Martin McKean, head of creative for film and animation at DRPG Film, explores how storytelling, creativity and analytics can combine to achieve greater impact.

Ideas are only as effective as your ability to communicate them persuasively. A brand is an idea. So is your ambition for a diverse and inclusive business. Your CEO’s new vision for the future is an idea too. It might even be the best idea you’ve ever heard (at least, that’s what you’ll say in the meeting). But right now, it’s just a spark. If you want to start a fire, then the fuel those ideas need is the power of persuasion.

As someone who has worked in the advertising and marketing sectors as much as the corporate comms world, it seems obvious to me that just about everything a business has to say is sales of one kind or another. Why else are you communicating if not to persuade someone to think or do something? Whether that’s to buy a product, work smarter, be more inclusive or just get their timesheets done by Friday. 

I run a workshop for comms professionals, and I always start by asking what the single most important factor is when you’re designing a communication – whether that’s an email, a film, a campaign, a conference or anything else. Of course, the answer is understanding your objectives – but you’d be surprised how long it can take for someone to say that. How are you ever going to craft the right message if you don’t know what you want to get out of it? Yet people often find it challenging to define what they’re really trying to achieve. 

Of course, your objectives change everything. They drive every decision that happens in an agency like mine. We ask ourselves, “what should the audience think, feel and do so that the business can meet those objectives?” We design a strategy, and only then do we unleash the full power of the Creative team. Because when you highly focus creative thinking, you get outstanding results that change hearts and minds, galvanise people and inspire action. 

But how do you measure those results? At my agency we put a big focus on analytics – beyond just knowing the number of views, it’s about understanding the impact. Because the value of your film or campaign isn’t the cost of making it - it’s the return on that investment. It’s the benefit to the business when employees rally around the CEO’s vision or the increase in retention when your culture improves. 

And while getting hold of those kinds of data requires planning and patience (though it’s well worth the effort), you can get a good indication of a film’s likely impact using a mixture of technologies like camera-based analytics, which works brilliantly to measure the audience reaction at a screening or event, and smart video platforms. We’re lucky enough to have an Innovation team here who are working on the next generation of measurement tools for video, so we’re always looking to see what new insights we’ll be able to gather for our clients.

Of course, all of this is a moot point if you don’t also have outstanding storytelling – because that’s the secret sauce in truly persuasive comms. My own speciality is film, so I admit I might be biased, but in my view film’s ability to tell stories, build deeply emotive connections and shape how people think and act, is unsurpassed. But to tell you the truth, it’s only over the past couple of years that we’ve had the data to back that view up.

The stakes seem so much higher in today’s business world than they used to - too high to leave impact to chance. That’s why we’ve shaped our business the way we have and invested so heavily in creativity and technology – the means to persuade and sell, and the ability to measure it. With AI adding powerful new tools to the filmmakers’ toolbox and revolutionising parts of our workflow, a frighteningly smart Creative team and a load of extraordinary measurement tech to play with, I can truly say that we’ve never been in a better position to help our clients shape and transform their audiences.