What to include in a company video (and what you can cut)

On March 6, 2012, a small American company posted a video shot in a warehouse on YouTube. On screen is the founder, Michael Dubin, walking between the shelves and talking about razor blades. In the first hour the website crashed under the traffic. In the next 48 hours about 12,000 people signed up for the service. The video had cost $4,500.

The company was Dollar Shave Club, and that video is still one of the examples people cite most when they talk about company videos. It's usually remembered for its humor. It's worth watching for a different reason: it contains very few of the things a company usually puts in its own.

What does a company video need to include?

Less than you'd think, but in a precise order.

Who you are and who you're for, said right away. One sentence the viewer could repeat to a colleague. If after ten seconds a viewer still doesn't know what the company does, the rest of the video works against it.

The problem, seen by the person who has it. Not “we offer integrated logistics solutions,” but the truck that shows up late and the customer who calls three times. The problem told from the customer's side is the part of the video where viewers recognize themselves.

One piece of proof, shown. A product doing something on camera, a real customer describing a result, a number that can be checked. Viewers skip the claims they can't see (“we're reliable,” “we put passion into it”).

The people. The faces of the people who work at the company, ideally busy with what they really do and not lined up posing.

A single ask at the end. Visit the website, book a trial, call. One, not four.

Why do so many company videos look alike?

Because they all follow the same outline: an aerial shot of the headquarters, hands at work in slow motion, the founder telling how it all began, the values written on screen, the client logos, the company logo on a white background. Each of these scenes makes sense on its own. Lined up, they produce a video anyone in the industry could sign.

As we read it, the reason is that almost all these videos describe the category, not the company. They show what a company of that type does, and in doing so they put viewers in a position to compare it with others of the same type, almost always on price. It's the same mechanism we describe in our guide to Category Design: whoever presents themselves in their industry's words gets judged by their industry's criteria. If a video seems interchangeable with a competitor's, it's often one of the signs you're competing in the wrong category.

What goes in the first few seconds?

The most important things, because part of the audience won't see the rest. Wistia, a platform that hosts business videos and measures how they're watched, reports that videos under one minute are watched for an average of 52% of their length. Put another way: roughly one person in two sees what's in the second half of a short video.

Google reaches a similar conclusion for YouTube advertising. Its guidelines, called ABCD (grab attention, show the brand, build a connection, say what to do), recommend showing the product or logo within the first five seconds and bringing it back during the video, instead of saving it for the last shot. Kantar, hired by Google to validate them, analyzed more than 11,000 ads; Google concludes from this that ads following these guidelines have on average a 30% higher likelihood of short-term sales and a 17% higher long-term brand contribution. These are estimates produced by a model and commissioned by the company that sells the ad space, so they should be taken as a sense of direction, not a promise.

For a company video the practical consequence is simple: the founding story, if it's needed, comes later. The opening is for the reason the viewer should stay.

Does a company video need to work without sound?

Yes, and people almost always find out too late. In 2019 Verizon Media and Publicis Media surveyed 5,616 US adults aged 18 to 54: 69% said they watch video in public with the sound off. The same survey found that 80% of people who use captions have no hearing problems.

A video built entirely on someone's voice, with no subtitles and images that say nothing on their own, is for part of the audience a silent video of people moving their mouths. The test to run before delivering it is to watch it with the sound off and ask whether you can still tell what the company does.

What was in the Dollar Shave Club video?

A question and a calculation. The video asks the viewer: “Do you like spending $20 a month on brand-name razors?” And it answers itself: “Nineteen go to Roger Federer.” Nineteen of those twenty dollars go to the tennis player, at the time the face of Gillette's advertising. The company's offer started at $1 a month plus shipping.

That one line holds almost everything a company video needs. There's the problem seen by the customer: I pay too much and I don't know why. There's the enemy, without needing to name it. And above all there's a redefinition of what's being bought: not a better blade, but an end to the markup paid for other people's advertising, with the razor delivered to your door every month. Dollar Shave Club didn't try to beat Gillette on blades, where it would have lost. It moved the conversation onto ground where Gillette, given how it was built, couldn't follow.

What's missing is the aerial shot of the headquarters, the founding story, the values, the headcount. On July 19, 2016, Unilever bought the company for a sum the press reported at around $1 billion.

What can you cut from a company video?

Everything that fails this test: if we copied it into our closest competitor's video, would anyone notice? Generic footage of the plant, words like quality, passion and excellence, a parade of client logos with no result behind them, the company's history from its founding year: usually not, nobody would notice.

At Project Mantra we see this as the first job of a company video, before any shot: finding the sentence about you that a competitor couldn't say. If that sentence isn't there, no footage can replace it. If it is, the video often gets shorter on its own.

Before the shoot, the script Michael Dubin had written for the Dollar Shave Club video was four pages long. According to Entrepreneur's account, the director, Lucia Aniello, started her work by helping him cut it down.