Why Some Brand Videos Feel Like Ads and Others Feel Like People.

You can usually tell when someone has been told to say something again “but more naturally,” because there is almost nothing that will make a person less natural faster than telling them to be natural while six people stare at them.

This is one of the funny things about brand films because everybody says they want authenticity, but then we start writing exactly what the founder should say, how they should say it and sometimes even where they should pause, and suddenly the person who actually built the company sounds like they are reading the back of a brochure.

There is nothing wrong with scripting when the project needs it, especially for commercials or messaging that has to be precise, but if I am interviewing someone because their perspective matters, I actually want to hear their perspective.

I would rather ask why they started the company, what people misunderstand about the work, what almost made them quit, what they care about more than their competitors or when they realized something was actually working, because those answers usually sound like a person instead of a mission statement.

The solution is not throwing structure out completely because then we end up with a fourteen minute answer about how the company got its first printer in 2007.

Structure matters.

It just needs enough room inside of it for something real to happen.

A good brand film should still sound like the people who built the brand, because otherwise we could have saved everybody a lot of time and just filmed the About page scrolling slowly on a laptop.