5 examples of tech firms killing it with brand-driven animated storytelling

A tech company's explainer has to do one hard thing: make somebody care about software they cannot see.

Most of them answer that by explaining the software. Features, integrations, a tour of the dashboard. It is the safe choice, and it is why so much B2B video goes unwatched.

The five below do the opposite. Each one puts a person on screen with a problem and lets the product turn up as the thing that solves it. We have written before about what separates brand storytelling that works from the kind that gets skipped. These are the animated version of the same argument.

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One rule before the examples. The story has to be true.

Audiences are good at spotting an invented origin. Claiming a heritage you do not have, or a provenance that turns out to be outsourced, starts as marketing and can finish as a legal problem. The stories that work are usually the unglamorous ones already sitting in the business: the frustration that started it, the customer who forced a change, the work you turn down.

None of that needs inventing. It needs finding.

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Five tech brands, and the specific decision each one got right.

Slack: show the day, not the dashboard

Slack sells software that helps teams work. The explainer never explains the software.

It follows one character through a chaotic working day instead. The mess is familiar, the frustration is familiar, and Slack arrives as the thing that quiets it down. Their line is "made for people, built for productivity". People first, in the strapline and in the film.

Nobody watching needs to know how the platform is built. They need to know what it does to a Tuesday.

Headspace: an app walkthrough can still be a story

Headspace built a strong illustrated identity and then animated it, which is why a library of thirty videos still reads as one brand.

The film itself is an app walkthrough, the least promising format there is. It works because the voiceover speaks to one person. "It is here whenever you need it." Millions will watch it and it still sounds like it was made for the viewer.

A functional video and an emotive one are not different videos. Most companies decide they are, and then make the functional one.

Pendo: complexity is fine once you know who is watching

Pendo makes software that analyses software. It is genuinely hard to explain to a general audience, and they do not try.

They are speaking to product teams who already understand the problem, so the film is allowed to be technical without losing anyone. It opens on the pain those teams actually have: no reliable picture of how customers use the thing they built.

Knowing exactly who is watching is what earns you the right to be complicated. That decision is made before anyone opens an animation brief, not during it.

Spline: give the problem a body

"Every designer deserves a world with dimension." Spline is a browser-based space for designing in 3D.

The film hands the difficulty to a character. Traditional 3D software has a steep learning curve, so the character climbs a hill. Then the tool takes a 2D cube, turns it into a 3D one, then into a phone, in real time. The struggle and the relief are both shown rather than described.

It opens with "once upon a time", which should be unbearable and is not.

Eero: sell to the buyer, show the end user

B2B animation usually addresses the buyer and forgets the person who ends up using the thing. That is a mistake, because the buyer is trying to picture exactly that person.

Eero, now part of Amazon, opens on the benefit to the service provider and then moves into the household actually using the wifi. The end customers are the characters. The provider watching it sees what they would be able to offer, demonstrated rather than claimed.

Two audiences, one film, in that order.

Five decisions, one pattern

None of the five films is winning on animation quality. They are winning on a decision made before anyone opened After Effects.

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- Make somebody care before you make them understand.
- The customer is the hero. The product turns up to help.
- Complexity is allowed once you know exactly who is watching.
- A character gives an abstract problem a body.
- Two audiences, one film, in the right order.

We took the third one literally with Haydale, explaining nanotechnology in plain English to an audience that needed the science kept in.

Every one of those is a brand decision that the animation then carries. If they are not settled, the film will not settle them. The brand strategy workshop is where they get made.