due to travel restrictions and to minimize exposure between crews. LED volume production allowed studios to continue filming without leaving the studio lot while maximizing every moment talent was on set.
Even for CMOs and brand campaigns, virtual production reduces "per asset" costs by maximizing studio hours and on-set capabilities. This allows teams to film social cutdowns and multichannel campaigns simultaneously.
Modern brand storytelling can also boost your organization's presence in the digital landscape in various ways. For instance, you could integrate internal links to cloud-based workflows to boost lead generation and data accessibility. You can also integrate strategic keywords and search terms into your film's title, caption, and subtitles to boost search engine optimization.
Virtual studios bridge the gap between creative teams and technical execution through collaborative digital assets. You can easily integrate visual effects (VFX) assets into your virtual backgrounds using cloud storage and other workflows. This way, a post-production team can create the graphics on their own time, and all the assets will be digitally available whenever you go on set.
Virtual production services offer practically countless use cases in branded content production, especially when compared to traditional location shoots. Scenarios could include:
Virtual production supports Forge's four C's of branding by providing a reliable environment for long-term content campaigns and series:
Branded content production can significantly elevate your project's reach and creative potential, but you can't approach the job alone. Branded content producers and professional production teams manage digital assets, as well as physical talent and crews, to speed up and strengthen production while boosting quality and eliminating risks.
Forge Virtual Studios offers virtual production for CMOs and other brand leaders, letting organizations of any size use the capabilities of Hollywood to bring their stories to life. Explore Forge's specialized services or contact the team to discuss your next project.