By The Systems Thinker · June 21, 2025
Introduction
Your company has a “video strategy” that looks something like this: when a need arises—a product launch, a trade show, a new campaign—you go out and “buy a video.” The process is transactional and project-based. Once the video is delivered, the relationship with the producer ends until the next “emergency” arises. This one-off approach is how almost every business thinks about video. My contrarian stance is that this project-based mindset is incredibly inefficient and is the primary reason your video efforts feel chaotic and disconnected. It’s time to stop buying videos and start investing in a storytelling system.
The Current State of Things
The standard model for video production is the one-off project. Each video is treated as a discrete task with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A new budget is approved, a new creative brief is written, and often a new vendor is found. The result is a library of video assets that feel disconnected, vary wildly in quality and messaging, and have no strategic relationship to one another. It’s an archipelago of isolated tactics, not a coherent content ecosystem.
The Immediate Risk
The most immediate risk is a disjointed brand experience for your customers. A fast-growing tech company produced three different videos in one year with three different production companies. The first was a polished, animated explainer. The second was a gritty, handheld testimonial. The third was a formal, corporate-style brand video. A prospect who encountered all three would have no clear sense of the company’s identity or personality. The brand appeared schizophrenic.
The Problem Is You’re Re-Inventing the Wheel Every Single Time
The project-based approach is massively inefficient. Every time you start a new video, you have to spend time and energy on-boarding the production team, explaining your brand, defining your audience, and establishing your core message. You lose all the institutional knowledge and creative momentum from the previous project. It’s like building a new factory for every single car you produce. It is a system designed for maximum friction and minimum efficiency.
The Problem Deepens When You Realize What You’re Throwing Away
In a typical video project, a huge amount of valuable “waste” is created. For every minute of finished video, there are often hours of unused B-roll footage, unused interview clips, and unused graphic elements. In a project-based model, this material is usually archived and forgotten. The tech company, for example, had hours of incredible interview footage with their CEO from the brand video shoot that could have been repurposed into dozens of high-value social media clips, leadership thoughts, and internal communications pieces. But because they were only thinking about “the one video,” this asset was lost.
The Far-Reaching Implications Are an Inability to Scale
A company that buys videos one at a time can never achieve true scale in its communication efforts. They are trapped in a reactive cycle, always scrambling to produce the next asset for the next fire drill. They cannot build a consistent brand narrative over time or create a deep library of content that serves every stage of the customer journey. This puts them at a huge disadvantage to competitors who have adopted a more systematic, program-level approach to storytelling.
The Counterintuitive Solution Is to Hire a Partner, Not a Vendor
The solution is to shift from a transactional, project-based relationship to a long-term, strategic partnership. This means finding a single, trusted team that acts as the steward of your brand’s visual story. A partner like Appture Digital has the tools, talent, and technology to build a storytelling *system* for your business. This system-based approach includes:
1. A Central Story Strategy: A core narrative that informs all video content.
2. An Asset Management Plan: A strategy for capturing and organizing footage so it can be repurposed.
3. A Content Calendar: A proactive plan for creating and releasing content, aligned with business goals.
This turns video from a series of expensive one-off sprints into a powerful, efficient, and ongoing program.
But Isn’t a Long-Term Retainer More Expensive?
The initial sticker price of a retainer or a multi-project partnership may seem higher than a single project fee. But the total cost of ownership is drastically lower. The efficiencies gained by eliminating constant re-briefing, the value created by repurposing unused footage, and the brand equity built through consistent messaging provide a far greater ROI over time. A good partner will be able to create more, better, and more effective content for the same or even less total annual spend than the chaotic one-off approach.
Final Thoughts
Your brand story is not a single event; it is an ongoing conversation. Stop shouting one-off messages into the void and start building a consistent, compelling narrative. By moving from buying videos to investing in a storytelling system with a long-term partner, you can finally transform your video marketing from a series of frantic, expensive projects into a predictable, scalable engine for growth. Are you building a collection of disconnected videos, or are you building a library of brand assets?
