It’s an age-old battle between the two guiding forces of life. On one side is the cooler-headed cerebral faculties that lead us to a life governed by the scientific method. On the other side, we have the faculties of feeling: the more sensitive, take-off-your-shoes-and-dance-in-the-rain faculty.
We’re hard-wired to respond to appeals to either of these faculties, and successful marketing will use one, and often both, in any given piece of content. In the current marketing environment, every single message that is sent out has to compete for space, against other marketing messages out there, but also the busy lives of the target audience, which is why video content holds a special ability to affect both head and heart—and do it fast.
Video automatically engages a viewer in a way that text and still images aren’t capable of doing. Video production companies can use that engagement to more completely and concisely tell their client’s story, winning over emotion and intellect in one fell swoop.
Take a look at a commercial our video production team did for Miramontes Capital in Orange County. It does a great job of simultaneously tugging on the viewer’s heart strings and affirming the intellect, both of which are crucial to reach a person who is about to make decisions about their retirement.
Scene one shows a man who’s just left his job to start out on his own enterprise. The music, the composition of the scene, and the actor’s expression all pull out an emotional response from the viewer. Here, the words rise up to meet the images, providing the intellectual reassurance, “You made the right choice.”
The next section shows the man’s daughter going off to meet a young man in a car, a scene that can bring about a wealth of emotions, but as the scene progresses to the couple’s marriage, then to the man’s granddaughter running into his arms, the narrator’s voice repeats, “You made the right choice.” The phrase now wraps that intellectual assurance in another layer of emotional depth.
The next scene takes the viewer through a man’s diagnosis with a disease, and he and his wife’s decisions here carry with them both an element of fear, but right along with it the narrator’s voice provides guidance and assurance with the “right decision” verbiage. Finally the comparison is made with retirement planning, a last appeal to the intellect.
Almost seamlessly, the video moves back and forth between emotional appeal and intellectual reassurance, sometimes using the same phrase to accomplish both. Video is supremely adept at doing just that—moving quickly through a variety of content, images, and moods in order to serve the story. But it isn’t easy. Picking the right video production team in Orange County can mean the difference between a tight, balanced end product and an overly emotional, poorly executed mess. Twelve12 prides itself on getting into people’s hearts and heads with our videos.