"Storytelling" is one of the most-used words in production marketing right now. Nearly every company promises it. Very little corporate and industrial video actually delivers it.
Look closely at most of what gets called a "brand story" in this space, and you'll usually find the same structure: a testimonial interview, cut against some B-roll, with music underneath to carry the emotion the footage isn't earning on its own. That's a format. It's not a story.
What a story actually needs
A story needs a protagonist. It needs a problem. It needs stakes — something that gets worse if nothing happens, or better because someone acted. And it needs a resolution that pays off the setup. Without those elements, what you have is information delivery wearing the language of narrative: facts and features, presented in order, with a soundtrack doing the emotional work the structure doesn't.
The difference matters because audiences respond to it whether or not they can name it. A viewer forgets a list of product features almost immediately. A viewer remembers a person who had a problem and solved it — that's not a marketing trick, it's how human memory works. We're built to hold onto narrative, not spec sheets.
What this looks like in practice
When we build a piece, we ask the same questions a screenwriter would ask, even for a two-minute industrial video: Who is this about? What's at risk for them? What changes by the end? An operator noticing something's wrong. A team responding before it becomes a bigger problem. A resolution that closes the loop. That's a real arc — not because it's dramatic, but because it's structurally a story, with a beginning that sets up a question and an ending that answers it.
None of this means abandoning the information a client needs to communicate — cost figures, product capabilities, process details. It means giving that information somewhere to live: inside a narrative, carried by a person, instead of stacked next to one.
The honest test
Here's a simple way to check whether a piece is actually telling a story or just claiming to: take away the music and the interview soundbites, and watch what's left. If there's still a person, a problem, and a resolution playing out on screen, it's a story. If what's left is just B-roll waiting for something to explain it, it's a format wearing a story's name.
We'd rather build the first kind.