High quality vs self-shot: why your athlete content doesn’t need a trade-off
Brand and athlete partnerships. For years, they’ve been a fantastic way for companies to meet their goals of growing awareness and building some brand love with audiences through high-quality athlete content.
That athlete content - traditionally consisting of polished interviews and cinematic action shots - has been quickly replaced by mountains of user-generated content guided by marketing managers desperate to have a presence on vertical content platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels.
Leticia Bufoni, Lore Bruggeman, Aldana Bertran & Margie Lyndidal self-shooting on the set of Skate the Museum
The problem? Too many brands follow this ‘lo-fi’ concept and take it too far, reducing visual quality, production value and any narrative. Publishing this ‘homemade’ look can reflect poorly on the brand itself, seemingly abandoning its quality output (both in production and storytelling) and potentially impacting the perception of the brand positioning, values or the product itself.
So how can brands produce quality athlete content with a self-shot feel (which we know audiences connect with), combined with the production value that delivers premium content for the brand across multiple platforms?
First, it’s about understanding why the user-generated style connects so well with audiences. Forget about who’s behind the idea of creating the content because just one word matters:
Authenticity.
Putting the audience experience first
Fans crave authentic experiences: content that provides unique access and insight into their favourite athletes. They want to be immersed in their world and embedded in their life and culture, not watching down from the stands. That’s what live sport is for.
The user-generated style delivers just that. The more relatable, everyday aesthetic breaks down barriers between production and viewer, fostering a sense of inclusivity, access and a deeper level of engagement as audiences see themselves reflected in the content.
“Adopting this style makes the viewer feel immersed, not shut off as a distant bystander.”
This approach is proven to be highly shareable, delivering for your content the most sought-after of commodities: attention.
When audiences resonate with the content, they are more likely to watch it to completion, engage, and share it around their networks. All this is good news for your organic reach.
But - and this is a big BUT - this doesn’t mean you’re just handing a phone to your athlete and telling them to shoot it themselves.
That’s because, and I’m speaking from a lot of experience here, it’ll be shit.
Danny MacAskill & Hans Ray from Do a Wheelie
Letting an athlete loose with just a phone usually results in one of two extremes: them shooting hundreds of clips like a child given a camera for the first time, or nothing because they weren’t sure what to capture, not confident or were too busy with training/competing/living.
So don’t worry. None of us creatives are out of a job just yet!
The most important thing still is to come up with the right idea that delivers an authentic user-generated experience that brings your fans closer, but with the quality of production, storytelling and action they now expect.
The result is content that can build audience retention, clearly deliver your messaging, engage a broad audience, and remain consistent with your brand quality and values.
We’ve been lucky to work with a few clients recently who came to us with this exact requirement and allowed us to bring athletes into the production to blend storytelling, action and authenticity.
Here’s just a couple…
Take four of the world’s best skaters and combine them with the iconic Natural History Museum. What an opportunity!
The challenge? To create a host of content across YouTube, Instagram Reels and TikTok, which could deliver a raw, authentic feel for core skate fans while also having broader appeal for Red Bull’s sports audience. We’d also need to tell the story of our four athletes getting the chance of a lifetime to turn a museum into a skatepark for the ultimate session.
So, how did we make the cut?
Taking the skaters, our Cut Media in-house dream team, 3x specialised skate filmmakers and a toy box full of brand new Canon cameras (everything from cine cams to vlog cameras and even remote-access PTZs), we were ready.
Mixing content shot by our team and the athletes gave us a genuine, authentic style, while we closed the film with a 60-camera array setup which captured our skaters jumping a raptor in the Hintze Hall; a ‘how the fuck did they do that’ shot that was like a stop motion from a 90s skate magazine.
All fuelled by a copious amount of Red Bull over four epic nights on set.
Nike X JD Sports: The Alpine Run Project
We’re currently working on this project, led by the inspirational John McAvoy, with support from Nike and JD Sports.
You can learn more about it here.
In a nutshell, we’re telling the story of John and 12 young people from inner cities across the UK as they go on a journey culminating at the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc in Chamonix.
Storytelling is at the heart of the project, yet young people are also the target audience. So, while we created a feature YouTube documentary, the big focus early doors was on 9:16 vertical content for Instagram and TikTok.
Our solution has been to adopt various techniques of capture. Shooting quality imagery and audio on our in-house 4k cameras (with a vertical guide for framing) and drones has been accompanied by taking our own iPhone on set, plus collecting self-shot content (accompanied by a strong brief) from our young people to tell their stories in their own words.
It’s been nothing short of inspirational.
Embracing the vertical content world and leveraging it to make audiences love your brand is a massive part of what makes our content strategy fly. Want to learn more? Click here to see what we do.
