Corporate and Industrial Videos

Corporate videos are often seen as dull and uninspiring- even by those that need them.

But they don’t have to be…

You still have an audience you want to reach and engaging them on an emotional or intellectual level is just as important with a corporate video as it is with a fiction film. And story is the key.

Corporate videos, at first glance, may not seem like they have or need a story- they’re there to inform, educate and engage, after all, rather than entertain. But things are made much more effective when you include storytelling elements like relatable characters, emotional hooks and narrative progression…

Case Study - IRI Recruitment Video

IRI provide sales data analytics for major retail businesses and have a number of tools and software platforms they sell to help their clients process the vast amounts of information they work with.

They wanted a simple video they could put on their website and push on social media to aid their upcoming recruitment drive. For many potential new employees, big data might seem like a daunting environment in which to work, so IRI wanted to break down that barrier and make it feel accessible. They also wanted to encourage people with more industry experience to join them and wanted to highlight their career development programmes and flexibility as an employer. Above all, they wanted to emphasise that IRI was a great place to work.

In our experience as filmmakers, the best way to make an effective recruitment video is to focus on the people- both the potential employees watching and the people already working at IRI. This way, the employees could share their personal stories of working at the company and our audience could find them and their experiences relatable. The video would essentially be a series of PTCs (Pieces To Camera) where the employees talk about what they do and what they like about working there. 

It was important that they do this in their own words rather than try to read from a script or fit in as many corporate buzzwords as possible. This is often something that corporate clients struggle with since years of marketing training has taught them that keywords and phrases are important to brand identity, but with video it’s necessary to minimise it so that the individuals come across as natural and honest as possible. There’s no bigger turn-off for an audience than someone who’s spouting jargon in a cadence that isn’t theirs. 

With the help of the client, we pulled together a varied group of people from across the business to represent the broad spectrum of people working at IRI. The rest of the video was made up of sequenced B-roll- supporting footage of the environment and the people that work there, including the interviewees.

By focusing on the people, we were essentially presenting characters to the audience and just like in a fiction film, we wanted the audience to find these characters relatable and honest and thus empathise with their experiences and points of view, so that they came away thinking that IRI would be a great place for them to work as well.

Their recruitment drive was a resounding success, including a huge turnout for their careers open day, and the video was incorporated into a number of their job adverts for major recruitment platforms. And because of the person-centric focus of the piece, the video can likely be used again on future campaigns without the need to make changes or re-edit.

CASE STUDY - NRAS RAAW CAMPAIGN VIDEO

The National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society, like most charities, wanted any video they commissioned to raise public awareness and ultimately drive fundraising. But they had an issue- the disease they were trying to raise awareness of and funds for - Rheumatoid Arthritis - is often mistaken for the much more common and less debilitating condition, Osteoarthritis. As a result, one of the preconceptions the general public has is that arthritis only happens to the elderly, but Rheumatoid Arthritis can happen to anyone at any age and it’s this phrase (#AnyoneAnyAge) which was driving the charity’s new marketing campaign, particularly over their Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Week. As such, when we were approached to make a new campaign video, this became the primary message.

The video was to be based around a number of interviews with people living with RA and representing a range of ages and backgrounds. Prompted by open questions, each interviewee would talk about their condition and how it has affected their life in their own words, telling their own story. NRAS also wanted to engage the audience and play with their expectations, not telling the viewer what the disease was until the very end, so the audience could only judge the condition based on the interviewees’ experiences. This would keep the audience’s attention and make them realise how serious RA is, dispelling their expectations upon the reveal.

Like many small to medium-sized charities, NRAS had a limited budget for this campaign video and this meant we had to get creative with the format. The budget wouldn’t allow for multiple location shoots- for the interviews and any supporting B-roll footage- so the interviews needed to be shot on a single day in a studio environment. To keep within their budget, we decided to film all the interviews against greenscreen which allowed us the flexibility to change the style of background later. We wouldn’t be able to create a realistic composite this way (that would require matching the lighting to a predetermined background), but something more stylised would work well. It would also allow us to bring in photographs behind the interviewees in lieu of location B-roll to support the stories. While this approach was largely born out of budgetary compromise, it had the added benefit of focusing the video in on the interviewees and what they were saying.

And what the interviewees were saying was the whole story of the video. We got lots of impassioned, erudite responses about living with the condition. Some of these stories were surprising (such as not being able to have children due to the medication), some of them were heartbreaking (losing your youthful dreams of playing sport professionally because of the condition), but all of them were real and honest. Honesty is important in a video like this. The interviewees need to be speaking in their own words- if they are trying to say something scripted or say things in a certain way, it’ll usually come across as false and the effect can be disastrous for the brand overall.

Two edits were produced- a 2min 20 sec version for direct upload to Twitter, Facebook and other video platforms and a 60sec edit for Instagram. Both versions used the same story, although the longer version went into more detail and covered more story beats. The videos went out as part of Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Week, the charity’s major campaign slot and the response was extremely positive.