Desmond Bros Blog

Brand Storytelling Case Study: Heineken

06 June 2020

Marketing | Estimated read time: 4 - 5 mins.

Filmmakers love telling stories with beautiful imagery. Stories that are simple are always best, with visual storytelling as king.

For a brand film, this “Keep It Simple” rule, combined with capturing the feel and flavour of a brand, makes things fun. A challenge, but fun.

Here’s how we did one for Heineken. You can watch the commercial here:

We did this commercial on spec, so Heineken didn’t actually commission this. We were just hankering after a nice cold brew!

How can you make your commercial for social media a success?

Message

Keep the message on point. This doesn’t mean it has to be on the nose - like ‘buy my product’.

Any brand video or advertisement has a message you want to convey. For us, we chose the idea that you have to “earn it”, that after working and waiting, a refreshing beverage will taste better.

Then we stuck to that message, and built a story of working and looking forward to enjoying a cold bottle at the end of the day.

This narrative we had in the commercial gives Heineken the quality of being worth striving for.

Planning

After creating an idea, and a script, we didn’t start shooting straight away. We spent a few days planning the visuals, getting every shot storyboarded.

Why was this important? With social media and online videos, you want to make every second count. Grab the attention of your viewer, and don’t let go.

We even went so far as to completely record a trial run of the video with a small DSLR camera, and did some post production to see how the pace of the edit was.

Story

People don’t necessarily want to watch your video. It’s sad, but true. (Your auntie wants to watch it, and we do too!)

What you need is to make the video, and the story in it, interesting and unique enough that they’ll want to watch it.

We built our story for the Heineken spec commercial around things in our area that were interesting and unique. New forestry, beautiful countryside and the natural process of turning trees into firewood.

To sum it all up, your online commercial for social media or any destination needs to be simple, well-thought out, and hella interesting.

We’re just the guys you need to create stunning content in Cork, Munster and beyond.

As a fella once said, give us a call. (Or the contact form works just as well)

Jack Desmond
Desmond Bros.

Got a question?
Reach out to Jack.

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