Every established company has two or three stories that everybody inside it knows and nobody has ever recorded.

There is the decision that nearly ended the business in the third year, the phrase used in meetings that no new joiner understands until somebody explains where it came from, and the founder’s rule about which work to turn down, still followed scrupulously and written down nowhere at all.

These things get passed along by the people who were there, which works perfectly well, and works for exactly as long as those people are there.

What is actually at risk

Companies commission films for all sorts of sensible reasons, most of them to do with attention, and we will come back to those.

The reason that tends to matter more to owners, once they have sat with it for a moment, is simpler and considerably harder to undo. The generation who remember the founding will not always be around to tell it, and when they are gone the story does not become inaccurate so much as secondhand, after which it settles into a paragraph on an About page, which is not remotely the same thing.

A film made while those people can still speak for themselves is not marketing. It is a record that happens to be useful for marketing.

The story does not become inaccurate. It becomes secondhand.

Why film rather than writing

We publish for a living, so this is not a sentence we offer lightly: some things do not survive being written down.

What a person’s face does while they describe the year everything nearly went wrong is information, and so is the pause before an honest answer. Written up, both become adjectives, and adjectives are the first thing a sceptical reader discounts.

Film also does something useful to the people in it, which nobody expects going in. Being interviewed properly is one of very few occasions on which a senior person is asked to explain what they actually believe, at length, to somebody paying close attention, and most of them say afterwards that they understood their own position rather better for having had to say it out loud to a stranger.

What makes one worth watching

The instinct is always to make the film about the company. The ones that work are about people, and they are specific to the point of feeling almost trivial from the inside.

The sayings still quoted on the factory floor. The teapot nobody is allowed to move. The argument about whether to take the contract that would have doubled the business, what was decided, and what that decision cost for the following four years. People inside a company take all of this entirely for granted, which is precisely why it is the part an outsider leans forward for.

If a detail makes you say “oh, that is nothing, that is just what we have always done”, put it in the film.

The ordinary commercial case, briefly

A film does the things you would expect it to do. It gives people a reason to stay on the site rather than leave it, it travels further than text because sharing it costs nothing, and it does a good deal of the introducing before a first meeting, so that the meeting itself starts further along than it otherwise would.

All true, and all secondary to the point above. If you are choosing between formats rather than deciding whether to film at all, the differences between corporate video and documentary are the place to start.

The part that is not recoverable

Most decisions in a business can be revisited later without much penalty. Positioning can be redone, a website can be rebuilt, and a bad hire can be corrected.

This one carries a deadline you do not control, because the people who can tell the story first-hand are available now and will not be available indefinitely. Nearly everything else on your list can wait a year without changing at all.