Product Animation

Animated product videos can have a few different purposes. They can explain your product to your audience, helping to boost their understanding of the features and benefits. They can demonstrate your product in real-life, or showcase what it looks like to use your product. They can market your product, creating short highlights for use on social media or in advertising. 

Animated product videos are often composed of graphics, illustrations, photography, CGI and more. They can use a single medium, or a mixed approach to tell a story about the product and why it’s beneficial to the viewer.

Your business can benefit from animated product videos by an increase in your brand awareness or perception. Because you’re using animated product videos, you may gain an advantage over your competition, who might be using traditional forms of product advertising like photography or videography. Your products could be deemed to be more premium, or simply become more distinctive or known. 

Your business also benefits from animated product videos by helping your customers to understand what your product does, how it works, how it helps them, why they should buy it, and why they should buy it from you. When you help your customers with these crucial purchasing factors, you’re going to increase your engagement, visibility and conversions. Finally, these videos can be used across lots of different marketing channels, helping you to advertise and raise awareness of your product.

Animated videos work brilliantly for any business or product. By using animation, you’re adding sound to visuals which is processed in the brain differently to text or image based information. 

But, we’ve seen fantastic results for a few different types of businesses. Companies who have highly complex or technical products benefit from explaining them thoughtfully in an easy to understand way. Companies who have digital or software products are often limited by traditional photography or videography, so they turn to animation. Companies whose products have complex internal mechanisms or are hard to film will definitely benefit. And finally, companies who have abstract or intangible products, or products that are still being developed or prototyped.

The length of any video depends on the context of where it’s being seen and by who. If you’re advertising a product on social media, then keep it really short. Ideally under 30 seconds, even shorter if possible. If you’ve got someone to your website and they’re looking for more information, you can run a little longer, somewhere between 30-90 seconds is best. If someone’s looking for a demonstration or more detail, you can run even longer. We’ve seen great results at the 5 minute mark, but this is a highly interested buyer, looking for a deep level of understanding.

2D animated product videos are often quicker to produce and more cost effective. Depending on the animation style you could be using bespoke illustrations, supplied imagery or graphic design to help tell the story of your product. 

3D animated product videos are created in a completely different way. Products and objects are modelled, textured and then lit using physically accurate simulations of materials, light and shadows. They’re brilliant for creating realism. But they normally mean higher production costs and production timelines due to their complexity and added steps.

There is no one cost for an animated product video. It generally comes down to a few key factors. What are you looking to create, in what style, and how quickly do you need it? A simple animation using supplied photography, no voiceover and a single deliverable is going to have a completely different cost to a highly complex 3D photorealistic animation needed in lots of different sizes and lengths. We will always provide a free, no obligation proposal that outlines different scopes of work and their associated costs. If you have something in mind, or have any questions, give us a call or drop us a message for a quick chat - we’ll be able to give you a ballpark pretty quickly.

This is an often overlooked, but highly advantageous aspect of product videos. Because someone’s spending more time on your page watching the video, you’re seen as giving viewers high quality information and seen as an expert by the search engines. You’re likely reducing quick bounces from your site too which harm you. The video gives you the opportunity to rank in search results via video rich snippets too. Because your content is much more shareable, you’re increasing your chances for backlinks and social shares, which both increase your SEO performance.

Just like cost, there is no single answer to this. It entirely depends on what you’re looking to achieve. A simple 2D project will take a different amount of time to a complex 3D project. We say that 8 weeks is the sweet spot for most productions. This gives you enough time at each creative stage to properly review, share with any other stakeholders and get feedback. We’ve built a reputation for creating high quality work quickly, but we need your help to do that, and you’ll have reduced feedback windows. We’re known for our speed and reliability, so if you have an urgent date in mind, just give us a call or drop us a message and we’ll be able to tell you if we can work our magic tricks.

The most important elements from a script perspective are a strong opening scene or sequence that hooks the viewer and makes them want to watch further. Then you need to explain to them how this product can help them - usually save time, save money, get money, or a combination of all three! Finally it’s key to have a strong call to action; the next steps they should take after watching the video. From a design perspective, the most important aspect is showing the product. Then, show its features, highlight the benefits and have a strong sense of brand throughout.

