It's time to talk about the clap problem

The bar we set for ourselves

Over the years, I have judged enough award entries to know how ropey the effectiveness data can be for the average corporate film.

"My boss liked it." "Everybody clapped." "The client was complimentary."

These are literal responses to some of the effectiveness categories of awards that I have judged.

There are a few problems with this. Some small, some quite significant.

At the smaller end of the scale, from a professional pride standpoint, can't we aspire to achieve more than just a clap? At the more significant end, this kind of goal damages client perceptions of the role we play for them. It smacks of a product that is 'nice to have', rather than an essential, powerful business tool.

Now, obviously, for a lot of clients, a clap from the audience or a slap on the back from their boss is what they want. But we have to have the discipline to dig deeper.

Why the problem is structural, not personal

This is not a criticism of the people making the videos or the people commissioning them. It's a structural problem. Views are easy to measure. Belief change is hard. Attention is invisible.

Memory — the thing that determines whether your communication actually influences a decision — is nearly impossible to track using the tools most organisations have at their disposal. So we defaulted to what we could count. And over time, what we could count became what we optimised for.

For a long time, in fact, through much of our history, judging effectiveness has been challenging, if not impossible.

Video sharing platforms have tended to — surprise surprise — optimise the metrics which help them: views, engagement. That is exactly what they're selling to their advertisers, so that makes sense. According to the VidCo 2024 State of Video Marketing Report, 74% of companies measure video using these stats.

The problem with that, though, is that it is not what the client — what you — necessarily want. The question we should have been asking is simple but clarifying: did it actually work?

Did it change minds? Did it change behaviour? Did someone just have autoplay left on in an unwatched browser?

An industry measuring the wrong thing

We have built an entire industry on a metric that tells us almost nothing about whether we achieved what we set out to do.

91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. It is, by near-universal consensus, the most powerful communications medium available. But as an industry, we are not capturing, nor communicating that value to the people who are investing in it. Which is exactly why it is so easy for businesses to put a line through the production budget when times are hard.

If we're aiming for clapped hands, that's something any business can quietly decide to live without. If the change we're generating is an undeniable business transformation, it's considerably harder to cut.

Which is how you end up with an industry producing enormous volumes of content, measuring it obsessively, and quietly wondering why so many clients see it as a nice-to-have.

The tools exist. The question is whether we use them.

The good news is that this is a solvable problem — and the tools to solve it already exist. Not because of some future technology, but because the behavioural science and neurobiology research needed to understand what makes communication land has caught up with the question we should have been asking all along.

Fully 95% of decisions are made by our subconscious minds.

That single fact reframes everything. It means that asking people whether they liked a video — or counting how many watched it — tells you almost nothing about whether it will actually change their behaviour. You have to go deeper.

We know what genuine emotional engagement looks like at a neurological level. We know how to measure it. And we know how to use that measurement to make the work better — to iterate until the content doesn't just get watched, but actually does what it was made to do.

The shift is simple. The implications aren't.

The shift this requires is not complicated. It is simply this: stop asking how many people watched it. Start asking what happened in their heads when they did.

The conversation the industry needs to have is not about production quality, distribution strategy, or which platform to prioritise this quarter. It's about moving from a world where we make content and hope it works, to one where we can actually guarantee that it does.

That guarantee isn't hypothetical. There is a methodology that treats communication effectiveness not as a hope, but as a measurable, improvable outcome.

That changes everything. It changes the brief. It changes the relationship between a communicator and their audience. And it changes the question — from "how much does a video cost?" to "what is the measurable business impact of our communication strategy?"

Twenty years in, I believe, this is how our industry will safeguard our futures.

This has been playing on my mind in one form or another for years. If you have any thoughts, I would love to hear them. Even if you think I am completely wrong...

See you next time.