What is a commercial?
A commercial is advertising in the form of a film. Fifteen, thirty or sixty seconds, sometimes longer online, placed in a break on television, before a video on YouTube, between episodes on a streaming service or in a feed. It has a product to sell, a brand to stand for and almost no time to do either, which is why the commercial is the most compressed form of storytelling there is. Every frame has a job.
The word covers a wide range. A retail spot with a price and an end date is a commercial. So is a brand film with no product in it, running at sixty seconds in a premium slot. The format is the same; the job and the craft are different.
Why it matters
Why a commercial matters
Film is still the strongest way to make someone feel something about a brand in a short time, and a commercial puts that film in front of people who did not go looking for it. That is the point and the challenge. A commercial that earns its attention builds memory, affection and the mental shortcut that makes a brand the easy choice later. A commercial that does not is thirty seconds of media money spent on being skipped.
With connected TV and streaming, the commercial has come back to the living room with better targeting than broadcast ever had. The form is not fading; it is being bought more carefully.
In practice
How a commercial works in practice
- 01
A commercial starts with a brief and an idea, usually presented as a script and a visual treatment. Once it is approved, pre-production builds the shoot: casting, locations, wardrobe, props, the director's shot list, the schedule. The shoot itself is often one or two days, and a good one captures more than the spot. The social versions, the stills and the alternate lengths come from the same day.
- 02
Post-production is where the commercial is made: the edit, the sound design, the music, the color grade, the graphics and the end card. Then come the versions, because a commercial today is a family of files: 30 and 15, 16:9 and 9:16, with and without supers, captioned and clean, each delivered to the spec of the channel that will run it.
At RIOT
Commercials at RIOT
We have made commercials for brands at every scale: the Bogg Bags CTV spot "Real Life, Worry Free", the U.S. Chamber of Commerce brand spot "For the Pursuit", and more than a decade of campaign and holiday films for Coach. The approach is the same whether the spot runs on television or in a feed: one idea, told well, made so every version holds up.
Watch out
What people get wrong about commercials
Front-loading the logo. Audiences skip the moment they smell an ad, so a commercial has to earn the brand reveal rather than lead with it, but it also has to be unmistakably yours before the skip button appears, which is a tension only good craft resolves. The other mistake is making a thirty for television and then crushing it into a vertical six. The versions have to be planned on the shoot day, not discovered in the edit.
