The CEO has agreed to record a short video after the results release. Everyone likes the idea. Then the practical questions start. Who writes the script? Does it need the same approval as a news release? Can the CEO say anything that is not already in the release? Where does the video live on the website, and what happens to it when next quarter’s version replaces it?
These are the right questions, and the fact that they rarely get asked in advance is why so much investor relations video ends up as a one-off: recorded with enthusiasm, published somewhere on the site, never updated, and quietly embarrassing eighteen months later when the strategy has moved on and the video has not.
Video can do genuinely useful work in investor communications. It can also absorb budget and management time while producing something no investor needed. The difference is rarely production quality. It is whether the video was built around a real communication job, with the same discipline the company applies to everything else it publishes.
Where investor relations video actually helps — and where it does not
Start with the honest question: what can a video do that the existing materials cannot?
There are three answers that hold up in practice.
It can carry a complex story that documents struggle with. Some businesses are hard to understand from text and slides alone. A mining company whose value depends on the geography of a deposit, the sequence of a development plan, and the location of infrastructure can spend pages describing what a three-minute narrated flyover or site walkthrough shows directly. A biotech explaining a mechanism of action, or an industrial company explaining a production process, faces the same problem. When the story is spatial, physical, or sequential, video is often the clearest format available.
It can put a face on management. For most investors in small and mid-cap companies, management is a set of biographies and a voice on a webcast. A short, plainly produced video of the CEO explaining the quarter gives investors something the documents cannot: a sense of how the person leading the company actually communicates. That is not a trivial thing. Investors routinely say they invest in management teams; video is one of the few ways a company can let investors form that judgment without a meeting.
It can give an existing asset more reach. The corporate presentation is usually the most carefully built document a company produces, and it is delivered mostly as a static PDF that requires the reader to supply the narration themselves. A recorded, narrated version of the same deck — a corporate presentation video — lets the company deliver the intended telling of its own story to anyone who finds the site, not only to audiences who get the live version at a conference.
And where video does not help: it cannot rescue an unclear story, and a company that cannot explain itself on a page will not explain itself on camera either — script problems survive the transition to video intact. It should not be treated as a substitute for disclosure documents; the filings, releases, and reports remain the record, and the video sits alongside them. And it rarely pays off as a single showpiece. A lone “corporate film” from three years ago, still embedded on the homepage, communicates mostly that the company tried video once.
Formats that earn their place
Most useful investor relations video falls into a small number of formats, each with different production realities. It is worth being clear-eyed about those realities before committing, because the real recurring cost of video is keeping the result current, long after the first recording is paid for.
The narrated corporate presentation
This is often the highest-value, lowest-glamour option. Take the approved investor deck, record a clear voiceover — ideally the CEO or CFO, though a well-briefed IR lead can work — and publish the result alongside the PDF. Production needs are modest: a quiet room, a decent microphone, screen-recorded slides, light editing. Because the deck is already approved, the content risk is low, and because the deck is refreshed each cycle anyway, the update path is obvious.
The main production note: audio quality matters more than picture quality. Viewers forgive plain slides; they do not forgive a voice recorded in an echoing boardroom. A modest microphone solves most of it.
The CEO or quarterly update
A short piece — a few minutes, not twenty — in which the CEO walks through the period just reported. Recorded after the results are public, scripted from the release and MD&A, published on the results page next to the documents it accompanies.
The value here is tone and accessibility rather than new information, and that constraint should be embraced rather than resented: the update should contain nothing material that the written disclosure does not. Production can be simple. One camera, good light, clean audio, and a setting that looks like the company rather than a rented studio. What kills these is not modest production but irregularity — an update that appears for two quarters and then stops raises more questions than never starting.
The project or site walkthrough
For companies with physical assets, footage of the actual operation — the site, the plant, the drill program, the construction progress — does explanatory work nothing else can. These are the most expensive videos to make well, since they involve travel, drone work, and real editing, and they date quickly if they are tied to a specific stage. The practical compromise is to build them around things that stay true for a while: the setting, the scale, the infrastructure, the plan — and to keep stage-specific claims in the narration, where they can be re-recorded, rather than burned into on-screen graphics.
The ESG or sustainability narrative
Where a company has a genuine story — community employment, rehabilitation work, water management, safety culture — video can show it more credibly than a report chapter can assert it. The risk is equally obvious: footage that overclaims reads worse than no footage at all, and sustainability statements attract increasing scrutiny in many jurisdictions. Scripts here deserve the same review as any public sustainability claim, and generic stock imagery of wind turbines helps nobody.
Every video is a public statement
This is the section that should be read before any recording happens.
