"Anyone can make a video" is the most expensive assumption in finance marketing

We saw it over and over.

Clients would come to us wanting videos, with almost no thought behind them. The reasoning was always the same. Anyone can make a video, so let us just make a few.

No plan for where they would sit. No thought about how they fit the bigger picture. Just content for the sake of content.

It is an easy assumption to fall into, because the first half of it is true. Anyone can make a video now. The cameras are cheap, the editing software is free, and half the marketing team already shoots better footage on a phone than we could get out of a studio twenty years ago.

The assumption that follows is the expensive one. That because making a video is easy, knowing what the video is for must be easy too.

The question they had skipped

So we started with the question they had skipped.

Not what video should we make, but what is this video actually meant to do?

Where does it sit in the way you communicate? How does it stay flexible when the market moves? How does it reach more people and open more doors with your clients?

The first time you ask that in a meeting, there is usually a pause. Not because the answer is hard, but because nobody has been asked. The brief came down as a deliverable, and the deliverable got treated as the plan.

Video as a slightly livelier PDF

Here is what was really going on underneath.

Most of these firms had only ever seen video as flat. A slightly livelier PDF. Something you make once, put on a page, and link to in an email.

Not as a real strategy. Not as something that could do far more than the written research and email updates they had always leaned on.

You can see it in how the work gets commissioned. The video is signed off as a one off project with a start and an end, the way you would commission a brochure. Nobody asks what happens to it in month three, or what the second one should say given how the first one landed, because there was never meant to be a second one.

Treated that way, video is genuinely poor value. It costs more than a PDF and does roughly the same job. The firms concluding video does not work for them are usually right about their own experience of it.

What changes when it clicks

That question changed how they saw the whole thing.

Once a firm starts asking what a video is meant to do, the answers stop being about video at all. They are about the gaps in how the firm communicates.

We would hear things like this. Our research is excellent but only about forty people read it properly. Our client updates go out quarterly and the market moves weekly. We have a fund that nobody can explain in a meeting without a whiteboard. Our best salesperson has a thirty minute explanation that converts, and she can only be in one room at a time.

Every one of those is a communication problem with a video shaped answer. None of them would ever have surfaced from a brief that started with we need a video.

The doors that were already open

The moment it clicked, they spotted opportunities that had been sitting in front of them the whole time.

A weekly market view that could go out in a day. A series that explained the process behind a fund, so the sales team stopped starting from scratch in every meeting. Onboarding content that meant new clients understood what they had bought. Versions of the same story, cut for different audiences, out fast when the market turned.

They just never knew the door was open.

That is the part I find genuinely interesting about this work. Almost nobody needed a new idea. They needed permission to see something they were already doing as a system rather than a series of one offs.

The tool was never the hard part

Anyone can make a video. That has been true for years and it gets truer every quarter, and the arrival of avatars and digital twins has made it truer still.

Working out what it is for was always the hard part, and none of the technology has made that any easier. If anything it has made it harder, because the cost of producing something pointless has fallen so far that there is nothing to stop you.

So the discipline has to come from the question, not the budget.

What are you treating as a small tactic right now that might actually be a strategy in disguise?