Saving on part of a communication tool, such as a video, can be as absurd as, in the story of the popular joke, not buying chocolate for the bird to avoid bankruptcy because the lady of the house thought it 'essential' to keep the spending on sumptuous parties and various expenses. A young friend, who works in a communications department, asked me for my opinion on a video that they are going to disseminate among some three thousand members of the organization that has hired him. “It must be an internal communication tool,” I tell myself, while he searches for the piece on his cell phone to show it to me. The first surprise is that the video, approximately one and a half minutes long, begins by telling what the group does. That is to say: it explains to the recipients what they themselves do. “It's to value their work,” my friend justifies. No comment. Indigestible reading.
The second surprise is that, on top of the succession of images, impeccable from a technical point of view, text labels are superimposed almost as if it were a prompter screen ( as we lifelong snobs call it). Impossible to read everything Bosnia and Herzegovina Phone Number List that is said there at the rate it is coming out, except for prior training. “Why haven't you done a voiceover with this text?” I ask, waiting for any technical answer. “Because our budget was skyrocketing,” my young friend answers. “And we have saved on the parrot's chocolate,” I thought. Because they will have spent making the piece, buying bank images, plus what it costs to distribute it, so that more than two percent of the recipients do not read what the infinite labels say; and that's with luck. Succession of failures.
I believe that the set of errors that led to the creation of that piece should be part of the classic “what you should never do” and even less allow them to occur all together. First failure, as I see it: the idea that was intended to be disseminated was not well defined. The famous WHAT, which must lead the way to WHEN and HOW. Doing a little research, I came to deduce that, in the case of my friend, we have a group with a structural crisis and one of the 'leaders', seduced by some nearby post-adolescent about to graduate in communication, said that "what is effective “Today it is making a video.” And point in the mouth: we start with the how before defining the what. The “why”, “when” and “by what means” thing, yes that… On the other hand, whoever had to direct the making of the video, the communication tool in short, let himself be swallowed up. There is a lot of tension during a crisis and it is not a question of demonizing any communicator here.