Executive conference attendees knocked out by video profiles of their colleagues

In an effort to boost networking at an executive leadership conference, Johns Manville’s communicator Eric Brown led an effort to produce a series of short profile videos of select conference participants. The resulting eight videos have earned first place in the “Interview Video” category of PR Daily’s Video & Visual Awards.

To identify likely subjects for the video, the communications team added a question to the pre-conference survey: “Tell us something interesting about yourself that others might not know.” About a third of the responses led to eight stories from around the world. Brown partnered with Reel Creative Productions in Denver, a vendor with which he had worked for years; Brown directed the videos while Mark Burr from Reel Creative handled filming and editing.

Each video is grounded entirely in the employee’s storytelling (we never hear the interviewer ask a question); interview video is interspersed expertly with photos and source videos, resulting in some of the most professional videos we have seen employed for internal communication purposes.

The tales are raw and moving: a single mother of a disabled child, an employee whose sister-in-law donated a kidney, an employee who boxes for recreation, another who is a glassblower. The eight videos—running about five minutes each—were shown at the two-day conference, producing high praise from participants. Since the conference, the videos have been shared on Johns Manville’s intranet and have been screened for a few select external audiences, though it remains primarily an internal communication.

For top-notch execution on a solid idea, congratulations to Eric Brown and Mark Burr.