A unified brand is vital to a company wishing to uphold an identify among all of its audiences. The one audience that needs to be at the forefront of this initiative is the employees. With internal audiences on board, a brand, its messaging, and symbolism can come to fruition and trickle down to the vital external audiences. Add to that the fact that more companies are using video in their marketing and communication efforts—56 percent of marketers today distribute video content on YouTube according to the Content Marketing Institute—and it becomes pretty clear that video is a “must-have” medium.
To get all employees on the same page, an internal video can serve as an excellent resource, serving as a visual, interactive, concise mechanism for informing people about the purpose behind a brand. Martino Flynn was recently honored at the PRSA Rochester Chapter’s PRism Awards and received a ‘Best Internal Video’ award for the ‘We Are Windstream’ video we produced for Windstream. We are very proud of this work and believe that it is an excellent example of how an internal video serves as a rallying cry for all employees across an organization—be it a small business, or large corporation.
In December 2011, Windstream’s business segment was rebranded after it acquired PAETEC. Before the merger, Windstream was a telecommunications company that had a mostly residential and small business customer base, while PAETEC was a business communications provider that focused on selling IT and telecommunication services to large enterprises. Through the acquisition of PAETEC, Windstream became radically different, and it was up to the marketing and communications teams to make sure that all employees—old and new—understood the new company’s look, and were united under what the Windstream brand stands for.
Partnering with Martino Flynn, Windstream worked to create a video that demonstrated that through the PAETEC acquisition, the company is now stronger and more united. To showcase this, we traveled to four major employment centers for the company (Little Rock, Ark.; Charlotte, N.C., Greenville, S.C., and Rochester, N.Y.) and a variety of facilities in order to collect footage of the people and places that make the company what it is today. To ensure consistency in all of the shots and capture a high-end look, we enlisted the help of local cinematographers—from lighting to shot selection and beyond. When completed, we chose the shots, words, graphics, and music that told the story of Windstream Business in a succinct and energetic way.
The final video was presented to more than 14,000 employees across more than 150 offices nationwide, as well as presented by Windstream executives at a dozen town hall meetings at major company employee centers. Anecdotal feedback from employees has been positive, and we continue to work with Windstream to merchandize the video via re-edits for an external audience comprised of enterprise and SMB customers.
In the end, this video contains several key characteristics that should be a part of any internal video if it is to be a success among employees, which we believe contributed to our PRism Award for the work:
- Energetic: The tone is enthusiastic to demonstrate excitement around the changes taking place
- Informative: The employees learn where the Windstream brand was, where it is today, and where it will be heading in the future
- Clear: The messaging and copy is easy to understand and the narrative is easy to follow
- Concise: The video is relatively short in length to ensure that viewers’ attention is retained for the entire time
- Visually Appealing: The people and places in the video are recognizable to employees, and the shots flow smoothly from one to the next to complement the narrative
We believe that the ‘We Are Windstream’ video captures all five of these characteristics and will be sure to use it as a benchmark when creating future internal videos for our clients. While we can’t show the official internal video, below is one of the re-edited external videos created from the original.
