One campaign, every platform: commission it all at once

The same campaign now has to work on your homepage, in a LinkedIn feed, as a vertical reel and sometimes on a silent screen at a trade show. Those are different films. The mistake is commissioning them as different jobs.

How separate commissions drift

Ordered one at a time, the pieces stop looking like one campaign. The grade is a little warmer in the second batch, because it was done months later on another monitor. The titles use a typeface that isn't quite the brand's. The reels have different music, because the first license only covered one film.

Nobody can say what's wrong. They just don't connect the pieces, so each one has to introduce you from scratch. A campaign sticks through repetition, and that only works if people recognize the second piece as part of the first.

The same look, different films

The other common mistake is cutting the short versions down from the long one. The fifteen-second piece becomes the ninety-second one without its middle, and anyone who has seen one has seen them all.

The pieces should share a grade, typography, music and rhythm, so people know it's you before the logo appears. What they show should change. One opens on the founder, one is the product in use with no words, one is thirty seconds of process.

What has to be decided at the start

• One grade and one set of references.
• One music license covering every cut. I handle it, but I need the full list of pieces when I choose the track.
• One set of titles and logo animation, built once and reused.
• Footage shot knowing vertical is coming. A 9:16 crop loses about 60% of a 16:9 frame, mostly from the sides. I can reframe shot by shot, but it costs a day and still looks rescued.

What you get from one job

• The brand film, 60 to 120 seconds
• A trailer, 30 to 45 seconds, that stands on its own
• A teaser, 10 to 15 seconds
• Three to six reels, vertical and subtitled for sound off
• A square cut for feeds that still prefer it

Two more come almost free and usually get forgotten: a silent cut for event screens, and versions in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Done alongside the original they're small. Done a year later they mean reopening a project nobody remembers.

The short version

If the video only lives on your website, buy one film. If it will run across platforms, commission the whole campaign at once. The things that hold it together are chosen at the start and can't be added at the end.

If you're planning something, tell me what you have in mind and I'll tell you what to ask for. The rest is my department.