~Thought Starters for Pharma Marketers

You’re telling a story over the course of time, but are you capturing it? Often, videos are told in hindsight or opportunistically as part of a specific requests.

The result?

A lot of great stories are missed.

It’s time to shift your thinking. Strategically planning a documentary will ensure you’re ready to capture stories as they pop up knowing they have both short-term and long-term value.

• Start with a mini treatment to understand the tone, potential storylines, characters, and big picture story arc.
• Capture moments in time with the goal of making the big picture in the future.
• Along the way, release updates from your team on scientific milestones, capture the energy of your team, or share voices from patients.

All of this can ladder up to a compelling documentary. However, the more important win is the documentarian approach.

You may never end up producing a documentary. That’s okay. The point is capturing all the incredible stories and having a plan to do it.

By always thinking about the big picture, you’ll have more clarity and cohesion during the little moments in time. So embrace the fact that you are a documentarian and let it change the way you approach storytelling.

At Animus, we use a simple mantra to push ourselves: Creative Courage. Courage isn’t a word you hear too often in marketing, but without courage a lot of creative ideas land in the trash bin or, worse, stuck in our heads. Embracing creative courage fuels your team’s energy, pushes your boundaries, and differentiates your brand.

1️⃣ Reinvent Your Brainstorming Session
Plan your next brainstorming session like a party. Bring your team (and new people) together for a longer meeting in a different environment with a refreshed agenda. Include an icebreaker, interesting prompts, breakout sessions, and rules.

2️⃣ Get New Voices in the Conversation
The same ideas tend to come from the same people. Adding new voices will spark new ideas and challenge the way your team thinks. New voices can come from different departments, partners, or the people you serve.

3️⃣ Give an Interesting Homework Assignment
Challenge your team with a prompt that forces them to contextualize the problem in a new context. Simple ideas could be to write a children’s book or script an infomercial. The goal is to get ideas flowing and spark a new conversation.

4️⃣ Create a Hub for Curation
Ideas need a home outside of our heads. It’s important to give your team space to contribute their ideas. A shared deck, document, folder, or collaborative platform, brings your team together asynchronously. You don’t know when the lightning bolt of an idea will strike, but you can give a place to capture it.

5️⃣ Start a Ritual
Creativity shouldn’t only live with a defined project. Consider starting an ongoing ritual around creativity. For example, a monthly inspiration review or concepting session, can help to build an ongoing culture of creativity.

If your team is struggling with highly technical information and working with experts who dive into the details, you’re in need of stories. Stories are more memorable than facts and figures alone.

Everyone talks about storytelling, but most marketers don’t have clear frameworks to help guide their stories.

Through the years, we’ve had success with two simple frameworks that anyone can put into action right now.

Pain, Claim, Gain

When you have something complex and want a simple way to break it down, this is a go-to framework.

• PAIN: Paint a picture of the landscape someone is currently in. The ‘before’ state and the problems that come with it.
• CLAIM: Provide a clear solution to that problem. Showcase how you will help them.
• GAIN: Share the ‘after’ of the outcomes someone experiences once they make the change.

The Hero's Arc

When you’re looking to make your story more relatable it might be time for a hero.

• HERO: A character the audience bonds with begins the story.
• CONFLICT: A clear challenge needs to be overcome.
• GUIDE: A supportive mentor illuminates a path forward.
• CLIMAX: Tension builds as the journey continues.
• RESOLUTION: A lesson is learned and a new state is reached.

More and more brands are in-housing marketing capabilities and turning to boutique shops to redefine their approach. A social media team to help with social distribution and monitoring. A digital team for all things web. A video team for videos. Strategic tacticians who can augment a campaign with their domain expertise.

STAYING FOCUSED AND NIMBLE HAS ITS BENEFITS.

• You get experience with domain focus. No faking it. No quick turn to outsource to a freelancer.
• You get push back and passion. A smaller team connected to the work and mission. Not just saying “yes”, but challenging ideas.
• You get competition and collaboration. A mix of smaller agencies trying to outdo each other on your behalf.

Obviously, we’re a bit biased. We’re focused and nimble by design. We left a full-service agency years ago to focus on the craft of video. We built our model around video and servicing clients who love video. We’re happy to stay in our lane, collaborate, and pull in partners when needed.

It’s a model where everyone wins. And it’s working. Clients often gripe over issues with bigger agencies. We often see new agencies pulled in. And through all of it, we continue to find our home as a strategic and focused partner.

Everyone’s asking for a new video…all the time. It’s a great idea, but video comes with a lot of questions:

• How do you greenlight projects?
• What’s the right type of video?
• Who is going to make it?
• Where does it fit into our campaign?
• How do we keep it on brand?
• What’s the distribution plan?

You need a video strategy. A two-level approach for planning for video at the organization and campaign level.

Without a video strategy, it’s easy to get caught making the wrong videos, wasting money, launching videos without an impact, and duplicating efforts. Developing your video strategy will help your team evaluate the best videos to make a clear process for bringing them to life.

• ORGANIZATION LEVEL VIEW FOR HOW YOU APPROACH VIDEO.
  • A center of excellence who connects the dots between departments and partners to prevent silos and overlap.
  • A holistic view of the goals and prioritizes for the brand and department.
  • An overall budget and general estimates for various types of videos.
  • A process for requesting and fulfilling videos along with partners who collaborate and uphold your strategy and brand.
    
• CAMPAIGN LEVEL VIEW OF WHERE VIDEO FITS INTO THE MIX.
  • A creative brief template to ensure videos are on strategy with clear objectives.
  • A content plan to ensure you have videos that align to your various audiences and steps in their journey.
  • A campaign playbook and collaborative partners who can activate videos through your websites, social, and paid assets.
  • A distribution plan that maps how to bring an audience through the funnel with both paid and unpaid placement.

Animus Studios is the video-first agency that unlocks creative courage to find your fascinating. We put your stories into action by simplifying the process and rethinking what’s possible. From patient stories and employer branding to explainer content and anthems, our team helps pharmaceutical and healthcare brands bring their vision to life and make an impact.

We have a proven-process to drive projects from vision to creation. Animus Studios has a studio space with green room and a ton of top notch equipment. But we’ll build our production plan around the winning approach for the idea. We’re nimble, collaborative, and efficient. Our goal is to be your favorite go-to partner.