If you want a career as a director in the world of TV commercials (TVCs), then you need to become a master at the overlooked art of communicating your filmmaker’s vision and ideas via director treatments.
These (digital) pitch documents are the first step in the pre-production and essential to help you, the director, outline your perspective, vision, and story ideas for the job and explain how you want to bring the TV commercial to life.
In this article, I wanted to share my pitch-winning approach to writing director treatments for commercials!
Table of contents:
Use a director’s treatment template to pitch your creative vision & ideas 10x faster!
Let’s start at the very beginning by defining what a director’s treatment actually is.
A director’s treatment for a TV commercial is a digital pitch document to show the company that will pay for the commercial what the final result will look like, according to you, the director.
Pitching your creative vision through a director’s treatment is the essential first step in the filmmaking process to get the job and become the client’s creative partner for the project.
The document should be designed to show how the commercial will look and feel according to you—the commercial director—and anyone who reads it should understand it immediately and know what you want to do.
Usually, for creating a TV commercial, companies that want the commercial to be made will contact an advertising company or agency and ask them if they can make an idea, concept, or campaign for their latest product or service.
Another possible scenario is that a brand contacts a commercial director or film/video production company directly and asks them if they can develop a TV spot, but that doesn't happen often.
After a brand has contacted several ad agencies, people working at these advertising companies, so-called 'creatives,' will develop an idea and pitch it to the specific brand.
Just like you would probably ask for different pricing quotes when you want to do some construction work at your home, a brand usually contacts several advertising companies to develop an idea and pitch it to them.
The brand will eventually select an agency pitch that best represents its collaborative vision for the project and award the opportunity to one of the advertising companies.
Because the creatives at the ad agency that won the pitch don't have the vision, expertise, time, tools, skills, or network to bring their ideas to life with a camera, they will start looking for the right commercial director to help them visualize their TV commercial project. That's why they reach out to you, to help them on their quest.
But not just you alone! Like a brand will contact different ad agencies, ad agencies will want to see other filmmakers' perspectives on how they envision bringing the TVC to life.
Depending on the project's requirements, you can be one of many directors or production companies asked to create a director's treatment.
To create such a compelling director's treatment, the ad agency's creatives will provide you with a deck of information about the project—the TV commercial client brief.
These can come in many forms but are usually offered in an email with guidelines and a digital PDF document—the so-called pitch decks.
These pitch decks outline the entire commercial campaign in which the actual TVC fulfills just a tiny portion.
This deck will contain something about the tagline, which the whole campaign is built around, the story or visual language of the commercial, and explain how the specific service or product will be promoted via social media channels, TV, movie theatres, or physical stores.
After receiving these documents, it's your turn to jump on a call and ask as many questions as possible to unearth the project's goal and discover what specific questions or wishes your director's treatment needs to provide answers to.
When you've done that, it's time to formulate your ideas and the director’s vision by creating a visually stunning document to help you persuade the ad agency and their client to hire you for the job.
Now the big question is, how do you write a director’s treatment? To answer that question, we have to approach directing commercials from a different perspective.
Although it might seem like this is not the case, every successful business on earth exists because it solves problems. Your (freelance) business is included!
In filmmaking, problem-solving means someone wants to make a beautiful film but doesn’t have the vision, expertise, time, tools, skills, or network to pull it off. That’s why they come to you, the filmmaking expert, to help them solve that problem.
So when someone asks you to make a director’s treatment for their TV commercial project, they want to know if you are the right person to solve their problem. They want to know if you can help them bring their project to life in the most visually stunning way possible.
A director’s treatment is your filmmaker’s tool to present your solution and sell yourself as the right person to solve the problem.
The foundation of writing a winning director’s treatment is presenting a solid solution for the problem your prospect is facing. Pitching an entirely new idea while your prospect was solely looking for someone who had done this particular job before is a guaranteed loss.
To do that in a pitch-winning fashion, you have to know precisely the problem your potential client is facing and how you can use your unique skillset and experience to solve that issue, which means asking lots of questions.
Over the last ten years, I lost a lot of pitches because I didn’t provide a solution to the client’s problem. Most of the time, this was because I didn’t ask enough questions and just presented something of what I thought would be a beautiful film.
I sometimes completely ignored the essence of a client brief and the problem they were facing and provided them with a solution they were not looking for.
It’s good to understand that when a brand, video production company, or ad agency asks you to pitch a director’s treatment, you’re being asked to pitch your creative vision for creating something that is a means to an end.
Eventually, a product, concept, or service has to be sold, and the commercial you’re being asked to direct is just a marketing tool to help your potential client achieve that goal.
Because bigger financial goals are at stake, companies are willing to invest much money to get the best possible results.
And because there is so much money involved, clients want to know that the director they hire is the best problem solver for their project. This is why, for the right job, a commercial director can make a lot of money!
This is also why a brand usually doesn't contact a commercial director or film production company directly. A commercial director can create a beautiful film, but creating something that no one will watch makes no sense.
There needs to be a solid marketing campaign around the commercial so that the final product is seen by the desired audience and serves the client's purpose—to sell their latest product or service.
If the brand eventually has a killer commercial and marketing campaign, the chances of achieving better sales results increase.
In the end, investing one million for the ad and paying a good director 100K for the job is a tiny investment if the commercial can help boost millions in sales.
Because there is so much money involved, director treatments function as quality insurance. Once a client books you as a director, the treatment you've created will serve as a guideline for what you're obliged to deliver.
Of course, your concept or approach can evolve throughout the process, but your initial treatment should still mirror the final result.
