“What’s in an automotive brand film?”
Nowadays, automotive is a tricky sector to pin down in terms of what qualifies as either brand film or advertising. Especially when it involves a new electromagnetic compatibility laboratory that tests vehicles for radio and electrical interference. It’s as fine a line as those on the vehicles themselves.
On the one hand, advertising in this space is a mechanism all too familiar to us as consumers, one that functions overwhelmingly to soundbite and chic-shot its way into our pockets: Buy the product, because you need/want it. On the other hand, brand film, while of course still encamped within digital marketing borders, asks us to invest ourselves in the story over a rush to the register. Though if the messaging is effective, we should end up there anyway. Simply put, a function at the core of brand film should be the ability to work simultaneously with typical advertising, in support of businesses products. To make us care about how the thing came to be and who to thank.
Why make these, perhaps obvious, distinctions first before watching this piece? Well, because sometimes it’s difficult to spot exactly which is which. If brand film tells a good tale through fiction, fact, drama etc. then we might consider this offering from Jaguar Land Rover as a type of origin story. Formative steps of product development highlighted to establish the company’s ethos. Techniques of innovation and progress that will, presumably, be brought to bear on all product development. This is an approach also becoming more common in the automotive space since cars are now, in essence, roadworthy computers. With over 40k LinkedIn views in under 2 weeks, it’s also a direction of branding that other enterprises, regardless of field, could learn from.
While it is true that the production value here is as high as we might expect, for much of this type of brand film now it’s these processes mentioned above that become the character in our story. So that when we see a vehicle pass us in the street, we have a greater appreciation for the individual pieces of engineering and tech savvy that went into it. Nestled amongst a raft of releases focusing on the new Range Rover Sport, this film plays a bit-part in an overarching story of the impact that the product has had on Jaguar Land Rover’s business approach, and its people. In other words, this recent collective of brand films are more than the sum of their parts when taken together. A point well aligned with Jaguar Land Rover’s current message.