Definitely. This is one of the best use cases for an animated product video. We’d recommend having alternate versions of the main video for different social media platforms as they all have slightly different preferences. Social media platforms also reward you for different features like Stories, Reels and in-feed posts. We’d also recommend focusing on subtitling or captions as the majority of your audience will have their sound turned off.

By using animation, you’re not limited to reality. You can create videos around absolutely anything, whether it’s complex, abstract or just hard to film. They’re also easier to update with new information as there’s no need to reshoot the footage. Animated videos tend to be more consistent in their look and feel and they’re completely unique to your brand - you create your own world. 

Live-action videos are best for demonstrating physical product uses. They can offer a human touch and be a bit more authentic, especially if your presenter is a key part of your company. They’re hard to update, but they capture real world interactions between people and your products.

We specialise in B2B animated videos; often with companies who have complex B2B products and/or services. Videos work brilliantly for demonstrating software, technology or processes, as well as creating videos around subject matter that’s abstract or hard to film. By simplifying your messaging, your marketing becomes more understandable, relatable and memorable. Plus, B2B animated videos are easy to use across different platforms and channels.

Animated product videos work brilliantly at layering information to your audience. You start with a concept or an idea, then give a broad overview of the solution or your product, then you jump into the details. This mimics how humans naturally learn. Our brains prioritise information that comes through multiple senses like sight and sound. We store this information as if we’d experienced it, rather than something we simply read. Animation is brilliant at explaining abstract concepts, invisible processes and things that are hard to film. You’re making your products more accessible to a wider audience.

Animated product videos also give you the opportunity to tell a story, taking the audience on a journey rather than just giving them the cold hard facts. The brain interprets stories differently to other sources of information because we form an emotional response to it. All of these factors help to make complex or technical products easier to understand, and much more memorable.

The ROI of your video will depend on your measures of success. If you want to be seen as a more premium brand over your competitors, that’s a hard thing to measure. If you want to know how many conversions your e-commerce company had from a particular animated video advert, then that’s much simpler. We’ll always work with you at the start of the project to understand who’s going to see this video and where to help you understand if the video has worked in the way you want. 

You could measure the number of viewers of the video, the length of your sales cycles, if you’re seeing an increase in enquiries from a website or particular product page. You could look at A/B testing landing pages with and without videos, or with different versions of the same video. You could also look at surveying your sales teams and customers to see how the video has helped them. Did it reduce sales time, or maybe customers coming to sales staff with a higher level of knowledge?

There have been two main trends we’ve seen in 2024. Companies are looking for a mix of 2D and 3D product videos. These show off the actual product with all the photographic realism of 3D renderings, but use 2D animation techniques to explain the features, benefits and the why. These videos strike a balance between the cost and time implications of 3D product videos, with the simplicity and effectiveness of 2D product videos. 

We’re also seeing micro-narratives become a feature of product videos. Instead of creating a single 90 second video with all the information in, companies are realising the attention spans of their customers and opting to advertise a series of 10 second videos. Micro-narratives offer a single positive point about the product - a feature, a benefit, an outcome. Then through retargeting, the audience are shown multiple of these videos to give them a more rounded view of the product. The customer can then follow the ad to a custom landing page geared towards the single focus of the ad.

This is a core advantage of using animation for your product videos. There’s no expensive reshoot fees to update any information or statistics. We’ll build clean, modular project files so if there is any information that needs to be updated - it’s quick and simple to do so. It’s also worth knowing that there are emerging technologies that allow you to update the information in a video with a dynamic link to a text source - much like the way you can update content on a landing page through a CMS.

Another core advantage of animation is that you get to create a world that’s uniquely yours. It's hard to stage the real world to look like your brand identity, but in animations it's the very essence of the visuals. You use your colours, your fonts, your characters, your graphical elements, everything is designed around you. The words will reflect your brand's unique tone of voice. We’ll work within your brand guidelines to make something that’s strengthening your brand rather than diluting it. But don’t worry if you don’t have a brand guideline or a tone of voice document, we can work with you to define your look and feel in the animation.