Your explainer has 4,000 views. Three clicks to the product page. And your sales team still opens every call by explaining what the product does. Sound familiar?
Here’s the uncomfortable part: the film is probably fine. Smooth animation, clean visuals, professional voiceover. Nothing to fix in the edit.
The film isn’t broken. The brief was.
You wrote a brochure, not a brief
Look at your brief again. Seven features. Eight benefits. A section on the technology. A section on the team. And at the bottom: “make it engaging, keep it under two minutes.”
That brief can only produce one thing: a film that covers everything and explains nothing. A brochure with motion. Watched once by people who already know the product, ignored by everyone it was made for.
Why? Because it describes the product from your side of the table. Nobody wakes up wanting to understand your feature set. They wake up with a problem. If the film doesn’t open with that problem, you’ve lost them by second four.
Ask the one question that matters
What must the viewer understand, believe or do after watching – that they don’t right now?
Not “understand our product.” That’s a category, not an outcome.
An outcome sounds like this: “Understand that manual data entry is the bottleneck in their process – and that our software removes it.” Or: “Feel confident enough to book a demo.” Or: “Be able to explain to their manager why this compliance training applies to them.”
Read those again. Each one produces a completely different film. Problem-solution. Trust-building. Motivation. Not one of them is a feature list.
One film. One idea.
One film. One concept. One thing the viewer understands at the end that they didn’t at the beginning.
The most common way to kill an explainer? Ask it to carry everything. Five differentiators, thirty seconds each – and not one of them lands deep enough to change anyone’s mind.
Got five things to say? Make five short films. Each one focused, each one fast, each one deployed at the right moment in the journey. Five sharp films beat one bloated one. Every time.
Fix your brief tonight
Write this sentence before anything else: “After watching this film, the viewer will ___.”
Fill the blank with behaviour, not vocabulary. “Request a demo.” “Stop using the manual process.” “Forward it to their manager.”
Then ask: what’s the single biggest obstacle between the viewer and that outcome right now? Not knowing you exist? Misunderstanding what you do? Scepticism? Fear? The film has exactly one job – remove that obstacle.
And if your brief currently starts with “we’d like a 2D animation, around 90 seconds” – delete that line. Format, length and style are the last decisions in a brief, not the first. When they lead, the film fails. When the outcome leads, the rest falls into place.
So: watch your explainer one more time tonight. Then finish the sentence honestly – after watching, the viewer will ___.
If you can’t fill the blank, you’ve found your three clicks.
