Video Voyeur #10: Xerox Corporate Video No Carbon Copy Cat
By Larry Thomas, Latergy
Less than 30 days and 636,231 views ago, a $23 billion per year publicly traded company released a 2 minute video that “set out to tell the story of what Xerox does today, while honoring what everyone knows Xerox for – the invention of the plain paper copier.” according to Barbara Basney, vice president global advertising for the world’s leading business process and document management company.
The 106 year old imaging company with more than 10,700 active patents has evolved with the times while maintaining its technological edge, so we’d expect a hi-tech experience when they produced a video – A World Made Simpler … by Xerox – to tell the story of how “Xerox is helping simplify not only how business, but the world works.”
Strategy, history, her story.
Budget, technology, talent.
Lights, cameras, paper.
Paper? Really??
Yes, REALLY (well done):
The strength of the story made the video, but the quality of the video made it a story worth watching. In a world where DIY solutions and free software in the cloud seem to make everything significantly better, faster and cheaper … you really can only have one out of those three. Sorry, I didn’t make the rules up. I firmly suggest you choose “better.” It may cost a bit more, but will be well worth it.
According to Ms. Basney: “It was a labor of love … that required two weeks in a windowless, lightless concrete studio to create a special technique that brings our story to life. The technique was based on a manually intensive process of printing, folding, cutting, crimping, air blowing, rolling, stacking and pasting individual pieces of paper by hand – in order to create an effect of animation that isn’t animation, but is actually stop-motion.” Here’s how the PRoverbial sausage is made:
Doesn’t seem ‘cheap’ because it’s not. Less expensive than its ever been, but not ‘cheap.’ Neither is your brand.
Copy that.
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Larry is president of Latergy, a video services boutique that provides multimedia content strategy, production, distribution and measurement services to professional communicators. Prior to Latergy, Thomas pioneered online video marketing and PR as co-founder and president of PR Newswire’s MultiVu and COO of Medialink Worldwide, a NASDAQ company that was sold to a VC-backed competitor. He lives in NJ with his wife, Sherry Lynn, and their plethora of pups. Contact him at lthomas@Latergy.com.
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