Author: Siy Bishop

Only as good as the information you start with

When commissioning explainer content, the output will only be as good as the information that you give to the production team. Too little information or ambiguity and your audience will be left in the dark, more confused than when they originally watched the video!

To clarify, explainers are videos that educate an audience on a product or process. They’re the perfect tool for creating clarity from complexity and they perform best when they’re simple, understandable and engaging. To get there, you have the right people in the room at the very beginning of the project. So who do you need and what do you need to do with them?

Uncover the facts with a discovery call

What’s it about?

A discovery call is usually led by the team who is producing the final asset – it could be an agency or an internal team if the production is in-house. They gather together everyone mentioned above, and all of the details around the product/process are discussed to ensure they have all the information they need to do a great job. 

Questions can include:

• Who is the product/process for?
• How do they benefit?
• Is there a process to follow to achieve success? Give us all the detail!
• Are there any difficult points? If so, what? 

Who needs to be on it?

The relevant agency folk, then from client side, the project owner/manager plus all of the relevant subject matter experts. This includes the people who really understand the product/process you’re trying to explain. Ideally there are varying levels of seniority on the call. A junior member of the team may know the process inside out, whereas someone more senior may be able to give the details around long term benefits/goals/strategy.

Why are we doing this?!

It’s vital that whoever is producing the explainer for you has as much information as possible. Whilst they may know some surface level information, they’re about the narrative and creative – they need the support of SMEs to craft the story and produce the content.

Top tips

• It’s very easy for an SME to presume knowledge – they’re the expert after all. Try and shift perspectives to that of a complete novice
• Use AI note taking tools so everyone can focus on conversation, rather than note taking
• There are no silly questions!

Always start from a presumption that the audience has zero knowledge on the subject, even if you know they have. This may sound like additional work, but it may uncover elements that upon reflection, are really useful for the audience to understand and gives the production team a solid base to start from.

It doesn’t stop there!

Communicating a complex process in a visually engaging way so that the audience understands it isn’t easy. Take the time at the early stage of the project to ensure that all parties involved in the project get it. In a future post we’ll refresh ourselves on the animation process but for now, here’s a lovely looking explainer we did for our friends at Kalibrate.

Busy teams, important messaging

Adobe’s EMEA Sales Enablement team are constantly on the go. Whether it’s live events, webinars, videos, cascade packs or decks, they’re constantly communicating with sales teams across Europe. In a fast paced environment of constant change, communicating with effectively with a sales team who are non stop is a challenge.

The Sales Enablement team briefed us in on some creative video communications during the discovery call (a meeting where you gather all the information needed to get started on the project) it became clear that we needed to gain a deep understanding of the audience. How did we go about this? Using an exercise called Think, Feel, Do.

First steps – insight and honesty

Think, Feel, Do is all about putting yourself in the shoes of the audience to understand what they currently Think, Feel, Do about the subject in question and working out what we want them to Think, Feel, Do differently after they’ve interacted with the content. A really important component of this process is a stakeholder who knows the audience inside out. It’s very easy to make presumptions in this exercise – insight and honestly will produce the best results. Our client had been in the Sales Enablement team for years and knew the sales teams, processes and products deeply – perfect!

Product of behaviour? Understanding the content

On the discovery call, it became clear that we weren’t educating the audience on a new product or process, the goal was behavioural change around a specific way of working. We wanted to drive sales excellence by bringing to life best practises, methodologies and behaviours that peers could learn from. Understanding the goal of the content further informed our Think, Feel, Do exercise.

Think

By working closely with our client, we uncovered that the audience knew very little about this way of working and if they did, they didn’t necessarily know how to engage with it so we knew we’d have to add a quick reminder to the introduction of whatever we produced. We also uncovered that they were time poor and struggled to access content on the go so length and ease of access were also closely considered.

Post content, we wanted the audience to ‘think’ differently about the way of working – they’re better informed, understand why and know what to do next.

Feel

Our client shared that audience were extremely busy in their day-to-day but were keen to learn, especially when it came to peer-to-peer. We knew then that hearing from other people within the wider team would be really effective but we’d have to keep the script tight, stripping out anything that wasn’t to the point, whilst keeping it human.

The post engagement ‘feel’ we wanted to create was intrigue: the want to find out more, pride: of their peers success and finally, motivated: they want to succeed!

It was during this conversation that our client realised that playing the content at an upcoming sales conference was the perfect opportunity to share the content!

Do

The client had evidence that the audience hadn’t quite grasped the new way of working but those that had, had seen great success – another reason to hear directly from peers! It can feel obvious at the ‘do’ stage to want the audience to ‘do’ the thing they weren’t doing but it’s usually more nuanced than that. In this example, when we broke it down with the client, the ‘do’ two fold – look at their current sales cycle and see how they could implement some of the immediate learnings, then we signposted them to a page of dedicated resources to further support their learning.

So…

This Think, Feel, Do exercise took less than an hour, but in that time, we uncovered insight that was crucial to the creative development and then execution of the project. The tone of voice, script length and call to action were all informed in one quick meeting.

