May 7, 2021

Fat Free Newsletter - Issue #1

Hello,

We used to send out little emails of all the cool stuff we’d found on our travels that week. A short, sharp hit of inspiration in your inbox. It started from a list of 0 subscribers, but slowly it built. People liked it. They sent it to their friends and colleagues, they liked it too. People started replying to our email and a little community was born.

Then we got busy. Really busy. Something had to give, and our small but mighty email went on a sabbatical. Since then, we’ve made some big decisions, some small decisions and decided to completely change our life in the process.

Now we have the time to do what’s important: great work for our clients, great work to drive our business forwards, time to rest, time to play and take ourselves less seriously. So the small (but hopefully mighty) email has space in our brains and our diaries once more.

We will fill these emails with ideas and curated creativity for brand teams and agencies to bring you closer to the things you love about video, to give you ideas on how to navigate the content making process. As people get fatigued with “these unprecedented times”, brands and agencies will still need to work together to solve new problems with clarity, great concepts, and an exceptional toolkit at our fingertips. We’d like to make that a bit easier.

Here’s the first edition. If you like it, great. Even better, tell us why. If you think it’s rubbish, Mailchimp has a handy unsubscribe button below, and we promise not to take offence.

Fix up look sharp - Ideas to get your s**t together

Your budget is slashed.

Your team and assets are all over the place.

Your crew is on lockdown.

But you still need to make content.

You still need consistency.

Some ideas “during this difficult time”.

1. Up-skill the team

Lockdown provides some teams with a bit of space in their diaries. Getting your team equipped with some tangible video creation skills is a really valuable thing to do to turn your in-house capabilities into powerful content machines. The internet is swimming with great training content for free, drop us a note about your team and content needs and we can send you a bespoke list of resources.

2. Keep it simple and DIY

There are two new platforms that have recently been launched that let you create social video content easier than ever before. One from Vimeo, one from YouTube, so both reputable and trusted places

3. Get your shit/assets together

Nobody knows when we’ll be able to shoot again. In the meantime, your existing asset bank is the gold mine you’ve never had a chance to look through. This is the perfect time to collate your assets, label the shit out of it, go through the rushes and see what gems you can find. A seriously solid investment might be a brand asset platform for video content like Brandfolder, or Wiredrive, or Adobe’s own DAM system

3. Re-use, recycle

Build your content plan around re-using as much stuff as you can. Get your agency / freelancer to send uncompressed clean exports of any recent content without titles or music. If you can, ask for original rushes from the projects too to reuse and recycle.

4. Great time for UGC

Every single member of your audience has a camera in their pocket capable of creating content for you. You just need a good enough reason to get them to whip it out. Finding a creative way to bring a community together through a user-generated video campaign can give you serious multi-channel content mileage. Here is a great example from Tesco and another from Virgin Media

5. Don’t be too serious

Yes, this pandemic is no joke. But you don’t have to zap all the fun out of your content. The best video content at the moment helps place the brand on the same side as the audience. There’s really no need to be lofty, just human. Just don’t be like these brands

We got a kick out of this

“Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport is a manifesto in defence of reclaiming your leisure time. Worth a read/re-read during lockdown.

This video is a nice way to travel around the UK without leaving your house

I’ve always believed creativity needs constraints, and lockdown is giving us some really great examples of this in action

This parody of “every single facebook video” is scarily accurate

Respect to Birdseye for taking a firm stand on their voice within lockdown

Big love for this short film that was crowd-sourced from instagram photos

What happens when you ask AI to write a Eurovision song? It comes up with this absolute banger

Really love this trippy animation loop

Corona heroes and villains

✅ Hotels.com getting the tone bang on

✅Deliveroo not letting the production quality get in the way of keeping the content flowing

✅ I despise Facebook, but god damn they can put some good content out

❌Heineken is muscling in on the “we’re all in this together” vibe in a way that just feels too forced

❌Villain of the week goes to Nivea, with their content angle being LITERALLY NOTHING TO DO WITH SKINCARE

Here’s a thought, if the product/service contributes nothing to people during lockdown, is there any point referring to Covid-19 at all?

This newsletter is compiled by Kate & Neil.

We’d love to hear from you if you fancy saying hello.

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☞ You can also find us as @HelloFatFree on Instagram

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Kate & Neil

When we've got something great to say, we write a newsletter for brand teams. We curate the best of video, creativity and insights to inspire and delight.

Our readers are brand managers, marketers, creators, makers, planners and all sorts of curious minds. Video is an exciting part of their work, but they have other things to manage. Our newsletter is a way of staying inspired and informed in one place. So why you won’t find clickbait or spam. Just curated ideas and insights from Kate and Neil.

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