Making financial reports & investor updates more engaging with video

Annual reports have come a long way in the thirty years I’ve been in the workforce.

From piles of unread printed reports gathering dust, we transitioned to megabytes of unread PDFs (but at least they were searchable). Now, in this era of small attention spans and large faith in AI, we’ve arrived at the dawn of another generation of the good old annual report.

Just to set some context from the outset. In this piece I’m looking at how to use video to support Annual Reports – essentially pre-produced video that improves getting company results and strategic information across.

I’m not going to be looking at the pros and cons of streaming your annual meeting live online. That’s just a delivery mechanism, an alternative to hiring out a venue.

Reporting annual performance is governed by long held reporting standards and they’re not going away any time soon. What can and can’t be written (or said) remains heavily complianced.

Institutional investors still need analyst days and access to management, but for retail investors, the drive towards bite sized content summaries and remote / behind the scenes access that video brings, are unstoppable forces.

Graphs, pie charts, year-on-year columns of data and dense pages of prose are out. Animations, infographics, executive interviews and subject spotlight videos are in. If you’re going to talk about solar arrays in Southern Spain or CSR programmes in India, then these days you are best off showing them, rather than writing about them.

The essence of video is that it takes the viewer somewhere they could not otherwise reach. Be that a remote location or simply behind the scenes of an organisation. You get to look into the eyes of executives and make a judgement call.

Do the offices inspire confidence? Are the portfolio companies featured well managed?

There is a whole raft of non-verbal (and non-textual) information and value that you get from a video.

Not all video is alike, so it is very much horses for courses.

Yearly comparators of company performance are best dealt with infographic animations to visually bring the numbers to life.

The framing remarks of the CEO are likely to be work best as an illustrated (by video inserts) piece to camera because these remarks need to be carefully planned and often loaded onto autocue.

But other content can be longer form and more free flowing, a sit down interview about the market environment and outlook for example.

There is not just one approach so there is not just one type of video. I guarantee you one thing that is the same though, and that is moving images and sound are a lot more engaging and accessible than text.

Let’s look at some of the common elements that make investor videos great.

Start with what we are going to see and what we are going to say. It’s a visual medium.

You would be surprised at how hard it can be for investor relations teams to shake the habit that a filming brief is only about what people need to say.

The whole point of a video is that we get to use our eyes. So, make sure the visuals are something special. The sure sign that they’ve been overlooked is the senior executive filmed in a meeting room with a dusty pot plant in the corner.

Use the annual report as an excuse to go somewhere that shows the scale and aspiration of the business. Ideally somewhere people don’t normally get to see.

If you’re a retailer, film in the distribution centre because the stores will all be familiar. If you have international operations, shine the spotlight on them.

It’s all about capturing as much viewer attention as you can.

When it comes to what to say, it’s the same narrative structure that you see in a lot of storytelling – what happened this year, why it matters and what’s next.

You’re taking the viewer on a narrative journey with the advantage that they don’t have to use their imagination or rely on assumptions, they get to see things with their own two eyes.

Which brings us to that other key point of credibility.

If a picture paints a thousand words, then video paints 10,000.

Put your best people forward. We all like to think of ourselves as good judges of character.

The non-verbal cues and humanised delivery of C-suite executives there on screen explaining key points, builds trust and connection in a way that can’t be faked.

This is important because for as long we’re in charge of making decisions (before the AI robots take over), emotion and perception will remain as important a part of the decision-making process as cold hard logic.

There’s no way of avoiding the numbers. It’s financial reporting after all. But they can be brought to life.

Motion graphics and mixed animation / real life visual effects can create very eye catching and compelling presentation of the most mundane company statistics – value of stock, aircraft movements, geographical distribution of assets.

They can be made to look great and to move, really driving the point home.

We’ve talked a lot about why and how when it comes to video in financial reports, but let’s talk about some what’s – what topics work well as real world use cases of financial reporting video.

Obviously, a lot depends on your sector so there will be personalisation of this list depending on your company, but get in touch and we would be happy to develop some ideas around your financial reporting needs.

• FY and HY results video summaries
• Market commentary and corporate positioning from C-suite
• Corporate culture / ESG / CSR programmes
• Hiring & next generation people development
• Leadership profiles of high performing business units
• Net Zero and sustainability progress
• Portfolio company (or business unit) spotlight
• New fund launch and IPO videos
• Large construction projects / openings / acquisitions during the year
• Successful investment / exit case studies
• R&D and next steps, new product launches
• Private equity and investor days

We’ve created videos in all these areas.

A few that come to mind are fund launch content and successful investment exit case study for films for Private Equity. PE is an interesting one because the content strategy for that is particularly bifurcated. You have the transformation at the portfolio company, often held within a fund at somewhat arm’s length from the owner. Then you have the corporate strategy story of the PE owner – their investment strategy, management ethos and turnaround skills of which the portfolio company is just one example in practice.

Video content to show at investor days is another subset of the genre. Because of their sophistication, investor days require deep dive videos, typically longer than short form results summaries. They really need to take people under the bonnet of company operations and require participation of active high level managers (as opposed to delegating to comms people). These videos that work best are often used as a springboard for Q&A.

Authenticity is the name of the game and that means your real people on camera. No clever AI clones, no actors (unless it’s a scenario or training video). Just real staff, executives and ideally customers.

Because while we’re expecting you to say how great you are, it’s got so much more impact when coming from your clients and customers.

I caught up with a former client recently who had been getting very excited about the prospect of shifting fund manager updates onto AI avatars and shared the early results. Not only was it more effort having to create the script for the avatar, but the on-screen performance was strangely distant – think Parker Posey’s Lorazepam-popping Victoria Ratliff from White Lotus Season 3 (just not the same without Jennifer Coolidge by the way).

Some of our most popular investor videos have focussed on corporate culture.

Whether that’s looking at the impact of millennials on the workplace to following an inspirational leader around for a day and capturing 360 degree feedback on what made them different.

These are all areas which really come to life through the medium of the moving images.

Financial reporting is about so much more than just the numbers. Let us help you express the full potential of your results story.

Mahne Creative Media www.mahne.com is an independent specialist media production agency operating. We pride ourselves on the quality of our storytelling. We unlock the heart of the story to connect and engage target audiences through video, podcasts and training. Mahne Creative Media is the content producer management consultancies turn to when they need to stand out from their competition.