September 2018

Brand film, Portfolio, Released

Veterans’ Gateway – the value of emotional storytelling

Following on from the success of Your Legion, we have just completed a series of personal, story-driven films commissioned by The Royal British Legion for Veterans’ Gateway – designed to encourage veterans and their families, especially wives, to reach out and get the support they may need for mental wellbeing.

Veterans’ Gateway put veterans and their families in touch with the organisations best placed to help with the information, advice and support they need – from healthcare and housing to employability, finances, personal relationships and more.

The target audiences are veterans aged 24-65, mostly male, with mental wellbeing and/or employability concerns, and families, particularly wives, who live with veterans experiencing mental health issues.

Our approach

Quite simply – we leveraged the power of truthful and emotional storytelling to deliver a number of key content messages.

At the heart of each film lies a genuine, honest, down-to-earth and very personal story. By focusing on emotional human-interest stories, we were able to create audience-first content that connects directly with and engages the target audience.

Strategic storytelling works in business not only because it taps into our natural love of stories but also because we’ve tuned out to traditional marketing methods – we filter out most forms of advertising, but storytelling makes a deeper impression on us.

And, contained within a story that respects the audience, that content is much more likely to be noticed and remembered as well as shared.

Reach

The films were designed to work across a variety of channels as part of an integrated campaign for Veteran’s Gateway to raise awareness of mental wellbeing and employability, launching 10 September 2018.

Hound Dog Films managed the entire production – from initial creative treatments, script development, filming, editing and delivery – including cut downs, format re-versioning and subtitling for distribution across a variety of social media channels.

The results

All of the films were delivered on time and on budget.

Early indications are that the films are being very well received and, importantly, shared – within a week of launch, organic growth of the films’ reach is already outperforming the client’s existing films.

And they are certainly very pleased with the results:

“Wow! I found that so moving. Captures key messages beautifully without being overly sentimental and gives hope to others. We’re just loving your films. Thank you!”

Sinéad: Marketing Manager, Veterans’ Gateway

Here at Hound Dog Films we’re very proud of our track record for producing relevant, intelligent and targeted communications that resonate with our clients’ audiences – creative films that people actually want to watch.

See the Veterans’ Gateway films here:

Colin and Pete’s story

Linda and Sarah’s story