How (and why) to “Go Hollywood” with your corporate videos

We recently helped to knock out a video for a client that really paid huge dividends; read: “landed more business.” Along the way, we often found ourselves leaning away from “corporate,” and toward “Hollywood,” in our approach to this video, which was being crafted for a very small audience: the C-Suite. 
 
The story of this video’s genesis, and then later, greater success, lends itself very nicely to a helpful article. So here we are. 
 
So what was the challenge?
 
Mind you, we’re under NDA, so we’ll be cloaking this story in anonymity. But the gist will remain. And it goes something like this: 
 
Our client—a consultancy—had recently wrapped an initial “quick-win” project for a client of theirs: a large, respected enterprise. Then one of the people on our client’s team—a very smart sales rep—had an idea. It went like this: 
 
This “quick win” which our client had just created for the big enterprise, was really only known, and appreciated, by the enterprise person who was sponsoring the project. Couldn’t we parlay this “quick win”—this foot-in-the-door—to a “bigger success”--i.e., a stay-in-and-grow—if only other people in the enterprise knew about it?
 
Sure, the sponsor was delighted with the project. But the project itself was complex, and very difficult for her to quickly explain to her superiors. (She, like us, wanted not only recognition for the great quick win, but to allow our consulting client to do more great, game-changing work.) So the idea of “Let’s make a quick video about this” (the sales rep’s suggestion), quickly took hold. 
 
That’s when we were called in. 
 
Dueling dashboards
 
The project in question here involved a series of business analytics sub-projects, which delivered unprecedented decision-making power, in the form of easy-to-read graphical dashboards. The idea of “dashboards” isn’t exactly revolutionary these days; what made these particular dashboards so sexy was the fact that they captured information which had previously been impossible to capture. (We won’t say how, here. That’s a trade secret of our client.) 
 
But there were a whole lot of dashboards. Each one was richer than the one before. Even a fast-paced video would require about 20 minutes to describe them all. 
 
Think. C-Suite. Do you really believe they’ll sit through a 20-minute video, describing dashboard after dashboard in detail? 
 
You’re right. They won’t. 
 
Thus the boundaries of this assignment. 
 
The movie vs. the trailer
 
An important ingoing consideration was: What should the run-time of this video be? The easy and obvious answer was “About two minutes.”
 
Two minutes! 
 
Impossible? If you take it literally, yes. If you take it creatively, no. 
 
Here’s how we structured the thing—and this is really the impetus for this article, because you can liberally steal from this structure, for similar assignments that will cross your plate, whether they’re videos, or PowerPoint decks, or RFP executive summaries, or whatever: 
 
The video first laid out, in decent detail, the initial challenge of this “quick-win” project: How could all of this un-capture-able data be captured? 
 
Then it quickly laid out the methodology, and set the stage for the main part of the video: An overview of all these sexy new dashboards. 
 
We say “all.” But that’s misleading. 
 
Here’s how it worked: We singled out the coolest, sexiest dashboard, and showed it first. We described it in detail, with sufficient video and screen-time to show it in action, to dive into its various live charts and graphs and really show off its whiz-bang technology. 
 
And from there, we switched gears. Now that we 1) had shown just how cool these dashboards can be, and 2) basically created “the halo effect” for the subsequent dashboards, we were able to 3) breeze through just the highlights of all the remaining ones. 
 
This wasn’t a problem. It was an asset. It was a “hit ‘em hard, then knock ‘em down again” moment. In the video, it’s just overwhelming, all this goodness! You totally understand what’s being presented—and then you’re wonderfully overwhelmed by just how much awesomeness there is. It actually accelerates as it goes! When “the lights come up,” you’ve got this sugar-rush high. You want more. 
 
Can you say “movie trailer”? 
 
Going viral
 
The “movie trailer” analogy is an apt one. The idea of a trailer is to get you to want more—indeed, to buy more, in the form of a ticket. 
 
Guess what the enterprise execs did? 
 
Yep. They bought more. So this frantically-knocked-out video—which, again, was originally intended for an audience of maybe a half-dozen people—paid for itself a zillion times over with follow-on work for our client consultancy. 
 
Here’s the nice little “icing moment”: The enterprise execs were so delighted with the little video (we wisely framed it as “Look at What Our Enterprise is Doing!” rather than “Look at What The Consultancy Did for Our Enterprise”), that they had it posted on the enterprise’s intranet, for all of its thousands of employees to see. The execs wanted to spread the love, and the excitement, and the enthusiasm. 
 
And how many of those employee-viewers will go on to become executives themselves, someday? At that enterprise... or another? Talk about icing the cake. 
 
Need help with that “Hollywood challenge”? Contact us. We help businesses with these types of projects all the time. We’d love to help you, too. 

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