Types of Medical Animations Marketers Need To Know About
Image Credit: Midjourney
Marketing in the healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and biotech industries requires the constant expansion of audiences by delivering rich and useful content. While it may sound intuitive, choosing the right visual medium to suit a story’s information density can be a huge challenge, particularly when describing scientific topics.
Video marketing has exploded as production technology has become more accessible, with many different forms available to biotech startups, pharmaceutical companies, and marketing agencies of all sizes. These range from fully cinematic medical animations with Hollywood-level production quality to whiteboard-style videos and animated motion graphics. It’s important to know the distinction between these types of medical marketing strategies and when they are most useful.
2D Motion Graphics
2D animation has been used across film and marketing for nearly a century. It all started with the great innovations by Walt Disney and his contemporaries and has proceeded through our Saturday morning cartoons into our LinkedIn feeds today. Over time, toon-style animation has become easier to produce, and today it’s ubiquitous.
2D, toon-style motion graphics are tremendously useful for communicating simple, digestible information in a way that is easy to understand and palatable to the mind. It generally has a fun and inviting tone, and because of its visual simplicity, it can be fast paced, which can also reduce costs when animation budgets are based on overall duration.
3D Animation
3D animation has become a mainstay of scientific communication over the last few decades and is used across many industries, including the entire pantheon of medical sciences. Some of the medical field’s toughest topics require thousands of words to explain and yet often need to be understood in a very short period of time.
Never is this more the case than when trying to explain a complex drug mechanism of action to a busy healthcare provider or investor audience. Detailed, accurate 3D animation can convey not only the core information but the scientific and biological context for the information. This makes stories accessible to audiences of widely varied backgrounds, from patients to Ph.D-level investigators. Further, because much of the context can be built into a scene rather than verbally explained, valuable audience attention can instead be focused on the core message.
With the help of scientific animation services from leading pharmaceutical marketing and medical animation studios, clients can produce videos that engage with audiences on a deeper level. This is critical to generate interest in their technologies and create a framework of understanding upon which further knowledge can be built through other media, such as their website.
Whiteboard Simulation
Whiteboard simulation is a modern concept in which a human hand is filmed drawing images of different concepts in time-lapse, along with separately recorded narration. It’s a fun way to quickly get across basic information in a more palatable and human way than simply splashing some illustrations across a webpage.
Whiteboard animation is perfect for clients with a simple message and a tight budget. They tend to be very easy to understand; however, the visuals are often minimalist, so audience attention is harder to maintain. Frequently, bigger stories need to be broken into smaller, bite-sized productions. There are numerous agencies that specialize in this type of video at very economical rates. Not every project needs the Hollywood treatment!
Medical marketers and scientific communications specialists need to understand types of medical animation styles so that they can best plan their communications strategies to fit their content and target their audience’s mindset. These methods are important to know about as the pharmaceutical and biotech industries continue to develop new marketing strategies.
Every communications professional responsible for marketing, investor relations, or public relations for their company should understand these animation styles so that they can use the best communications tool to convey their message.
By working with Microverse Studios, you’ll learn how the mathematics of storytelling and the effects of color palette, pacing, music, and even the shape of the visuals affect the audience’s interest and ability to retain and understand the information you need to convey. Our scientific and medical animators have the experience and skill to ensure that your content is rich and well-researched and that we’ve used precisely the right tool to tell your story.