A video published by a listed company is corporate communication, full stop. The informal feel of the format changes nothing about its status. In practice that means a few disciplines, none of them optional.
Script and approval come first. The script should go through the same review path as a news release or presentation — IR, legal or compliance, and whoever signs off on public statements. Ad-libbing on camera is where trouble starts; an unscripted aside about the pipeline or the outlook can create exactly the kind of statement the review process exists to catch. The comfortable rule: if the CEO would not say it in a release, the CEO does not say it on camera.
No new material information. A video is a poor vehicle for disclosure, because it reaches audiences unevenly and its contents are hard to reference precisely. The safe pattern is for video to explain, contextualize, and humanize information that has already been properly disseminated — never to break it. Selective disclosure rules and dissemination requirements vary by jurisdiction and exchange, and the company’s legal and disclosure advisers should confirm how video fits its obligations. The website team’s job is to publish the approved material, not to interpret those obligations independently.
Forward-looking statements need their usual treatment. If the script contains outlook language, the company’s standard cautionary framing applies. How that is handled — on-screen, in narration, on the page around the video — is for the advisers to determine, but it should be determined, not improvised.
Captions and a transcript are part of the job. Accurate captions serve viewers who cannot use audio, and a posted transcript makes the video’s contents searchable and referenceable. Auto-generated captions need human review; transcription software has strong opinions about mining terminology.
The video needs a home and an archive. Decide where each format lives before publishing the first one: the corporate presentation video near the deck it narrates, the quarterly update on the results page for that period, walkthroughs on the relevant project page. Date every video visibly. When a new version supersedes an old one, either move the old one to a clearly labeled archive or retire it deliberately — companies keep records of what they published and when, and video should be no exception. An undated CEO update floating on a general “Media” page, discussing a quarter the visitor cannot identify, is worse than no video.
The mobile, muted reality
However carefully a video is produced, much of its audience will encounter it on a phone, quite possibly with the sound off, in the thirty seconds between two other things. Plan for that viewer rather than the imagined one in a quiet office.
Concretely: captions on by default, because a muted video without them is a slideshow of a person’s face. Key information on screen as text, not only in narration. A first ten seconds that identifies the company, the speaker, and the topic, since many viewers decide in that window whether to continue. Lengths measured in single-digit minutes for updates; long-form belongs in the webcast, which investors already know how to budget time for.
On the website itself, restraint. Autoplaying video with sound on a corporate homepage irritates almost everyone, including the investor opening the site during a meeting. A large background video that delays the page on a slow connection costs more than it adds — the person on hotel Wi-Fi trying to reach the latest presentation does not care about the drone footage behind the navigation. A clearly labeled, click-to-play video embedded where it is relevant does the same work with none of the friction.
Hosting is a practical decision with trade-offs. Third-party platforms are cheap and handle bandwidth well, but they surround the video with recommendations the company does not control and may raise privacy considerations depending on how they are embedded. Self-hosted or professionally embedded players keep the environment clean at some cost. Either can work; the choice should be made once, deliberately, rather than differently for every video.
A starting point that a small team can sustain
For an IR function of one or two people, the sensible ambition is not a video program. It is one format, done consistently, with a defined process.
The narrated corporate presentation is usually the best first choice: the content already exists and is already approved, the production bar is low, and the refresh cadence is built into the reporting calendar. A quarterly CEO update is a reasonable alternative if management is a genuine communicator and willing to commit to the rhythm — the commitment matters more than the format.
Before recording anything, settle four things in writing. The approval path, agreed with legal, so it is never negotiated under deadline. The publishing location and naming convention, including how versions are dated and archived. The production setup — the room, the microphone, the person who edits — so each recording is a repetition rather than a project. And the review date: after two cycles, look honestly at whether the videos are being maintained, whether they still match the current story, and whether the effort is sustainable. If the answer is no, stopping cleanly is respectable; an abandoned video section is not.
Notice what is absent from this list: any promise about what video will achieve with investors. Whether anyone watches, and what they conclude, is not something a company can guarantee, and an IR team should be suspicious of anyone who guarantees it on their behalf. What the team controls is whether the video is clear, accurate, current, properly approved, and easy to find. That is the whole job, and it is enough.
Video as part of the record, not a departure from it
The companies that use investor relations video well tend to treat it unremarkably. It goes through the same approvals as everything else, lives in a predictable place on the website, carries a date, gets refreshed when the materials it accompanies are refreshed, and gets retired when it no longer describes the company. The format is newer than the press release; the discipline around it should be exactly as old.
Handled that way, video becomes what it should be — another well-maintained part of the company’s public record, doing a job the documents alone do less well.
Corvize produces corporate presentation videos and manages the investor websites where they live, including the publishing and archiving workflow around them.
