The bad (and the downright ugly! 🙂 )

Just for a laugh (because it's old and not relevant to the way we use video today) check out this Ernst & Young recruitment vid!

Or if you've not had enough to make you cringe, try this!

Okay – time to be more serious. The next section does an analysis of what's wrong with a video that's okay from the technical point of view.

How to be uninspiring

Maybe it's just accountants who are so bad at this. Here's a (hopefully homemade!) marketing video. Notice that despite the fact that they've got the technical stuff right (it's all in focus and so on) it doesn't make you rush to the phone to call them up, does it! There are some possible reasons why not below.

What's wrong…	… and what you should do differently
Have a look around the 17 second mark. Does the slouching CEO make you think he's going to be the dynamic and proactive force for your good the advert goes on to say they will be?	Either stand, or sit right up. The best way is perhaps a stool without a back, to encourage you to have a straighter spine.
Keep watching until nearly the 30 second mark. That ten seconds sucks the energy right out of you.	Remember the lessons on keeping the energy high? Yeah? Do those things!
The montage and voice-over until the one minute mark is boring but largely harmless.. but not long after that you get moments with Dunkin' Donuts coffee cups and other dodge props!	Take a few minutes before you got live or record to look at what the camera sees, not what you see! Your brain filters things out because they're not interesting to you (right at that moment) but cameras see everything.
Either side of 1:30 there are pretty bland/boring poster shots (which are pretty obviously just there to give something to look at while the voice-over continues… but at 1:36 with get the fixed stare and rigid positioning of someone who's not allowing their personality to flow in… and who damps down the video by not having the right level of energy.	You can probably figure this out for yourself by now, right? Smile – be yourself… but a tiny bit *more.* (Do those exercises about energy again!)
And now there's a series of talking heads… each saying "We're special, because we do exactly what everyone else does".	Let's face it, if one of your sales points is that your comply to the required industry standards, you've not sat down before you started and figured out what your video was trying to do/achieve, have you!

Exercise: the next time you watch a video online, sit down with your notebook and a count-down timer on your smart-phone. Set it to something short such as 20 seconds. Ever time it rings, pause the video and jot down two things.

Firstly, note what the presenter had done wrong in the previous 20 seconds.
Secondly, jot down what you'd do differently.

Just having those things written down makes a very significant difference to your video presenting – you don't need specific exercises here!