One of the first questions that comes up when we’re planning an advert is who’s going to be in it, and quite often the client already has somebody in mind, whether that’s a member of staff, a loyal customer or themselves.
There are good reasons for that. Using people you already know keeps the cost down, because you’re not paying for casting or for professional fees, and it can give an advert a warmth that’s very hard to manufacture. It does come with risks, though, and whether it’s the right call depends almost entirely on what you’re going to ask those people to do once the camera is running.
When real people are exactly right
If you’re making a testimonial advert, you want a real person speaking from the heart. Nobody can do that better than somebody who means it, and viewers are quick to sense the difference between a customer remembering what happened to them and a performer reciting it. We’ve written separately about using real customers, including how we approach those adverts and the rules that apply to them.
Real people also work well when they’re simply being themselves on screen, whether that’s your team at work, a fitter on a job or customers browsing in the shop. Nobody has to remember a line or stop on a mark on the floor, so they look natural, because they are. When we made a recruitment advert for South Tyneside College, we used real students and not actors, because we wanted viewers to get a genuine sense of the community they’d be joining, and everyone you see in the advert we made for Bell Truck and Van with their agency, Dickinson Media, is a member of staff.
Where it gets difficult
The trouble starts when you ask somebody without training or experience to deliver a scripted line to camera, and it grows with the length of the line. It looks like the easiest thing in the world, and it’s one of the hardest. You have to remember the words, say them in the right order, sound as though you’ve just thought of them, look into the lens, keep your energy up, and often do something with your hands at the same time. Then you have to do it again in exactly the same way for the next angle, so that the two will cut together in the edit. Professional actors and presenters make it look effortless because they’ve spent years learning how.
It’s also very hard to predict who’ll manage it. Somebody who’s confident and funny in a meeting can freeze the moment the camera is rolling, while a quieter colleague turns out to be a natural, and there’s no way of knowing which you’ve got until you try.
The most famous example
If you’ve never seen the outtakes from a 2012 advert for Dysart’s, a restaurant and truck stop in Maine, they’re well worth a few minutes of your time. The advert featured Jack and Sonya Palmer, a couple who were regular customers, sitting at a table and talking about the chicken pot pie, and all they had to do was say that it was “baked in a buttery, flaky crust”.
It’s very funny, and the Palmers come across as thoroughly likeable, which is why the outtakes have been watched millions of times and were even spoofed on Saturday Night Live, with Will Ferrell and Kate McKinnon playing the couple. What interests us most, though, is the account written some years later by the advert’s scriptwriter at the restaurant’s agency. The writer had expected the Palmers’ scene to take about five minutes and watched it take around three quarters of an hour, but puts the blame on a lost note and not on Jack. After earlier shoots with the couple, the plan had been to give Jack the easier lines, and the note saying so had been mislaid.
In the end Dysart’s did rather well out of it, because the outtakes brought them far more attention than the advert itself would have. That isn’t something you can plan for, though, and on most shoots a line that won’t come out right just means time ticking away.
What it costs you when it goes wrong
Time matters so much because a shoot day is the most expensive part of most productions. The crew, the equipment and the location are all booked for a set number of hours, and the schedule is built around getting through a list of shots in those hours. We’ve written a separate guide to how a shoot day runs.
If one line takes forty takes, something else has to give. Other shots get dropped or rushed, and you can end up choosing the least bad take in the edit when you’d hoped to be choosing the best one. Any saving you made by not hiring an actor can disappear quite quickly, and it tends to come out of the quality of what ends up on screen.
There’s also the person to think about. Nobody enjoys getting it wrong over and over in front of a room full of people, and each failed take makes the next one harder, because by then they’re thinking about the last mistake and not about the line.
What an actor brings
A professional will usually have the line right within a few takes, and can then give you choices: warmer, quicker, more serious, with a smile at the end. They take direction, they know how to repeat a movement exactly, and they’ll still be fresh at four in the afternoon.
You also get to choose them, which is easy to overlook. When we cast the national campaign we made for PC Specialist with their agency, Forward & Thinking, we had more than a hundred applications for each role, and we watched the audition tapes the actors sent in until we’d found people who looked right for the part and could say their lines naturally. With a member of staff or a customer, you’re casting from a shortlist of one.
None of this has to make an advert feel less genuine. A good actor playing a customer or a member of staff in a scene is often more believable on screen than the real thing, simply because they’re relaxed. What an actor can’t be is a real customer giving a real recommendation, because the advertising code for TV says that testimonials have to be genuine unless they’re obviously fictitious.
Getting the best of both
It doesn’t have to be one or the other, and most of the adverts we make use a bit of each. The skill is in matching what each person is asked to do to what they can do comfortably.
That begins with writing for the people you’ve got. If the owner is going to appear, we’ll give them a short line they’d naturally say, and let a voiceover carry the detail. Bernard Matthews fronted his own turkey adverts for years, and what everybody remembers is a single word, “bootiful”, said in his own Norfolk accent. Your staff and customers, meanwhile, can be all over the advert without anybody having to learn a script, and for testimonials we ask questions and let people answer in their own words.
It’s also much better to find out beforehand. A quick test on a phone will tell everybody, including the person themselves, whether they’re comfortable, and that’s a far kinder place to discover the answer than a set with a crew standing by. Halifax did the same thing on a grand scale when it put its own staff in its adverts. It held auditions among its employees, and the best known of the people it found, a customer services representative called Howard Brown who first appeared on Boxing Day 2000, went on to front the bank’s advertising for years. Plenty of people who aren’t actors can carry an advert, and they’re worth looking for properly.
Where the advert really does depend on a long piece to camera, that’s the job to give to an actor or a presenter, with the real people doing what they do best around it. If those people are your staff, it’s sensible to feature several of them, because a good advert can stay on air for a long time and people do move on.
Deciding for your own advert
We’ll always be straight with you about this. If we think the person you have in mind will be great, we’ll say so and write the advert around them. If we think the script is asking too much, we’ll suggest a way of doing it that keeps them in the advert and takes the pressure off.
If you’re weighing it up for your own campaign, get in touch and we’ll talk it through, ideally before the script is written, because that’s when it’s easiest to shape the advert around whoever is going to be in it. And if the person you have in mind is rather better known than a customer or a colleague, that’s a different decision, and we’ve written about celebrity endorsement separately.
Keep reading.
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