The corporate video is dead.

It my all be very well creating a series of corporate videos, but getting anybody to watch them is quite another matter. Approximately 48 hours of video is being uploaded to YouTube every minute, so there’s plenty of competition out there.

The trick with video is to make it relevant, engaging and memorable. I work with a number of technology companies, often with products to sell that are difficult to differentiate form the competition. Do I really want to see two men in suits discuss the relative merits of a particular piece of technology? Does anybody?

Recently this issue came about with a large manufacturer that wanted to show off an environmentally friendly printer. The product manager was armed with a long and verbose presentation followed by a video of a man talking to camera. He was good, but it didn’t work.

Our team came back with a story board – an animated child with pigtails walking into her dad’s office and proceeding to tell all of the staff off, one by one, for the different aspects of office mistakes that were wasteful or environmentally unfriendly, or both. The only thing she approved of was the printer.

The client loved it, because we were able to bring out all the relevant points of the product in a relevant, engaging and memorable way. And only relevant and engaging video works.