Project & Development Manager
Explainer videos are often positioned as tactical marketing assets. They are expected to simplify a homepage, support a campaign, or help sales explain a product faster. This framing dramatically understates their real value and leads to poor decisions around scope, quality, and expectations.
For leadership teams, particularly in B2B and complex organizations, explainer videos are not about style or brevity. They are about decision velocity, buyer confidence, and organizational alignment. When leaders misunderstand this role, explainer videos underperform, not because the medium is weak, but because it is misused.
Many organizations use brief explainer videos like advertisements. Short, catchy, and feature-focused. Senior buyers are not looking to be entertained. They are looking to reduce risk.
B2B purchasing research consistently shows that buying decisions depend on clarity, internal consensus, and confidence in execution. Explainer videos are most effective when they function as shared mental models that help multiple stakeholders understand the same system, value proposition, or process in the same way.
When used as decision support tools rather than promotional assets, explainer videos shorten sales cycles, reduce repetitive explanations, and support alignment long after a campaign ends.
Leaders often push explainer videos to be “as simple as possible.” Simplicity, however, is not the same as omission.
In complex industries such as technology, energy, healthcare, and infrastructure, buyers do not distrust complexity. They distrust unexplained complexity. Research in learning science shows that understanding improves when information is structured, sequenced, and visually mapped, not when it is stripped of substance.
Strong explainer videos do not avoid complexity. They organize it. Animation enables abstract systems, invisible processes, and time-based cause-and-effect relationships to be shown clearly. This is especially valuable for VP level and executive buyers who must justify decisions internally.
Another common mistake is optimizing explainer videos only for engagement metrics such as views or watch time, without considering what happens after the video is watched.
The cognitive theory of multimedia learning shows that retention improves when visuals directly support the spoken message rather than decorate it. Explainer videos designed for retention become reusable assets across sales enablement, onboarding, internal communication, and executive briefings.
Those designed only for attention expire quickly.
Leadership teams often expect a single explainer video to serve marketing, sales, onboarding, and investor relations at once. The result is usually a vague asset that satisfies none of those audiences well.
Explainer videos perform best when they are part of a system. Different stages of the buyer journey require different levels of detail, framing, and emphasis. A high-level explainer may open the door, but deeper visual explanations are often required to support justification and approval.
Organizations that see consistent ROI treat explainer videos as modular, scalable assets that evolve with the business.
Explainer videos are often viewed as execution only deliverables. Leadership teams provide finished messaging and expect visuals to elevate it.
In practice, the strongest explainer videos are built through strategic collaboration. Determining what truly needs to be explained and what can be removed requires synthesis, an outside perspective, and industry experience.
At Broken Pencil Studios, explainer videos succeed when leadership teams involve creative partners early, not just to animate, but to clarify. This is where buyer justification strengthens, and internal alignment improves.
For VP of Marketing and senior leaders, explainer videos create value because they span departments, stakeholders, and decision contexts while maintaining consistency.
When executed strategically, they:
Explainer videos should be evaluated not by production cost, but by their impact on understanding, confidence, and decision-making speed.
If your explainer videos are not shortening sales cycles, supporting buyer justification, or reducing internal friction, the issue may not be the format but the strategy behind it.
Broken Pencil Studios partners with marketing and leadership teams to design explainer videos that clarify complex offers, support executive decision-making, and convert understanding into action. If you are evaluating explainer videos as a strategic asset rather than a one-off deliverable, we invite you to a focused discovery call.
