Once, producing video was expensive to make and clunky and expensive to deliver: basically you sent prospects a VHS tape by post!

Today, video is delivered directly to everyone's desktop or laptop and more TV programmes are now watched online than on the box itself.

Not only has technology driven down the cost of production, but delivery to your potential audience online is now - effectively - free.

Even duplicating DVDs is down to around a £1 for short runs of a thousand or so and continues to fall as numbers go up. (We recently produced 40,000 fully printed and packaged DVDs for a client and the unit price was 23p.)

So most of the obstacles that once held organisations back from representing themselves on video have disappeared.

Which still leaves the question 'Why do it?'

Having created many productions for many clients, we believe there are identifiable objectives shared by all of them:

To put a human face on their organisation. To make human contact. To provide the 'subtext' that no amount of facts and figures can supply.

'People work with people' and any business seeking another to do business with is concerned about 'fit.' They're looking for a cultural match as well as a commercial one.

Interestingly, while the internet has - in theory - opened up our access to each other, it also imposes an impersonal barrier. (Notice the number of sites where you really, really have to search to find a way of making human contact.)

Placing a video on your site can be a fast way of saying 'Hey, there are real people behind this'.

Also, video works in a radically different way from printed forms of communication, even from still pictures. Done properly, it gets in 'under the radar', catching the audience with their prejudices down and adding impact to the message.

A number of studies show that we absorb moving visual images more readily than any other form of communication.