Explainer Movie™ Masterclass #1 of 5:
The 3 Main Reasons Explainer Videos Are No Longer Working
“Only 1% of B2B content gets to me stop and say ‘I want to consume this in my spare time’. This is that 1%”
DEVIN REED
HEAD OF CONTENT @ CLARI
78k followers
“Only 1% of B2B content gets to me stop and say ‘I want to consume this in my spare time’. This is that 1%”
DEVIN REED
HEAD OF CONTENT @ CLARI
78k followers
The Rise And Fall Of Explainer Videos
Back in 2009, DropBox launched the first ever explainer video.
It was a huge hit, successfully helping the file share company:
- raise $48,000,000
- acquire 10,000,000 users
- grow a half billion dollar company
Back then, explainer videos were a “fresh”, novel way of learning about a company’s products and services, so prospects inevitably loved them.
But since then more and more businesses have turned to explainer videos to explain their products services, and now, a whopping 91% of businesses use them (HubSpot).
The Market Is Saturated
We’ve reached a point of complete market saturation.
Be it on LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, or blog posts, prospects are being interrupted with ads explaining their products day in and day out.
And it’s why in recent years…
Explainer Video agencies have seen a continuous decline in client attention and engagement:
Companies Have spent money on explainer videos That Didn’t Work
This Marketing Manager implies explainer videos are “Putting People To Sleep”
What Makes Explainer Videos So Skippable
There are a few mechanisms that we believe make Explainer Videos so skippable.
Let’s dissect them one-by-one, and in the next few masterclasses, we’ll focus on what you can do instead to craft videos that prospects watch from start to finish and – more importantly – actually convert.
Reason #1: Talking AT The Viewer
Here’s a 9 second clip of 3 different explainer videos:
Notice the one thing they have in common?
They all talk AT you.
99% of explainer videos have an external narrator that talks at the viewer.
There are 2 issues with this.
Issue #1:
You could get away with this kind of explanation 10 years ago, when video ads weren’t nearly as prolific as they are now, but nowadays – when viewers are interrupted constantly by them – this external narrator screams “this is a commercial trying to sell you something”.
This not only causes prospects to put up a wall of sales-resistance, but in some cases even angers people.
(Just look at the number of social media ads littered with aggressive comments).
People don’t like being sold to, and as a result, most are likely to scroll past an explainer video or click away in the first 5 seconds.
Issue #2:
It’s very dull, bland, and uninspiring “storytelling”.
(Storytelling is in “air quotes” for reasons we’ll get to in the next point).
Having an external narrator that just talks at the viewer makes the video feel more akin to a dry powerpoint presentation than an engaging asset.
There are far more creative ways of communicating your message that make your video feel more like a “mini-movie” – all of which serve to increase engagement, emotion, and memorability for the viewer.
But that’s a topic to be covered in our Masterclass on “Hollywood Narration Styles”.
Reason #2: ‘Problem to Solution’ Scripting
Despite pretty much every single explainer video agency claiming to “tell your story”, the vast, vast majority of explainer videos actually do anything but tell a story.
That’s because almost all explainer videos follow a scripting formula of:
“Call out the problem –> Introduce the solution”
Newsflash: this is not a story.
Stories have plots, which have:
- exposition
- rising action
- climax
- falling action
- resolution
(all of which will be covered in a lot more detail in the “Plotline” Masterclass).
So why do they keep producing videos with the “problem –> solution” structure?
Our guess – “because we’ve always done it that way”
This formula worked 10 years ago when explainer videos were rarely used.
But nowadays, prospects have heard their problems being called out time and time again.
And when a market has heard something time and time again, they become numb to it.
There are far more creative ways to show the problem you solve.
Ways that lure the viewer in to the point they forget they’re even watching a video.
We’ll cover them in the “Narrative Devices” masterclass, but for now, just avoid the cliche problem-to-solution script formula.
Reason #3: “Script First” Production
The way explainer videos are produced goes like this:
- Script
- Storyboard
- Animate
It makes sense in theory; it’s good to have an idea of what you want to say before you produce anything.
But the problem with this approach is that you are forced to go through the script, line-by-line, to conjure up a visual depiction of each sentence.
And when you do that, you end up with a very random assortment of scenes that don’t follow a cohesive visual narrative.
For example, if the script opens with…
“So you’re looking to buy your first home. You’ve got a great job, and a great chance at a good mortgage”
The visuals will have to jump from someone:
- looking at houses
- working at their job
- applying for a mortgage
That’s a very sporadic sequence of events, leaving you with a random collection of parts stitched together to fit the whole.
(Or what we like to call the Franken-video):
A better strategy is to mimic the movies.
So instead of approaching your video script-first, you approach it plot-first.
But we’ll cover that in our Masterclass on proven Hollywood plot lines (and provide you with some plug & play templates you can swipe).
Summary
In conclusion, explainer videos aren’t working as well as they used to for 3 key reasons:
- the outdated practice of talking at viewers – which creates sales resistance and lacks inspiration
- formulaic “problem-to-solution” scripting which does little to emotionally engage viewers in a story and makes explainer videos blend in with the masses
- script-first production approach that leads to disjointed narratives
In the rest of the masterclass series, we’ll dive into what businesses can do to combat these.
Starting with The Power Of Plots.