Corporate Video Culture in Russia

Daria Gordeeva
General Producer
Video Production Company Leaf Label

Any company sooner or later comes across an important challenge — the need to represent the company in the best light possible to potential clients, investors, partners and new employees. It is possible to make calendars and pens with the company logo or illustrious booklets and catalogs, but are they effective and convincing enough? The optimal solution of this task is a corporate video.

The history of creating business videos in Russia is limited to two decades, which is not a lot in comparison with existing world experience. The level of work in this segment continues to grow, but there are a lot of questions and problems. There are a few main problems, according to market players: the young age of the Russian video business market, no clear division of responsibility of agencies and production studios and still no very high level of professionalism.

The opinion that creating a worthy video for a small amount of money is a mistake. In an attempt to save money, the result could be a loss of clients or a decline in reputation, and the best-case scenario is that the project will leave both sides dissatisfied. The discrepancy of technical formats, quality of video, uncoordinated transition of video and poor sound recording will render null all efforts. This is not acceptable if you are creating a video for presentations or shows on the international stage.

The professional video production is quite expensive and is a multi-stage process, even if we are speaking about a simple video sequence and script. If a video is intended to be demonstrated on different platforms, then the question of adapting the video is important. The target audience for whom the video is intended is the key factor in the creative conception and the final technological performance.

The century of new technologies and the century of increasing volume of business processes dictate their own rules. Today, the most effective tool of business communication appears to be a video business card by virtue of the specificity of the miniature video genre. This is intended as a vivid and laconic video portrait of a successful businessman or a business portrait of a company, which can be delivered by any electronic device an unlimited amount of times. The content of the video is determined individually; it depends on the specifics of a company activity and the goals in general. Carefully designed and organized video sequences will create the right impression about a certain product or service, and will provide prospects for business cooperation with the video business card owner.

One of the most complicated and difficult tasks for the moment is video placement on the Internet. The World Wide Web is frequently used for the purposes of company, product and service promotion. The largest market of Internet video users is the West. The peculiarity of the Western video market is that the video content is distributed in business segments or competitive platforms. The companies reach their target audience not through their web sites but because of video placement in those places where the targeted audience already exists. Naturally, this requires the people responsible for the video to be concerned with its production values and competitiveness.

The Russian market of video content placement is still forming and is seriously behind the Western one, although there are more and more examples of quality work with video content on the Internet. But, participants still don't have a precise understanding of where, how and what to transmit over the Internet. Nowadays even production heavyweights, like movie and television companies, do not manage to adapt and establish a contact with the Internet audience with maximum efficiency, and that's why, while bearing huge costs, they are left out of the center of attention. On the contrary, small companies, by means of mobility and fresh ideas, successfully fit in this video stream.