The Secret Ingredients of Stories That Stick

When people talk about what makes a brand film successful, the same ideas tend to come up. It needs to be original. It needs to go viral. It needs to be short. As if the impact of a story can be engineered by ticking the right boxes.

Originality is questionable. Going viral is unpredictable. And while shorter often is better – especially when it comes to hooking increasingly decreasing attention spans – it’s no substitute for substance. Some films arrive loudly and disappear just as fast. Others take a slower pace, staying relevant, resurfacing years later, and continuing to be referenced because the story still holds and resonates.

After nearly 16 years editing and directing films at Nice and Serious, I’ve learned that the ones that endure aren’t necessarily defined by novelty, numbers, or runtime. They’re shaped by something harder to quantify: the perspective and craft of the filmmaking team behind them. A personal point of view that reframes something familiar, humour where you don’t expect it, or a thought-provoking social experiment that lets the audience experience the message rather than having it explained to them.

Those are the secret ingredients. Not a formula, but a way of thinking.

I’ve looked back and selected a small, hand-picked selection of films from our archive which show those ingredients at work.

Ingredient 1: The flip

Swapping perspectives is one of the oldest tricks in storytelling. Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. See the world through different eyes. It is a familiar device, and one that is easy to get wrong.

Through Her Eyes, our film made with Southwark Council for White Ribbon Day, uses that device to tell a very familiar story in a different way. We follow a teenage boy on an ordinary journey. Nothing dramatic happens. No one explains the issue. There is barely any dialogue at all. You simply start to notice the looks, the comments, the feeling of being watched, and how those small moments begin to add up.

The reason the film has resonated so widely, why it has won awards and why people still talk to us about it years later, is not because the idea was new or original. It is because it came from lived experience. Like most women, I have spent much of my life navigating public space with constant vigilance. Crossing the road without quite knowing why. Avoiding certain routes after dark. Staying alert when I would rather be listening to music. I used that experience, the fear, anger and frustration that come with it, to shape the story and give it its emotional weight.

Rather than showing women and girls enduring harm, we flipped the perspective and asked men and boys to feel that tension for themselves. The film does not spell anything out. By the time the message lands, the audience has already felt it.
 

Ingredient 2: An invitation  

On paper, Immoral Code should have been doomed to fail. It is 23 minutes long, dense, and features a lot of talking heads – the kind of issue documentary that can feel heavy and hard to stick with.

The short doc (yep, by features standards, it counts as a short documentary), made with Stop Killer Robots, explores autonomous weapons and whether machines should ever make life-or-death decisions. To bring the issue to life, we filmed a social experiment with real people, posing them increasingly difficult moral questions via a computer interface. The camera captures their hesitation, disagreement, and moments of doubt, turning abstract ethics into something immediate and human. It was this social experiment that lifted the film and made it really resonate with audiences.

Rather than lecturing, the film invites viewers to think along with the participants. By showing how hard these moral choices are even for humans, it becomes clear why coding ethics into a machine is impossible and why the conversation matters.

Ingredient 3: Goofiness

Another film that earns its place here is a Christmas ad we made with Dogs Trust. It was built around a line that has been around for decades: “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas.” Forty years on, the problem hadn’t gone away, which gave us a tricky storytelling challenge: how do you say the same thing again without it feeling trite?

The secret ingredient we used was humour. Together with our clients, we made the bold choice to sidestep dogs almost entirely. Rather than showing sad kennels or abandoned puppies, we swapped them for lifeless Christmas presents.

There was no need for guilt-tripping or emotional manipulation — humour did the heavy lifting. It invites the audience in and lets a familiar charity line land in a completely fresh and unexpected way.
 

Ingredient 4: Immersive authenticity

Telling a brand’s story through a real person is a well-worn storytelling device: follow someone on their day-to-day and use that to humanise an organisation or a product. It’s a popular approach but it can often feel shallow and inauthentic.

With The Man Behind Your Chocolate, made with Rainforest Alliance, we went in deep. Instead of spending a day in Côte d’Ivoire filming a few interviews and a bunch of b-roll, we spent weeks with Adrien and his family. We went to work with him, shared meals, and really got to know his life, his sense of humour, and his resilience. That time and attention shows on screen, and even 11 years later, to me, it remains one of our most successful case study films.

The secret ingredient was our passion for honest, immersive filmmaking. By investing in real relationships and letting the story unfold naturally, we gave a human face to cocoa farming and the people behind the chocolate we all enjoy.

Ingredient 5: Nerdy enthusiasm

Penguin tasked us to create a bold, playful and thought-provoking video to illuminate their enduring spirit – one that’s brought people together through the power of stories since 1935.

When a brand as iconic as Penguin opens up their archives to you, you don’t wait a single second to jump right in. We learned all about their groundbreaking origins, and Allen Lane’s audacious plan to bring books to the masses. We drooled over their pioneering graphic design principles. We discovered a huge amount about the impact of their books on culture and society.

When we re-surfaced, we knew what we wanted to do: capture the spirit of Penguin’s pages ‘through the pages’ themselves, creating a highly textural, collage-led animation. Shaped by our very real enthusiasm and passion for the brand – and the impact its books have had on our own lives – we were able to create a rich, layered piece of work with our hearts as well as our minds.

So, the full secret to success is? 

The truth is, there’s no magical recipe that’s guaranteed to make a brand film successful. Even if you include every single secret ingredient above (and that would be a very disjointed film indeed), there’s no telling what might resonate with audiences at any given moment. The only thing we know that works? Create films from our hearts, and tell stories that mean something to us. Because, when a film has been made with care, that sentiment is contagious.