Call the Video Category What You Want; In The End, It’s “Informational”

Last week a prospective new client of a major corporation asked me to fill out a vendor application. Among the questions listed, I was asked to break into categories the types of videos our corporate video production company creates. I thought about one we finished for a client last week which he intends to use to sell his product, but before I realized it would be popularly classified as a “sales” video, I started to type “informational.” Backspace, backspace, backspace. “Sales.”

The one we finished a few weeks ago on a corporate sustainability initiative, I thought: When it is shown to the private equity company’s investors, it will be seen as an “investor relations” video. When it is shown to other CEOs to give them ideas about how to better the planet and increase profits, it can be called, hmmm… “Marketing?” No, it’s really “informational.”

Or the video for the federal government, explaining to ex-offenders the services in the community that can assist them: “Informational.” But for the sake of sounding more professional, I’ll classify it as “educational.” Same for the video we are about to start with a major pension fund whose beneficiaries need to know details about the plan.

The videos for the nonprofit dinners? “Event” videos. But not event-entertainment, like a wedding. Really, they are informational, telling attendees about the organization or the people being honored. (And come to think of it, a wedding video can be informational too, but that’s not my business.)

We live in The Information Age. We have learned to crave information, even when it comes in substance-less 140 character tidbits, hourly headlines sans supporting facts that major newspapers blast into smartphones, or friends’ comments on banal subjects that glide past them as a day progresses. The information yearning permeates the media formats; it is found not only in written words, but in spoken radio and song form, in photographs, and, of course, in video. Spreading information via written links is good; bolster it with video, and you might create a “following” — and that’s a magic word in the advertising industry these days. Even sitcoms are chockful of product placements, indirectly providing information about the product that is the subject of the actors’ banter.

For some folks, it seems to sound more justifiable to the budget process to label a video as having a grander purpose, like marketing, sales, IR, or HR. The relationship to ROI might be easier to calculate. And indeed, videos serve those functions. But through my window, most times the camouflaged intent of video is to be “informational,” to create little bites of enlightenment that audiences will love to digest.