Corporate Videos Can Be Worth Every Penny

A while back, Steve Crescenzo asked this question on his blog: “Is corporate video a waste of money?”

I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the people who do corporate video do it because it’s fun. Because it’s so different than uploading copy to the intranet or producing a print publication. But that if you held a gun to their head, they’d admit that, while the corporate video is fun to do, it’s probably not worth the money it costs to do it.

Galloping to video’s defense came my old friend Dave Gardner of Visions West Productions, who responded that the format is better than prose for –

1. Inspiring and motivating. A well-crafted video is just like a feature film. The messenger controls the pacing and mood. Artful combination of music, voice and image can elicit an emotional response in an audience. Rarely do hearts race or hands clap after reading a memo. Through video, employees, investors, the public or other audiences can really catch the excitement of an executive’s or company’s vision or product.

2. Establishing credibility. Employees are the most skeptical audience around, and they know spin when they read it. Any company can direct a writer to pen rhetoric, even lies, and then print and distribute same. Only careful fact-checking can establish their veracity. Certainly an executive can appear on-camera in a video and deliver the same spin, but it is much more difficult to conceal a lie when your audience can look you in the eye. That’s the most common reason clients ask me to put their executives on tape for employee consumption — believability. Executives who are natural-born communicators are trusted by audiences when they can be seen and heard.

Dave, forgive me for editing you a little — after all these years, I just can’t help myself — but I’m going to add a third thing:

3. Telling a complex story. That whole “picture’s worth a thousand words” business is true.

Example:

Dave and I last worked together in 2003, when I was searching for a more (1) compelling, (2) credible and (3) accessible way to communicate Belo‘s strategy of media convergence. Convergence had become an overused buzz word in our industry, and investors’ eyes were beginning to glaze over when we told our story with the conventional PowerPoint.

Dave and I responded by writing and producing a video that won the IABC Gold Quill in 2004. Called A Day in the Life of Belo [wmv download], the eight-minute video shows how Belo’s media companies work together to make synergies happen.

A MediaPost reporter who turned up at a screening of the video wrote this review:

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION – Kudos to Belo, the Dallas-based multimedia company, which showed an eight-minute video, “A Day in the Life of Belo,” during the CSFB conference. Belo’s got an interesting story to tell, how its TV, cable, newspaper and Internet properties work in connection with each other in places like Dallas and the Pacific Northwest. The video was pretty powerful, even if it would make newspaper traditionalists go into shock. The overnight news-gathering functions in Dallas, for instance, are handled by one central desk serving the newspaper, TV station, Internet and cable news channel. Say what you will, but it’s a smart way of using resources in a — how shall we say it — truly media agnostic way.

A well-conceived video can achieve things that other corporate communications vehicles simply cannot.

Dave also points out that video needn’t be pricey or time-consuming today:

Effective video still requires the hand of an experienced pro, but no longer is it a necessity in every case to schedule a large crew, dubbing and editing facilities weeks or months in advance. Today I can make a quick revision to a video and burn a new DVD for a client between morning coffee and breakfast. I’m actually taping a CEO at the O’Hare Admirals Club tomorrow during a stopover. I’ll edit and author the DVD when I get back to my office on Friday (a day delay because I have a shoot in Boston Thursday), and employees across North America will have access to his message on the Intranet next Monday and have DVDs on Tuesday.

If you’re considering a corporate video, here are some useful tips from Marie-Claire Ross.

Oh, and for grins: Here’s a fun corporate video from a Dutch company called MindShare, sung to the tune of Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money.” Some have trashed it as the “worst corporate video ever,” but I think it works. I can guarantee the audience loved it.

Technorati tags: Video, PR, Public Relations, Corporate Video, Corporate Communications, Video Production, Marketing

Tags: dallas pr, dallas public relations, Video news release, vnr