Animatic guidelines
What is an animatic?
An animatic stimulus takes the individual images from a storyboard (like a comic strip of the ad) and puts them into a movie file, animating them and adding audio. You are essentially turning your storyboard into a movie.
In an animatic ad, there is movement within and between scenes (in a Boardomatic, generally there is no movement within scenes - the only movement is moving from one still frame of a scene to another). There is audio so you don't need to text to explain what's going on.
Norms for Animatics vs. Finished Film
Animatics present unique challenges for normative benchmarking. Animatic testing varies widely across organizations, from CGI renders to boardomatic storyboards, with generative AI making these differences even more pronounced. Animatics are also tested on smaller, less diverse sample sizes than finished films, limiting the diversity of our norms.
Building robust animatic norms is challenging because these assets aren't publicly available across enough organization types for quality benchmarking. While we've previously used user-generated testing to create distinct animatic norms, we don't believe this is the optimal approach for animatic benchmarking.
We recommend using the Curated Norm when testing animatics. Our data shows a small performance difference between animatics and finished film that diminishes with more ads tested. Animatics perform well on Reach but struggle with Emotion and Resonance compared to finished film, effects that largely cancel out in overall Sales Impact scores.
Animatic stim guidelines
How should animatics look?
- Animatics can be black and white or color.
- They can be 2D or 3D
- Have a look at some examples in the video below
What about sound?
You should include audio so you don’t need text to explain what is going on. The animatic should show what is happening so there is no need for additional explanation. Any voice-over or music for the finished ad should be included in the animatic. If the music cannot yet be used or isn’t yet available this can impact response as it is often a significant part of the ad (especially if the music is used to emphasize key moments, reinforce mood, or even more when specifically designed for the ad (words, meaning, etc)). If you are still unsure about what music to use at this stage, music can be experimented with.
How long should they be?
There is no limit on the number of frames but the overall length should be very close to the expected/desired length for the finished film.
Comparability
It can be worth agreeing on principles (eg black and white or color) for how your business handles animatics where you want absolute consistency to enable very straight comparisons within multi-ad projects or over time.
Test your animatics with Amplify TV or Creative Video