Over years, I have been given many failed corporate communications videos to watch and have found that they all suffer from one or more of following problems.

1. A poorly written script

This would have to be one of most common problems. The script provides backbone to any video project and it must be perfect. It needs to be to point, clear and interesting.

Often scripts get written in-house resulting in wordy and highly detailed pieces of prose that do not translate well onto screen. Quite frankly, they are boring. Unfortunately, pretty shots and expert editing cannot hide a tedious narrative.

Worse still, is when script goes back and forth and content is played out in an illogical sequence. This results in no viewer being able to quickly understand your core marketing messages, if they can understand it at all.

Ideally, a script conveys most important pieces of information that your target market wants to know and is written with an objective in mind.

2. The video is too long

In this day and age of high speed broadband and other time-saving devices, very few of us have attention spans that can handle information for more than a few minutes.

Any video over 10 minutes is destined to lose viewers after first few minutes.

Yet, surprisingly there are many marketing videos today that are well over 12 minutes in length.

The best marketing videos are short and succinct. Yet, it is far easier to cram everything into a video than to make a short and concise one. In words of Blaise Pascal, "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter".

3. "The "look mum I'm on TV" scenario

While some of us may cringe at thought of a camera placed in front of us, there are many people who relish opportunity to show their face on television.

This can result in corporate heads droning on incessantly about how wonderful their company is (and what a great job they are doing). Sadly, this does nothing else but soothe corporate egos and turn viewers away.

Few people realise that talking to a camera in an appealingly manner is a skill in itself. Having a CEO spieling boring corporate fluff while looking dumbstruck and awkward in front of camera does not a good video make.