What matters in practice
Enquiries almost never arrive as a question. They arrive as an order: “We need a corporate film.” Behind that there is usually a real problem: too few applications, a trade fair stand with no material, a website that looks like 2016. Whether a corporate film is the right answer to it is still an open question. Testing that is what media consulting is.
What gets discussed
- What should change. Not “we want to look more modern”, but: more applications for one specific role, invitations to pre-qualification, sales of a collection.
- Where people encounter you. A film for a reception screen needs something different from one that starts unasked between two reels.
- What already exists. Many companies are sitting on unused material: aerial footage, progress photography, old interviews. Sometimes the quickest gain is a new cut from what is already there.
- What is sustainable internally. A social channel needs a supply, not a one-off. If nobody is going to look after it, the money is better spent elsewhere.
Why it comes before the quote
A quote written without this is a price for an assumption. It can be produced quickly, but it leads to change requests that are not changes at all. They are a different brief.
Possible outcomes
A consulting conversation does not necessarily end in a production. It may just as well conclude that a budget works better spread across a year than spent on a single film, that photography is the more urgent need. Or that the real problem sits in the wording of the job advert rather than in moving images.