How do you do creative on a big budget?

Boy is this ever a fun—if uncommon—topic. So many times, in these articles, we’ve addressed ways to deliver the most bang for the buck... and often, for the nickel. 
 
That’s not always the case. Every once in a while, we’ll work on an assignment for a client with incredibly deep pockets. Then the calculus changes. Not the creative. But the approach to the creative. 
 
Think of it this way. If you see some low-budget movie with no-name actors in it, everything is cheap. The sets. The music. Even the hair and makeup look bad. 
 
Now make that same movie, except with an A-lister. Would the music sound tinny? No way. Would the sets look cheap? Nope. Would one hair on that actor’s head be out of place, in even one shot? Never. 
 
But these two hypothetical movies are shot from the exact same script. 
 
Or are they? 
 
Playing Monopoly
 
More times than we can count, we’ve used the word “stock” in deliverables we create: References to stock photos. Stock music. Stock illustrations. Canned material. 
 
Granted, that does pose some very real creative problems. How do you, for example, make your stuff stand out when you’re using the same ingredients as countless others? (We wrote a cool article on that very topic; check it out here.)
 
But for a recent assignment, the sky was the limit. Of course we’re under NDA so we’ll need to cloak the details in anonymity, but the client was a major U.S. enterprise. You know their name, even if you haven’t used their service. And you likely have used their service. 
 
So. We were tasked (by this enterprise’s ad agency, to be clear) with developing concepts for a creative campaign that would span all media. Think network television spots. Bus sides in major cities. Blanketed social media. Everything. 
 
In the broad scheme of things—and this is pretty typical in situations like this—the client’s big budget item wasn’t the creative, but the media buy. (Yes, our rates are quite reasonable here at Copel Communications!) Think of, for example, a Super Bowl spot. There’s no way the production budget comes anywhere near the price-tag for the air time. 
 
But we still had what felt like Monopoly money to play with. Imagine an unlimited production budget. What do you do? 
 
How do you spend it? 
 
It’s all in the scale 
 
We’ll single out one of the campaign concepts we’d submitted here, because it illustrates our point nicely. 
 
We wanted to show (imagine that this is a “pride” campaign, showing the world how great this company is) that this company makes people’s lives better. So we’d start with, say, a guy on the street. A woman in a grocery store. A cop on the beat. (Remember, we’re fudging reality here a tad, to maintain confidentiality.) 
 
And we could then show how each of these people’s lives were improved by Big Company. 
 
That’s fine. In fact, it’s nice. It’s intimate. You, the viewer, can easily connect and identify with all these people. 
 
But what if it’s bigger than that? What if Big Company is helping entire neighborhoods? How do you show that? 
 
Know how? You show it. You go big. You go aerial. You broaden the perspective—try that with stock footage—and have all these people coming together harmoniously. 
 
But it gets even bigger. (Yes, Big Company has global ambitions.) Big Company, it turns out, is helping the entire planet. It’s all part of the “E” in what’s commonly known as ESG, for Environmental, Social, and Governance, i.e., corporate social responsibility. 
 
So we scripted time-lapse special effects which depict the world’s wounds, healing. Changes in the oceans. The weather. All orchestrated (what the heck, call in the orchestra) to this very human-level narrative which began, mere seconds ago, at the street-and-grocery-store level.
 
That’s how you use a big budget. 
 
Stress-test it
 
Note the progression here. We started small on purpose. The reason for this was twofold: 1) It established the intimate, human connection. 2) It effectively “showed off” the big budget: The spot grows bigger and bigger and more audacious as it goes. That’s intentional. 
 
Imagine if we didn’t work that way. What if the spot started with the planets and stars and special effects? Then it doesn’t have anywhere to go. There’s no exciting revelation, no expansion. In a strange way, it would be small.
 
Here’s another stress test: Does the whole thing resonate with the client’s intent and vision? Put bluntly: You can’t bring in space ships and aliens if there’s no need for space ships and aliens. Everything must be justified. 
 
Overall, we’d say that lower-budget projects force you to be more, not less, creative. You have to do more with less; you can’t simply buy your way out of a problem. 
 
But big budgets, as you’ve seen, have their own special challenges. We couldn’t turn in a script for just-the-grocery-store-level perspective for this assignment; we’d be laughed out of the room. You need to make it appropriate for the assignment. And yes, even the budget. 
 
Not everything we work on is a multimillion-dollar project. Not that yours isn’t—but even if it isn’t, we’d be delighted to help. A creative challenge is a creative challenge, and we love rising to the occasion. Contact us today to get started. 

---