All I Want For Christmas Is A Video Team

Smash those Like and Subscribe buttons on audio-visual talent

I’ve been running an informal poll lately. When I’ve been catching up with comms leaders—people running teams at startups and established tech companies alike—I ask them: If you had to rebuild your comms function from scratch tomorrow, what would you do differently?

The answer is almost universal. They’d build a video team.

Not “invest more in video,” not “hire a video-forward agency,” not “get one talented Zoomer with an iPhone and a ring light,” an actual, dedicated, in-house video team. A director of photography who understands visual storytelling, an editor, and an audio specialist. Three people who can work together as a creative unit. That’s the minimum viable video team.

The way people consume information has shifted, and our profession hasn’t caught up. US adults now spend six hours and 45 minutes per day consuming video content across streaming, traditional TV, YouTube, and social platforms. They spend 16 to 17 minutes reading for personal interest. That’s a ratio of roughly 24 to 1. Look at your team or agency. Are you spending a comparable ratio of time on video-focused and text-focused-efforts or anything close to that? My guess is decidedly not. In fact, it might be the inverse.

This isn’t a generational quirk that will revert to the mean. Among Americans ages 15 to 24, only 9.5 percent read more than 20 minutes per day for pleasure. Approximately 80 percent engage with screens for 20-plus minutes daily. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends survey, 56 percent of Gen Z considers social media content more relevant than traditional TV shows and movies. Half feel a stronger personal connection to social media creators than to television actors.

Right now, video capability lives almost entirely outside of companies. You hire a production company or a freelance crew when you need something shot. There are good reasons for this arrangement. The videographers I know value their freedom: the ability to work on projects that interest them creatively, to move between industries and clients, to avoid being locked into one company’s needs. It’s the same reason talented people start agencies or consultancies of any kind.¹

But the imperative for companies to bring this function in-house has never been stronger. When video is a sometimes thing you hire out for, it stays peripheral to your communications strategy. When it’s an always-available capability sitting next to your comms team, it becomes central and second nature.

Don’t mistake this as me calling for the PR version of Pivot to Video at the expense of text-based output and text-based professionals. This isn’t an “either/or” situation, it’s an “and” situation. The truth is the modern media ecosystem demands more of everything just to break through.

And not all content or messages lend itself toward video consumption. Communications that index toward precision and reference-ability, especially financial and crisis communications, still lean toward text, especially in an age where machine-readability is becoming so much more important.

There are also huge audience-specific considerations. The data I presented above is top-line. Want to target 50-to-70-year-old policymakers in DC? Video’s in the mix, but in a style very different from a video game rollout to 13-to 25-year-old males whose time with text-based media we can probably handicap at “Cro-Magnon”. CFOs aren’t going to want to sit for a 10-minute video. Give them a doc they can scan in 90 seconds.

It gives me no pleasure to write any of this. I am, at my core, a word person.² I default to thinking in prose first and pictures second. It’s what drew me to Twitter over Instagram back in the day. I love the craft of it, the precision it demands. But I can’t let that love blind me to how people actually communicate now, and neither can you.

So 2026 is the year I get serious about video: getting over the discomfort of recording myself, learning to edit, understanding the visual grammar of the medium, and building video into my own communications alongside the writing I do here. It feels uncomfortable in the way that acquiring any new skill does, but that discomfort is a signal that it matters.

I’d challenge everyone reading this to think about the same thing. What are you building into your comms work with video for the coming year? How central is it to your strategy versus how central it should be?

And since we’re heading into a new year, I want to hear from you. Who are the most talented video people you work with? The freelancers and small shops who do exceptional work and deserve more recognition? Email me with your recommendations, and I’ll compile a list in an upcoming edition to shine a light on the people doing this well.

1. I can relate!

2. Which is why we’re all here right now instead of on TikTok watching me lip-sync and dance to Video Killed the Radio Star surrounded by text bullets from this newsletter. Such indignity will first require the establishment of a paid tier.