With increases in internet speeds and accessibility to high quality video equipment over the last several years, video has become a popular medium for online storytelling, especially in recruitment marketing. At Stories Inc., we’re big fans of video and we do a great job with it, but we’re quick to point out to clients and prospective clients that video is not the only medium to tell stories online. In fact, for some stories, video is simply not the best medium.

I was recently listening to a podcast that featured one of the world’s foremost storytelling experts, Alex Blumberg. As former producer of This American Life and founder of Gimlet Media, Blumberg knows how to tell a great story.

In this particular podcast, Blumberg shared a story of a time he tried experimenting with a production for TV, which turned out to be very different from what he’s used to in radio. His explanation for why the experiment was so difficult for him was very relevant to our work:

“You can’t watch people telling a story [on TV] about something that happened a long time ago. Something about it just does not work…You need so much more visual information than just watching people talk. You can produce a story from the past, but to do it, you have to give people something to watch—you have to invent an entire visual story to go along with the story that the person is telling.”

On client projects, when we uncover a great story from the past during our interview process, we tend to only turn the story into a video if the client has access to visual materials that help tell the story. Whether it’s physical artifacts, old photos, or archival video footage that we can cut to as b-roll, you need more than just a talking head on-screen recounting a story from the past.

For one client project, we heard a lot of great stories about the company’s early office environment, but we had no access to archival materials, so we chose not to use video to tell those particular stories. Instead, we created a story graphic where we were able to combine interesting design elements (like a map of the old office locations) and illustrations to help tell the stories.

From our more than three years of experience creating powerful recruitment marketing videos, we had come to our own conclusion about the difficulty in using video to tell a story from the past without any supporting visual materials. It was nice hearing one of the world’s foremost storytelling experts validate our beliefs.