Animation is one of the best narrative tools around: it can evoke feelings and grab attention. Animation has been used for decades by brands in advertising and content marketing to explain products creatively, bring characters to life, and leave messages in the audience’s memory.
However, as new interactive technologies emerge, some ask whether animation is still the best option or whether virtual reality is a better approach. Is it still worth investing in animated content for brand building in 2024?
This is a resounding yes. Animation offers unmatched versatility and memorability at a relatively affordable production cost and is still doing so. Animation’s ability to convey meaning quickly, however, is undeterred by shrinking attention spans and audiences that fragment across devices.
These elements, taken together, show why animation stays relevant and is an ever more important component of brand building in 2024 and beyond.
Animation from any professional 3D or 2D animation services studio provides a creative license for brands to connect with audiences in imaginative ways live action cannot replicate. This offers special storytelling opportunities to communicate complicated knowledge and share brand stories clearly.
With animation, you have total control over what is depicted in the world without the real-world limitations of live action. This enables brands to share their ‘why’ through narratives that are the core of that brand once they are given creative freedom. Innocent Drinks, for instance, created an animated series called Innocent World about what the company calls an ‘idealistic Innocent World,’ one driven by people and fruit.
Animation liberates storytellers to construct fully realized environments where brands’ guiding principles manifest visually. Marketers are empowered to make corporate values tangible by embedding them directly into an animated world’s visual fabric. Want to show community commitment? Design smiling residents who wave to neighbors. Seek to convey innovation? Fill the landscape with scientists discovering new products. This world-building control enables messaging resonance no live action can achieve.
It also allows brands to give human shape to intangible attributes through characters. M&Ms has long been playing the playful, fun-loving personality through its candy-coated spokescandies.
Newer brands, such as Australian Neobank Up, do the same: Their friendly, welcoming service is embodied by whimsical animated Frank the Bank creatures.
Speaking of neobanks, it is worth mentioning the mega-popular neobank in Ukraine, Monobank, whose mascot is a mono-cat.
No promotional video of the bank is complete without this cat, and when ordering a physical card, you will receive a limited set of stickers; moreover, the mascot often appears in the bank’s app. There are even achievements for spending on certain categories of goods and services. Achievements can unlock clothes that can be used to customize your cat in the app profile.
This strategy attracts a younger audience to the bank’s app and increases audience attachment and engagement with the product.
Brands’ identities become approachable and memorable because vibrant, animated mascots make them accessible. Especially with bland products, they inject charisma and can forge emotional connections with audiences. These brand champions can also show principles in action through stories. Frank and Mono-cat could be stellar customer service explaining a new app feature, showing what friendly banking looks like instead of just saying it. It makes intangibles tangible to viewers’ minds.
The animation outshines at making complicated things more comprehensible through irony and analogy. Healthcare organizations use this to make sense of medical conditions and treatments. Takeda’s “Explain Psoriasis” campaign visualizes the autoimmune disorder through a city invaded by overactive white blood cells. This simplifies understanding of the invisible skin ailment.
Based on these strengths, animation empowers marketers to:
Animation’s ability to tell stories in various ways becomes especially valuable as brands strive to articulate their purpose and meaning.
Animation also has the special power to elicit powerful emotional responses by weaving compelling imagery, motion, music, and dialogue into and through a resonant cinematic experience. Live action works better with acting performances, but talented animators deliberately use every aesthetic detail to manipulate the audience’s feelings.
This is shown in action through a classic Pixar like Up. In just minutes, the poignant opening montage of a couple’s life together hits you with lush animation, an elegant score, crisp sound design, and restrained dialogue that evokes laughter, love, loss, and tears. The powerful connection between viewer and character is to be formed during this emotional rollercoaster. Viewers have to immerse in the narrative.
Animation’s emotional resonance can be harnessed by brands, too, for stories of similar intimacy. A relatable persona overcoming challenges with the brand’s product or service for support is a way marketers can build animated shorts. It’s a combination of rational benefits and stirring audience empathy that helps to communicate value in many ways.
Animation also powerfully imprints messages into the audience’s memory. Human research into pictorial superiority effects, picture superiority effects, and the Von Restorff effect has found that vivid, emotionally stimulating visual information is better recalled than plain text or static imagery.
Multiple studies directly attest to animation’s significant memorability advantages, including:
An examination by Carleton University found that viewers who watched an animated explainer retained over 65 percent of the information, compared to 10 percent from reading a transcript for the same content.
Cognitive scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, investigated using fMRI brain scans to discover that people watching a brief animated video exhibited far greater neural activity associated with building understanding than those viewing static illustrations covering identical material.
This memorability stems from how animation utilizes:
Motion: Animated videos’ non-static nature can better ‘hook’ viewers’ innate motion sensitivity, holding their attention to the imagery.
Imagery: Animation actually depends a lot less on words to convey meaning than it does on metaphors, analogies, and visual motifs. They stick better over time.
Emotion: The imagined perfect visualizations of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and motivations that animators craft deliberately to engage audiences visually and emotionally in ways that will increase engagement as well as memory. Memorables are funny, cute, inspiring, and surprising.
Taken together, these devices produce a highly stimulating cinematic experience that lodges animated content into memory. For brands, this translates into improved audience recall for everything from ad messages to product explanations to branded content. It also powers significant downstream effects.
Although media consumption habits have shifted, in 2024, animation remains the unrivaled memorability advantage for marketers. Animation provides brands with a way to overcome distractibility due to short attention spans and multi-device fragmentation and its ability to tell impactful stories.
Animation also has cost advantages over live-action and retains creative strengths. Creating high-quality animation takes a lot of skill and labor. But it skips the expenses that come with traditional video, like travel, equipment rental, insurance, and personnel.
Recent data indicates animated video costs between $3,000−$20,000 per minute, depending on complexity. In contrast, live-action ranges from $8,000−$150,000 per minute. While styles and project scopes vary, animation remains the more affordable option for most brands.
It also gives financial freedom. Animation can be as grand as Pixar films on big budgets or as simple as telling a story on low budgets. Simple 2D animation can create affordable video assets that small businesses and startups can afford.
The reuse and adaptation possibilities of animation are also offered. Once the assets, such as characters or environments, are created, they become cheap reusable templates. It allows for carrying on value into sequels and future content. Less than remaking them from scratch, it’s also less expensive to adapt existing animations into new formats for new platforms.
In essence, animation is the astute use of animation to get the most out of a first investment by reusing it. Disney built an entire media empire by repeatedly recycling enduring character IPs like Mickey Mouse into new films, shows, and merchandising.
Live action has its own built-in realism advantages, but animation has good production value per dollar spent. One of the reasons why animation is becoming the ideal, budget-friendly video solution for brands is that it allows you to cut costs while maintaining messaging impact.
Animation continues to be a powerful, versatile, and cost-effective storytelling medium for brands in 2024 and beyond. Its unique ability to vividly bring imagined worlds and relatable characters to life allows marketers to connect emotionally with audiences, explain complex ideas clearly, and imprint resonant messages into memory. Though new interactive technologies emerge, animation endures by leveraging its strengths in visual narrative, memorability, and value. For these reasons, animation not only remains relevant but becomes increasingly vital for impactful and efficient brand-building across devices and formats. Investing in high-quality animated content remains one of the smartest decisions a forward-thinking brand can make.