If you’d like to know more, please get in touch – we’d love to help you out with your own Think, Feel, Do workshop!

‘Think Feel Do’ in action
Using the Think Feel Do framework, we worked with them to gain a deeper understanding of their audience’s current level of understanding, and where they wanted to get them to – why weren’t they engaging with the wider business? Once we understood this, it was important to create “I get it” moments for the audience, for them to feel driven to action. Ultimately, we wanted them to ‘do’. All of this informed the narrative approach we took – we needed to show off the impact of those who had successfully engaged with the wider business.

This in turn, informed the creative approach we took – interviewing people from across the sales team, and then utilising beautiful 3D animation to bring their success stories to life. We pushed the boat out and created abstract islands full of analogies – taking the complexity out of the picture.

Not only was it powerful for the sales team to see their stories visualised in that way, but the fact that it was taken further by being shown at events across Europe, serialised and used internally, shows the impact it had. We’re now in talks with other areas of the team to bring other key themes of the 2025 sales cycle to life.

Messages don’t land when audience’s aren’t understood

When considering audience, it’s easy to get over excited – this content is for everyone in the region/organisation/on planet earth! The enthusiasm is great, but there’s a real risk of producing generic content that gets lost in a sea of sameness.

We’ve all seen or even produced content that didn’t quite land. Maybe the visual storytelling of an animation would have done a better job of explaining a new technical process than a piece to camera featuring an engineer. A series of 90 second videos may have had more success than the 5 minute video that time poor employees were sent.

5 simple steps

If we want to turn a message into a piece of content that moves audiences to action, we really need to understand our audience. We can do this using the 5 Ws – WHAT, WHY, WHO, WHERE & WHEN. 

WHAT – Clearly understand the message

Are you really clear on what you want to say? Can it be articulated in a single sentence? Is it sensitive in nature? How much detail do you need to share to ensure the audience ‘gets it’?

WHY – Is there a clear goal?

You have a clear message, do you have clear outcomes and objectives? What is it you’re expecting your audience to do? What action do you want them to take?

WHO – Hone down your target audience

If you need to reach everyone in an organisation, what’s the best medium? Consider language and tone. If it’s a specific team, what level of detail will they need? What’s the best way to do this?

WHERE – What channels do your audience use?

How are your audience going to access the content? Is it suitable for their channel of choice? Is it easily accessible? Will you need to put spend behind it to ensure it reaches them? 

WHEN – Is it deadline driven?

Consider your timeline and how your audience relates to this. Do they have specific working hours? Are they across multiple time zones? 

Answering these questions will help you refine your audience and communicate more effectively with them. We’ll take a look at a technique that can help us gain even more insight in a future email.

This is just the beginning!

​This cinema advert we produced for ScreenSkills is a great example of the 5Ws at work. Understanding our audience allowed us to craft the right narrative from Mel’s story.We hope you’ve found this useful and if you’d like to know more, or you want to talk to us about a project you like our help with, get in touch!

When creating content for events, you get one shot connect

What was the last event you went to, whether internal or external, that used video in a way you really remembered? That really captured your attention, gave you goosebumps? I really hope the answer is more positive than I think it may be…

Let’s be honest, it’s easy for event content to be all flash and no bang. Content looks cool, but it’s forgettable. There’s a sea of illuminated faces in the crowd as phones come out… There was a perfect opportunity to set your stall out, land that killer message. Connect with the audience.

How can we capture attention, land the message and ultimately drive action?

Communicating human to human

Remember, the content we’re producing is speaking to a person, just like you. They’re trying to solve a problem, advance their career, or make a difference. The opening video for your event is THE moment to make a connection, grab their attention and communicate human to human.

Ok but how do we go about doing this? Consider these top tips:

Understand your audience
We mentioned the importance of understanding audience in a previous email – have a look at the 5W technique – and when looking for the human story, audience understanding is even more important. Once we know more about our audience, we can more deeply understand their hopes, fears, dreams and anxieties.

Find the human story in your messaging
There’s far more to it than ‘sell more stuff’ or ‘be better managers’. What does ‘selling more stuff’ unlock? What’s the human lens you can put on it by using words like enabling, empowering, owning and inspiring? What human problem are you solving? How can you make your message resonate and really mean something?

Tell an honest story
Do you have a customer/stakeholder who’d be up for getting involved? Can someone tell you what your audience is enabling? Can they see the human impact of what’s at stake if they don’t act? Hearing from a customer/client who has their life changed because of what your audience has done is incredibly powerful.

It doesn’t stop there!

Finally, turn the mirror back on yourself – does the message you’re crafting resonate with you? Share it with colleagues, friends and family – what’s their response?

When we produced the opening video for Adobe’s International Women’s Day event, we knew that a film where parents interview their young children was going to be risky, but we knew we’d nailed the human connection when our client told us there were laughs, tears and applause in the room when it played! If you’d like any more information about event content, get in touch!