Create engaging corporate videos that people actually finish
Photo: Sydney Sherman Photography
How many times have you started watching a video and bailed halfway through?
A bunch? Yeah, me too.
The standard line is “you’ve got their attention as long as you can keep it,” but most advice about keeping attention tends to be surface-level variations on “create good content.” Not very helpful.
Enter “try/fail cycles.”
Try/fail cycles have been a go-to storytelling technique for basically forever, yet corporate video creators hear the word “fail” and run away. Why would a company want to admit its failures in a video???
We’ll get there.
First, let’s define the strategy:
When your main character has a goal in mind, they need to try things to achieve that goal. They keep trying and failing, until eventually they try and succeed.
Try/fail cycles. Pretty self-explanatory.
(Yes, for corporate video, your main character can be “the company.”)
Corporate teams love to skip the messy middle — but this oversight is the exact reason that viewers aren’t finishing your videos.
Audiences aren’t invested in the journey.
What too often happens in corporate video is that you introduce a problem and solve that problem in the same breath.
For example:
I wanted to open a bakery, I worked really hard, and now people love us.
Good for you, but why should I care?
When you introduce a goal, then show a failure, you are making two promises:
- “I am going to take you on a journey.” Now the audience is locked in.
- “There will be a satisfying payoff.” When you have to work for a victory, the success is all the sweeter.
Here’s what happens when we introduce try/fail cycles.
I wanted to open a bakery.
[TRY/FAIL] I created a rock-solid business plan, but investor after investor turned me down.
Finally, my uncle took a bet on me.
[TRY/FAIL] I opened my store, but on the first day no one came.
I started handing out samples to people on the street.
[VICTORY] Those people told their friends and suddenly I’m getting orders from celebrities like Harrison Ford.
Suddenly, this story is a lot more interesting (and you can listen to the whole thing in this award-winning episode of Backstory & Beyond, the podcast that Tribe produces.)
Yes, I cheated a little bit using a long-form example, but I promise you can do this in short-form video too.
Now, for all of the corporate communicators (and compliance teams) who are sweating right now. I have good news.
You can actually succeed in try/fail cycles.
It’s called the “yes, but…”
Yes, you got one step closer to the goal, but now the stakes are higher or a new problem has arisen.
Yes, I got the funding, but now if I lose the bakery, my uncle is out tens of thousands of dollars.
Yes, the FDA approved our new medication, but that created more patient demand than we had capacity to handle.
In a corporate video, the audience is assuming we’ve got a happy ending in store. What we need to do is keep them wondering how we’re going to get there.
And that’s how you keep them tuned in.
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