We’re all accustomed to Christmas being the busiest time in our industry, and this year is no exception. With the slew of Christmas ads in full force the many months of painstaking meetings, edits and pressure to spread holiday joy in a wholesome manner are being cast into public view. And the cracks are beginning to show.
The issues which have been thrown up by this year’s Christmas ads (and in fairness, every year’s) are exactly what Collective has been talking about for years. The advertising process has been stuck in a rut for decades now and this is never more obvious than when the Christmas ads hit.
With an estimated £9.5billion spent on Christmas ads this year, the Christmas production process for ads is still riddled with PR disasters, dosh-draining shoots and planning that requires months of tears and anguish all to find world events have rendered it irrelevant…or worse.
The world doesn’t stop because of Christmas ads, but imagine a way of drastically reducing the time needed to create your ads, making them more timely and relevant. Imagine if there were ways to cut your costs drastically. Imagine you could do both of these and help to save the planet as well.
Collective has been using real-time 3D for over a decade. By embracing new technology, we have clearly shown not least through EE’s recent campaign (below) and a rapidly increasing number of other ads) that you wouldn't have to put your Christmas plans together 12 months in advance.
3D real-time engines like Unreal and the ever-expanding Omniverse are no passing fad - the internet you’ve become accustomed to is just the trial run for the 3D opportunities the Omniverse holds.
Many advertisers have found characters for their festive ads that stand the test of time, from old veterans like the Duracell Bunny to more recent Kevin the Carrot from Aldi (let’s hope the two never meet!).
The time, expense and carbon-guzzling rendering farms could be slashed dramatically with real-time 3D, savings which can then be passed on to the customer. Characters you create will remain in your own content library for you to update and revitalise for every subsequent campaign, rather than starting from scratch every time.
These aren’t insignificant little savings. With real-time 3D, it’s possible to achieve cost savings of up to 80% when compared to traditional workflows and a 30% to 40% reduction in project timelines due to real-time collaboration and sweeping efficiencies across the board. This means you can confidently create your ads mere weeks before the big event, allowing you to capture the nation’s zeitgeist up to the very minute.
It’s inevitable that an ad created in the middle of summer will fall victim to changing world events sooner or later, as we’ve seen this year, with M&S taking the brunt of this. resulting in expensive lessons learned and a PR inferno to put out.
If that had been created in Unreal, all the negativity could have been avoided with just (literally) a couple of clicks to the colour scheme. When audiences see reports of ads being pulled from the air or see millions spent on sets, their reaction is often - “Why am I still paying more in the shops when they can afford this?”.
With real-time 3D, TV spots can cost an estimated 30% to 40% less than with traditional methods. Real-time 3D allows brands and creatives to work closer together than ever and see their ideas come to life right before their eyes, wherever they are in the world. The virtual production market is set to grow 20% year-on-year by the end of 2023.
Large productions can now do for £25 million what used to cost £100 million, and the all-important carbon footprint is less than 1% of the equivalent shoot on location. Reindeer and Christmas trees rejoice!
In short - forget traditional CG pipelines; forget ripping up your New Year’s resolutions about sustainability - Unreal and 3D real-time are the answers to Creative’s Christmas woes and giving the great British public a present they won’t be asking for a refund on.
By Steve Barnes, Founding Partner at Collective
