The Video Brand: How to own it

Partner blog: TwentyThree

Over the past few years, most B2B companies have been leaning more heavily into video, running more webinars, publishing more content, and explaining complex ideas through video rather than relying on traditional white papers. This represents real progress, as communication has become clearer, more human, and significantly easier for audiences to engage with.

Yet, while companies have increasingly embraced video, they are still delivering it almost entirely on other people’s terms. The majority of brands’ video content continues to live on a familiar handful of platforms: YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Zoom and X. These are undeniably powerful tools that
have made production and distribution remarkably easy and scalable, but they were never built for brands. They were originally designed for individual creators, and now, algorithmic reach, and maximum utility for the platforms themselves.

As a result, brands encounter several meaningful compromises. Audiences constantly remain one click away from the brand’s ecosystem, captured in a third party environment with its very own look and feel. Also in an environment where other brands can compete for attention and even comment, and the valuable viewership data generated in these moments rarely belongs fully to the brand.

As Marshall McLuhan famously noted in his 1964 book Understanding Media, ‘the medium is the message’. He argued that people tend to focus too much on the content being delivered while overlooking how the medium itself, its form, structure, and the environment it creates fundamentally shapes the way that content is received and interpreted. In other words, the platform or channel is never neutral. It influences perception at a deep level by changing the scale, pace, and pattern of human interaction. Applied to today’s marketing landscape, this means the interface people use, the level of distraction surrounding them, what they encounter before a brand’s content begins, and what they are nudged toward afterward, all subtly shape how that brand is perceived, whether we like it or not.

And when nearly 85 percent of customers express a desire to see more video from the brands they follow, these interactions are becoming brand critical moments. Which is why it is so important for brands to think about how they can regain some of the stewardship they used to enjoy, in a less fragmented media era, by bringing more of the important moments back into environments that they actually control.

This means making websites truly video-first, creating dedicated video sections and pages on brand websites instead of video libraries on Youtube, and designing webinars and virtual events that feel like they are from and by the brand itself, rather than a generic platform template. Not to mention exploring all the ways a brand can delight viewers by embedding their brand into the more subtle areas of the experience such as play buttons with logo animations, curated webinar intros and even
stylised video players. It is not a dramatic change, but it is an important one, because If you don’t start to own your whole video experience, you risk losing valuable control of what will increasingly become one of your brand's most critical dimensions.

The writer is Dan Duffett.

Dan puhui aiheesta myös MarkkinointiKollektiivin tilaisuudessa 8.4.2026. Katso Rohkeutta ja resilienssiä brändimarkkinointiin -tilaisuuden tallenne täältä.