Five Lessons From A Year Of Brand Work

It's been a useful year. Five different industries, dozens of projects, hundreds of shoot hours. The work has stretched the practice in ways I didn't expect when the year began, and the lessons that have stuck are the ones worth writing down before the next year buries them.

Here are the five.

1. The brief still decides everything

I started the year saying this and ended the year more convinced. Every project that performed well had a strong brief. Every project that underperformed had a weak one. The correlation isn't subtle.

A strong brief answers four questions before any kit moves: what does this content need to do, who is it for, where will it live, and how will we know it worked. Most weak briefs skip one or more of those, usually the last. "We just want it to feel cinematic" is the answer when the questions haven't been asked. The strong-brief work this year had measurable outcomes attached to it from the start, which made the production decisions sharp and the post-production sign-offs fast.

The lesson going into next year: spend more pre-production time, not less. Even on small projects.

2. Anonymity has improved the work

A counter-intuitive one. Most of my case study work this year ran through agencies, which meant naming end clients in public-facing content created conflict-of-interest exposure. So the case studies got anonymised — generic framing, sector-only, no specific names.

What surprised me was that the writing got better once the names came out. Without the pressure to make the client look good, I could focus on what actually changed in the project — the strategic shift, the production decision, the unexpected outcome. Readers didn't seem to care about the names. They cared about the lesson.

Going into next year, I'm planning to lean further into this. Anonymous case studies, structural lessons, no logos. The work speaks louder when the brand isn't being marketed.

3. Vertical is no longer optional

A year ago I was still treating vertical as a derivative format — capture for horizontal, crop for vertical in post. By mid-year I'd flipped it. Vertical-first capture, with horizontal added during the same shoot for the assets that needed both.

The shift was forced by the audience. Across every brand I worked with, the vertical content outperformed the horizontal version of the same material — usually by 2x to 4x on engagement, often more on completion rate. Audiences are watching where they're watching, and that's vertical, on phones, with thumbs ready to scroll.

The shoots that came out best this year were the ones where vertical was treated as the primary frame. Compositions worked. Subjects sat naturally in the crop. The final cuts felt purpose-built for the channels they lived in. The shoots where vertical was an afterthought — even when the horizontal hero film looked great — produced weaker social cuts that quietly underperformed.

Going into next year: vertical-first, every project, no exceptions.

4. Retainers outperform one-off projects, by a lot

I started the year quoting one-off projects. I ended the year preferring retainers. The maths is straightforward: a retainer relationship lets pre-production accumulate over time. By month three of a retainer, the partner already knows the brand, the audience, the channels, and the sales rhythm. By month six, the production is faster and sharper than any one-off engagement could be.

The clients on retainer this year produced consistently better content than the clients who commissioned individual films. Same kit, same craft, sharper output. The difference was institutional knowledge.

For next year, I'm structuring more engagements as quarterly or six-month retainers from the start, with clear exit clauses. The fixed-project model still works for hero films and one-off campaigns, but the engine for everything else lives in the retainer.

5. Saying no improved the practice more than saying yes

About a third of the discovery calls I took this year ended with me telling the prospect they didn't need what I do. Either the brief was too small, or the budget didn't match the work, or the brand wasn't ready, or the project shape wasn't a fit. Each "no" felt expensive in the moment.

It wasn't. The practice tightened because of those calls. The leads that did proceed were better-qualified, better-aligned, and easier to deliver against. The relationships that started with an honest disqualification often turned into referrals — prospects who weren't a fit themselves but knew someone who was. And the projects I would have taken on a less disciplined year, the ones that would have stretched the practice in the wrong direction, didn't happen.

Saying no to wrong-fit work is the most underrated tool in a freelance practice. The temptation, especially in slower months, is always to say yes to keep the calendar full. The brands and partners who said no to me in the past — referring me on when I wasn't right for their brief — are the ones I respect most. I'm trying to do the same.

What's coming next year

Three things on the priority list for the next twelve months: more retainer relationships, more writing, and a tighter pre-production process with published templates and checklists as free downloads.

Thanks for reading along this year. The work has been genuinely interesting, and the next year of it should be too.

If you're scoping content work for the new year and want to talk through it before any kit moves — start a conversation. The first 30 minutes is free, and the most useful part of any project.