The importance of sizzle reels: Your Agency's Ultimate Calling Card

In the fast-paced world of advertising and creative agencies, first impressions matter. Clients, partners, and industry peers often decide in mere seconds whether they’re interested in what you have to offer. That’s why a well-crafted sizzle reel isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s an essential tool in showcasing your agency’s identity, creativity, and capabilities in a matter of moments.

What Is a Sizzle Reel?

A sizzle reel is a short, dynamic video designed to capture attention and communicate a brand’s or agency’s essence. Think of it as a highlight reel — your agency’s best work distilled into a fast-paced, visually compelling format. It’s a fusion of work created, storytelling, branding, and proof of performance, and of course a pumping tune that get’s your head nodding.

Why Every Agency Needs One

1. Your Instant Elevator Pitch

People are busy, and attention spans are short. A sizzle reel allows you to communicate who you are and what you do in a visually engaging way. Whether you’re pitching to a new client, attracting top talent, or introducing your agency at an event, a sizzle reel gets your message across — quickly and memorably.

2. Show, Don’t Tell

You can talk about your creative prowess, innovative thinking, and award-winning work all day, but nothing proves it like seeing it in action. A sizzle reel lets your work speak for itself, demonstrating your expertise across different industries, platforms, and styles.

3. Sets the Tone for Your Brand

A well-produced sizzle reel isn’t just a collection of past projects — it’s a reflection of your agency’s personality, style, and values. The music, pacing, visual treatment, and messaging should align with your brand identity, making it a powerful branding tool in its own right.

4. A Door Opener for New Business

When prospective clients are considering agencies, they often browse websites and portfolios. A strong sizzle reel can be the difference between them digging deeper into your work or moving on to the next option. It creates excitement, builds credibility, and sets the stage for deeper conversations.

What Makes a Great Sizzle Reel?

• Concise & Impactful: Keep it short — ideally between 60–90 seconds. Every second should add value.

• Curated Content: Don’t include everything; focus on your most impressive, relevant, and recent work.

• Strong Narrative Flow: Even in a short format, storytelling matters. Ensure it has a rhythm and flow that keeps viewers engaged.

• High Production Quality: It’s a representation of your work, so make sure it’s polished, well-edited, and has a compelling soundtrack.

• Clear Branding: Your agency’s identity should be unmistakable. Use brand colors, typography, and messaging that align with your positioning.

At the end...

In today’s competitive creative landscape, a sizzle reel is more than just a montage of past projects — it’s a strategic tool that encapsulates the essence of your agency. Whether you’re winning over clients, attracting talent, or simply making a statement in the industry, a well-executed sizzle reel can be the ultimate calling card. If you don’t have one yet, now’s the time to start cutting. Tell me what you think about our reels on Merkle, DC and Dentsu Lab? happy to hear your thoughts!

The weight of words in digital design

Ever marvelled how some digital products seem more approachable, more human or even funny and engaging? When it’s just an interface with text or dialogue what makes the experience stand out as a good one? 

Tone of voice as a brand platform

The crucial differentiator in these cases is how and what the product is talking or presenting the content to the user. How to bring the brand feeling to a AI chat bot or a voice service like Amazon Echo? The brand must be reinterpreted as a tone of voice or apply one if one is already figured out. 

Some brands excel in the offline world with the way the tone of voice being a big part in the brand. One of my all time favourite is Innocent, the company that makes tasty smoothies and juices. On the packaging they make funny jokes and keep it light with a tongue in cheek tone of voice. 

So if innocent would be a chat bot, the transition would be pretty painless since the brand personality is so distinct.

One other great example is Tobias van Schneider’s app Authentic Weather. It trumps all the other weather apps with it’s snarky humorous ways it tells the current weather. The big difference is the tone of voice that makes it special. It seems it has a personality that our twisted sense of humour can connect to.

Why chat bots and digital virtual assistants need a personality?

The explosion in AI powered assistants and chat bots have challenged the UX designers to really make the experiences memorable and not just utilitarian. Apple has given Siri a bunch of jokes and comebacks that define her as a personality and it’s all about the context and tone of voice. The rest is in our imagination. Bots with a personality will connect to us in an emotional level and make us come back to them. 

When creating a bot we humans have to teach the AI to be more human, to reflect the tone of the brand. So it’s more a content creation task than anything else. Let’s keep it in mind that the  visible user interface is going to be replaced by touch and voice even by just text and when we design the next experience we use the tone in the content as a way to make a distinct brand experience.

How can a platform renewal change company culture?

DHL approached us to renew their DHL.com platform in full and during the discussions and estimations we recognised the need for really change the traditional approach for a big platform project. 

The DHL internal project team was ready for a change.

Instead of spending a year in just designing the experience and hammer the design through the political structure of the client, we took the agile road: Let’s design and build a beta site, and test this with real users and that voice of the DHL customer would help to drive the new portal into more customer centric direction.

This meant that we needed to design a system that would adapt of course to different screens but also that we couldn’t just go and design templates. We needed to create a design language for DHL that could be used in various different situations and templates. We decided to go with Brad Frost’s Atomic Design approach, that is a toolbox for creating a design system, all responsive and mobile first. 

