Brands must properly harness the creativity behind photography and film in their marketing communications to better reward an audience engaging with their advertising – that was one of the main takeaways from Powered by Nine’s Big Ideas Store session on the power of visual storytelling.

“If you can reward your audience for staying at the tele to watch through the ad break then you’ve done your job well as an advertiser,” Liza Goodall, Powered Studios’ Executive Producer of Video of Production, told the virtual event’s audience.

“One of the tools you can employ to break free is creativity. The more creative and outside the box, to coin a hackneyed phrase, then that’s exactly it, you’re breaking free from what’s been done a thousand times before,” she said when asked how brands can best employ visual storytelling to stand out in the market.

For Powered Studios, the key is to find the “balance between creativity and servicing a brand”, Goodall said, emphasising the need for brands to utilise highly skilled professionals to bring their story to life.

“What we’ve seen in terms of advertising in that COVID space is the perfect example of why it’s so important to have people trained in the discipline of telling a very short story with an advertising need connected to it,” she said.

“If you consider what you need to put all of that together – a director of photography, a director, a writer, an editor – those are key things and highly trained professionals are giving that powerful visual moment the very best shot it can get.

“If you think about the repetitive kind of Zoom-style screens we were seeing over and over, for obvious reasons, that helps us understand why it’s so key to bring the right professionals into the storytelling that goes into advertising.”

For Tony Gardiner, Director of TV at Fremantle Media, while photography tools are available to everyone, it is knowledge, skill and experience that steps professionals out of the crowd of smartphone photographers.

“Where we [professionals] stand out is we inherently know how to use the tools. The tools may be available to everyone and I encourage everyone to use them, but if you want your images to stand out I definitely think that’s where our skillset comes to the fore,” he said.

“Creativity is the key to breaking out of the mould, using the tools available to us in a creative way. That’s the best way you can break out.”

It was a message echoed by Gracie Otto, a film director boasting an impressive slate of television commercials for major clients including Bonds.

“As soon as someone does something different every other brand tries to replicate it,” she said.

“If you think of Bonds and underwear, every young woman wears this, that is the target market. So then don’t just squeeze it down to ‘these are the people we’ll target specifically’ or ‘this is the thing we’re going to idolise’. You can have influencers from all different walks of life. Brands like Bonds have always been ahead of the curve on that.”

Otto encouraged brands to stand out by embracing diversity as just something they do, as opposed to ticking a box on a checklist.

“Bonds have never segregated things. A lot of brands have a ticking the box thing, like let’s get this person in because we need someone with this body size, this colour skin. But when it’s not cast like that, but cast with eyes on being diverse, it makes it more normalised and less tokenistic.”

For Kate Geraghty, a photojournalist at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, her profession is separated from a world of citizen vloggers and photographers by a code of ethics.

“With a Herald or Age photographer, or any photojournalist for that matter, there’s a continuity of ethics,” she said. “You can look at our newspaper or whatever platform and you will know we have not enhanced or changed the image.

“The image they are seeing was taken on that day, the caption is relevant, and with everyone who’s not bound by those ethics we don’t know where the image has come from and what political motivations may be behind it.”