Vivian Plegt
Marketing Manager at Ember Creative
4.8on 06 Aug 2026
Brand Film for a Rebrand
We completed a full brand repositioning last year, including new packaging and a reformulated range. The launch film had to carry a considerable amount: signal that something had genuinely changed, without disowning a brand our existing customers have bought for decades. Those two requirements pull directly against each other and reconciling them was the entire brief. There was also a sustainability claim attached to the new range, which raised the difficulty — consumers discount those claims by default now, and an assertive film risked doing more harm than a quiet one.
DOT wrote the concept rather than executing ours, which was the right call. We'd been circling the problem internally for months and were too close to it.
Their proposal was to stop making claims altogether and show the process instead. No voiceover explaining our values, no certification marks on screen — just the sourcing and the production, filmed as it actually is. The argument was that anything asserted would be discounted and anything demonstrated wouldn't. That reasoning is what I took to our board, and it's why it was approved.
It also solved the heritage problem in a way I hadn't anticipated. The craft on screen is genuinely old, so the same footage communicated continuity and renewal simultaneously. I've thought about that solution a lot since — it was more elegant than anything we'd generated ourselves.
Production was three days across two sites, with post around six weeks and two review rounds. What stood out is that they solved a strategy problem rather than a production one. We approached them for a film and got a resolution to something we'd been stuck on. I've worked with several agencies who would have shot our brief competently and left us with the same underlying problem in nicer packaging.
