Marketing cartoons, AI video, and a singing corpse

Vimeo's Outside the Frame newsletter is a regular dose of ideas, insights, and inspiration to help marketers think differently. Let’s go!

1. Marketers be like...

Many a career is seemingly being built on this irresistible formula - take a folksy observation and spin it into priceless marketing advice. Luckily Jon Emminizer is here to lampoon our foibles.

2. The unseen transformation

World Mental Health Day is one of those events that poses a challenge to brands. It’s clearly an important cause and one which affects everyone. But performative and disingenuous acts of marketing risk diluting the important messages being shared, and add to the growing cynicism around the brand purpose industrial complex.?

Some brand work stands out though, so kudos to ASICS whose campaign focused on the mental health benefits of regular exercise. By subverting the familiar “before-and-after” visual language of physical transformations, this campaign rose up above the rest.? ?

3. Marketing, but make it cartoons

Tom Fishburne – aka the Marketoonist – creates brilliant cartoons that capture marketers’ day-to-day struggles with wit and immediacy – from battling for legal approval to passive-aggressive management meetings. But his belief in the power of humor at work goes much deeper, as he lays out in this thought-provoking TED talk.?

By increasing vulnerability, allowing us to say the unsayable and become comfortable with the inherent discomfort of change, humor, Tom believes, is an incredibly overlooked business tool. “Fear kills creativity" he says, "and humor is our most powerful tool to drive fear out of the system.”?

4. Video, but make it for me

We've all had a lot of fun with Dall-e and similar tools that allow us to create images from text captions. But the next frontier of this technology was always going to be video – and it appears to be here already. Meta recently announced Make-A-Video, "a new AI system that lets people turn text prompts into brief, high-quality video clips."

It's pretty extraordinary stuff and the potential use cases are obvious, from creating videos from scratch to adding motion into still images. But the question will come down to quality – just because we can create content in this way, doesn't mean that content will necessarily do what we need it to.?

Oh, and scroll down to the gallery and find "A golden retriever eating ice cream on a beautiful tropical beach at sunset." It may just be the most terrifying thing you'll see this year (wtf is that hand?!)

5. Understanding ablesim

The D&AD Annual is always worth exploring – a treasure trove of the year’s best creative work, and a stunning digital design experience in itself. This year’s edition also includes a series of insightful opinion pieces, from the future of fashion film to brands’ new obsession with work.?

Marianne Waite 's important piece about inclusivity is especially worth a read. She explains that an holistic, integrated approach is needed to avoid well-meaning but ultimately short-term – or even gimmicky – outcomes.??

"True inclusive design isn’t about developing concept pieces aimed at solving issues for disabled consumers, it’s about empowering teams to recognise and eliminate ableism across the entire go-to-market process. Insights and creative ideas from consumers and peers with disabilities need to be woven throughout the fabric of organisations, anchored firmly to the central business strategy."

Marianne Waite

6. A perfect example of…

…doubling down to make a good idea great. Ivan Zacharias' spot for Upwork makes the point that the old rules of work are dead. So obviously you need a singing corpse, a bi-plane and an uplifting anthem.?

Vimeo's tools help marketers put their strategy in motion. Connect your brand with the world through stunning, ad-free video experiences and engaging live events to grow your business. Find out more here.