I sat through a video shoot last year that cost more than my first car.
Proper studio. Lighting rig. A director who kept saying "beautiful" after every take. We were all very excited. The finished video got 34 views. Fourteen were the production team. Three were my mum.
That failure sent me down a rabbit hole I still haven't climbed out of. I read everything I could find about why video works and why it doesn't. And somewhere in all of it, I came across an idea from Alfred Hitchcock that reframed the whole thing for me.
Hitchcock had a rule about framing. The size of something in a shot should be proportional to its narrative importance at that moment. If a gun matters more than the character holding it, the gun gets more of the frame. The camera tells the audience what to care about.
Most business video breaks this rule in one consistent way. The company fills the frame. Their story, their values, their team of passionate professionals. The buyer sits off-screen, wondering if any of it applies to them.
What's actually in the frame
I've watched a lot of business video over the past few years. The bad ones are more instructive than the good ones.
The pattern is almost always the same. A brand film opens with a drone shot. Music swells. Someone senior talks to camera about origins and mission. The production is often beautiful. And the one thing it has no room for, in all its beauty, is the buyer.
There's a concept in The Visual Sale — one of the better books I've read on this — called the 80% video. The idea is this: your sales team gets asked the same questions on every call. Cost. Fit. What goes wrong. Who it's not right for. Those questions account for roughly 80% of pre-sale conversations.
Most companies hide those answers behind a "contact us" button. They make buyers schedule a call to find out whether the call is even worth having.
A video that answers those questions honestly, on camera, without hedging, does something remarkable. It gets watched. Not because it's beautifully produced. Because the buyer can see themselves in it.
Contact us to find out if we're right for you
Here's exactly who we're a good fit for — and who we're not
The video that told me not to buy from them
Three years ago I watched a video from a managed services company on YouTube. Eight minutes long. The whole thing was about exactly who they were the wrong fit for. Small businesses, they said. Short-term contracts. Anyone who needed a lot of hand-holding in the first six months.
I wasn't their target customer. I watched every minute of it.
What they were doing, whether they'd have called it this or not, is what The Visual Sale calls radical transparency: the willingness to openly discuss price, problems, and who your offering doesn't suit. It sounds like a way to lose customers. In practice it's the fastest way to build trust with the ones you actually want, because it signals you have nothing to hide.
Vulnerability isn't a risk in video. It's the thing that makes everything else stick.
The book describes vulnerability as the "magic wand" of video storytelling. Not as a nice-to-have. As the thing that glues every other element together. Watching someone share a failure or admit a limitation triggers genuine neurochemical trust responses. We connect with honesty in a way that slick production can't manufacture.
The brand film that cost more than my first car had none of that. It had confidence. It had polish. It was absolutely watertight.
Nobody trusted it.
Whose story is being told
There's one more thing that changed how I think about this.
Marcus Sheridan, who wrote They Ask, You Answer and appears throughout the research in this space, talks about what he calls the Robin to Batman effect. The customer is Batman. The brand is Robin. Robin doesn't save the day. Robin equips the hero and gets out of the way.
Most business video makes the company Batman. The founder's journey, the company's growth, the team's passion. The buyer watches and appreciates. Then clicks away.
The customer is the protagonist. The brand is the person who shows up at the right moment with the right knowledge and then steps aside.
The most effective video I've seen does the opposite. The customer is the protagonist. They had a problem, they found a partner, something changed. The company appears as the knowledgeable guide — present, helpful, but never the point.
Here's our story — where we came from and what we believe in
Here's what happened for someone with exactly your problem
What the camera should actually point at
Hitchcock's rule, applied to business video, turns into a simple question: whose story is in the frame?
If it's yours, you've already lost most of the people watching. If it's theirs — their problem, their fear, their question, their potential outcome — you've got them.
The practical version of this is straightforward. Write down the five questions you're asked most before anyone signs a contract with you. The real ones. The uncomfortable ones about price and problems and what happens when things go wrong. Not the questions you wish they asked. The ones that come up on every call.
Those are your first five videos.
Shoot them without a script. People reading scripts sound like they're reading scripts, and buyers pick it up in seconds. The Visual Sale has a rule it calls "don't stop": roll the camera and keep going even when you stumble, because the stumbles are part of what makes it feel real. Nobody trusts a human being who never hesitates.
In the digital age, authenticity trumps Hollywood-style production every time.
— The Visual Sale
Buyers will watch 20 minutes of unpolished video if it answers a question they're lying awake with. They'll click away from a beautifully shot brand film in eight seconds.
The camera tells the audience what matters. The only question worth asking before any shoot is: are we pointing it at the right thing?
