M2G Blog

Corporate

I have been producing “corporate video” for almost 30 years now, and with the paradigm shifts in technology and the web, I found myself thinking, “what exactly defines corporate video anyway?” From a traditional standpoint, corporate video is always “non-broadcast” and is produced by an organization to communicate something. There are so many uses for video within an organization, and those uses are growing. Most people think of training, marketing and promotion, which does indeed cover a lot of it, but certainly not everything. Now video is being used to communicate within an organization nearly as much as it’s being used to communicate out to consumers and clients. And of course, with the web, any video has the potential of being viewed by millions of people, not just a few.
Ten years ago when the web really had taken over, I was beginning to think there would be less work for media production professionals. I thought training and other communications would be done primarily with websites, that contained little video. I’m glad I was wrong about that. The web, and watching high-quality video on computers, has expanded the need for video content. Although much of that content is home movie stuff, there is also plenty of well produced media on the web. Productions that were originally designed for TV, or meetings, is now being re-purposed for the web, and our clients know that the quality needs to be as good now as ever before. Putting a poorly produced video clip on your website is just as bad as printing an ugly marketing brochure. You don’t want to do it. Image is important, and so is everything on your website.
So the means of distributing corporate video has changed from tapes to digital movies, but the fundamentals are still the same. Well thought out and well produced video does make a difference, which is why we spend so much of our time talking strategically with our clients about how they are using their video content before we go about producing it.
Lately we have found ourselves producing video that has to play in two very diverse places, a live event with a 40 foot screen, and on the company website. Same video, but with a very different viewing experience. That gets tricky when you have to make editorial decisions, because you have to make sure that it looks good on a big screen and in a small window on someone’s computer. Shot composition, graphics and sound all have to be considered carefully if you are making one video for multiple playback venues. But that is the fun part of corporate video nowadays. More viewers, who want and expect better quality. Sound good to us…