The benefit is that when working with a design language or a design system, is that you can design and build elements and components that match to each other.  

This approach turned out to be a real winner in getting the refreshed brand into the digital platform and get the designs fast in the browser, where our front end designers were able to build the designs quickly as responsive prototypes. These helped the stakeholders really understand how the website was going to react in real devices. It also helped us to quickly try out different solutions straight in the HTML without the Photoshop ballet in between. The communication between designers and developers was crucial to the success of the approach.

With the new components the Business Unit website owners can create a multitude of different pages, since the templates are dynamic and can be built from different components just by combining as seen fit. This gives the editors more freedom and still keeping the websites on brand and consistent.

Drumming For The Social Good

On one Thursday I found myself on a plane to the Golden Drum Festival in Portorož, Slovenia.

Razorfish was invited to talk at the 22nd Festival with the theme “Transformation”. The topic is very close to the theme and message Razorfish has been talking in this year and the topic of the talk I was going to give was aptly named “Toolkit For Transformation”. The Festival is held in the beautiful Slovenian coast and the scenery was very nice at the hotel when I arrived.

Friday morning started the program with Jason Romeyko’s talk Curators In The Age Of Now. The talk focused on the modern age and it’s challenges and how to be a Creative Director in this age. He pointed out that creative direction was more like the curator at a museum, a person who has the guts and vision to pick from a vast pool of creative output the ones that make a statement and add to the overall story that the museum wants to tell with it’s exhibitions. I found this parallel very good.

He also set an example that to create good work you need to invest yourself and do good. He himself was pushing for Vangardist Magazine’s HIV+ awareness edition printed with HIV positive donated blood and he believed in the idea so much that he signed a paper that he’d lose he’s job at Saatchi & Saatchi if the campaign would crash and burn. Of course it didn’t. The project was one of the Grand Prix winners this year.

Another great talk was Harjot Singh bringing us to the basics of good marketing. Through common sense he outlined the military past of the Madison Avenue era of advertising and leading us to the age of Meaningful Marketing. A very fun and real talk.

My talk went smoothly and was a great to talk about the shifts in the industry to come and how as creatives we can prepare for the shifts.

The day ended with a massive award ceremony where the majority of the winners had a real social aspect and a wish to help out the ones the campaign involved. From Turkey the Vodafone Red Light Application 2.0 would help women that suffered domestic violence and from Serbia “Button for Help” tried to take on the issue of human trafficking with a button that helps the victims to send her data to border police and Interpol. The jury did take stand for socially good campaigns this year and it’s refreshing to see that advertising can have a positive impact on people’s lives while being successful campaigns to the companies that created them.

After the ceremony the final party went on with local electronic musicians showcasing the best beats.

Creativity: Excitement and Despair

There’s a notion that creativity is something we’re born with. Some people have it and some people don’t. Every day we hear people saying “I’m not the creative type,” and in the office world there’s still a divide between creatives and non-creatives. Creativity is a process, not an aptitude.

We love to put people into boxes from the start. Boys play with cars and like the colour blue, while girls go for dolls and prefer pink. To debunk this, let’s look at us humans. We’re born as creative beings: we sing, write, dance, cook, build, design, solve problems, and the way we embrace the unknown has been an important factor in our evolution.

We create by remixing

We have this romantic notion that creative ideas are born out of the blue, but in fact they’re remixed and evolved versions of ideas that we’ve been exposed to over the course of our lives. We mimic, transform and combine ideas to give them new life. We have an unconscious thought process that takes something we’ve experienced and turns it into something new.

The process of creating something begins with intense excitement and energy about the new thing or idea we have in our heads. But the next steps quickly bring us to despair. How do I do this? How will I solve this puzzle? What’s needed here? You have to make the decision to just do it, to approach the challenge head first. Being creative means you’re willing to take risks and embrace the failure and uncertainty that comes with them. Doing something new is seldom the path of least resistance, so be prepared to fail. Don’t get married to your ideas, but be prepared to let go. If someone criticises your idea, it doesn’t mean they’re criticising you. It’s all part of the creative process.

"Why do we fall, sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up." - Alfred to Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins.

Getting past the blank page and reaching insight and results is easier if you sketch, take notes, go outside, wander, give yourself time to think and breathe. This incubation stage is important, taking distance from the task on hand and returning to it later on with even more creative ideas.

Creativity isn’t worth anything if ideas are not realised, so doing the actual work is one of the most important phases in the process. It’s the time to transform ideas into a presentable form. Ideas are fragile, so it’s important to craft the message you want to get across with care. Too many great ideas are never realised because they’re packaged or presented the wrong way. 

Creative Confidence

So if everyone is creative, why do some claim to be more creative than others? Well, creativity is like a muscle, you have to train to get better. Push actively for new solutions, apply design thinking methodology to problems, draw, do mind maps, whatever is your medium. I’ve been reading Tom and David Kelley’s Creative Confidence and the main point of the book is that everybody is creative, you just have to find it in you. Once you grasp that you are creative, a whole new world opens up to you. So the next time you see someone working on something with Microsoft Excel, you might be surprised to find out what it can do in creative hands.