My Video Content Crystal Ball
- Keira Maloney
- Jul 22
- 4 min read
I did something pretty nerdy this week.
I read the entire Film Supply commercial filmmaking trend report.
About halfway through I stopped reading it as a photographer and started reading it as someone who spends her whole working life inside the brands of salons and clinics all over Australia, and I believe a lot of what it says is coming for our industry. Hell, some of it's already here.
So here it is - what I believe the world's biggest brands are about to do with their content, translated into what it actually means for you and your salon over the next twelve months. Five predictions. No photographer or videographer jargon. LFG.
1. Real clients beat models.
The single loudest theme in the whole report: audiences trust documentary-style content. Real people, real locations, unscripted moments. Not actors. Certainly not perfection.
Now add the thing nobody in beauty wants to say out loud, feeds are filling up with AI-generated faces including skin that's never existed and hair that's never been touched by humidity, and your clients can tell, they can ABSOLUTELY tell.
Which means the brands that win this year won't be the ones with the glossiest content. They'll be the ones showing actual clientswith real skin, mid-appointment, laughing in the chair with foils in. The consultation. The reveal. The real reaction, not the posed one.
Your regulars are your best campaign.
So, prediction one: the salons brave enough to show real clients in a documentary style format will grow.
2. One good shot will beat fifteen fast cuts.
The filmmakers have a phrase for this and I love it: "keep it stupid cinematic." Meaning, stop with the whip transitions and the seventeen fast paced angles. Hold one beautiful, intentional shot and let it breathe. We've all been told to make our reels faster, busier, louder, and meanwhile the big brands are going the other way.
Picture it: one slow shot of a colour being rinsed. Steam. Hands. That's it. That's the reel.
In a feed full of visual noise, stillness is what will stop the thumb. Restraint reads as confidence, and confidence is exactly what someone wants to see before they hand themselves over to you.
3. The camcorder look is back.
VHS grain. 8mm texture. That slightly soft, home-video look. The report calls it "analog aesthetics" and it's everywhere in commercial work right now.
Why? Because your clients, mostly women in their 30s and 40s, grew up on it. It's the texture of their actual memories. And after years of pristine, filtered everything, imperfect footage feels human, trustworthy, even.
Same goes for sound: late-90s and early-2000s music is the nostalgia trigger of the moment. The songs playing when your clients were getting their hair done for their school formal. Think Lana Del Rey circa 2012.
So: behind-the-scenes of your salon shot camcorder-style. Team night out on grainy video. A throwback track under your next reel. It'll feel like a memory, not an ad. That's the point.
4. Your team becomes the story, not just you.
Brands are moving away from the single-hero narrative and into ensemble storytelling. Multiple people, multiple routines, woven into one bigger picture.
For a salon that's gold, because a salon IS an ensemble. The junior who is best on ground for making coffees. The front desk person who knows the flow of every therapist in the clinic. They all have a story and a narrative.
People don't just book a salon for a service, they book a room they want to be in.
Show them the room and the people in it.
Prediction four: "meet the team" stops being a dusty website page and becomes the actual content strategy. Professional looking reality TV style content with storylines is about to be everywhere.
5. Content gets built for the split screen and the timelapse.
Two formats the report says are about to be everywhere:
Split screens, two or 3 landscape frames running at once. Your treatment happening on top, the finished result underneath. Consultation on one side, the team at work on the other. Audiences raised on TikTok read these fluently now, and they let you say two things in fifteen seconds.
And dynamic timelapses, not the static phone-in-the-corner kind. Moving ones. Your whole salon day, open to close, compressed into twenty seconds. A full colour transformation with the camera actually travelling. It turns an ordinary Tuesday into something cinematic.
Both of these need to be planned at the shoot, not discovered in the edit. (She says, pointedly, as the person who plans your shoots.)
Here's the thing about all five of these - and I promise this isn't just the photographer talking - none of them are about better equipment or bigger budgets. Every single trend points the same direction: more human, more real, more you.
Which is either a relief or terrifying, depending on how comfortable you are being seen, but that's a note for another day.
The brands with the money have done the research, this is where content is going, the hair and beauty businesses that get there first are going to have a very healthy twelve months of social media engagement.
And if you want images and content built for exactly this - real clients, real team, split-screen ready, the lot - well, as I always say, I know a gal.
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