Are creative videos just noise?

Creativity has never been the problem. The world is overflowing with clever campaigns, striking designs and videos that could go viral.

The hard part is making those ideas matter. That's what strategy does. It's what turns a spark into something that actually grows a business. Without it, creativity is noise. With it, creativity becomes momentum.

Every idea is a dot

The easiest way I've found to explain this is with dots. Every idea is a dot: a video, a message, a story, a design choice. On its own, each one can be beautiful. But a page full of loose dots doesn't show anyone anything.

Strategy is the line between them. A good video strategy connects those dots into a bigger picture people recognise, remember and act on. That's the thinking behind the short video below.

More content, less meaning

We live in a time where content is everywhere. Brands post more, faster and louder, often because the tools make it so easy. But audiences don't want more. They want meaning. They want to feel that a brand knows where it's going and why that matters to them.

There's also a timing problem that volume doesn't solve. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, popularised as the 95:5 rule, suggests that only around 5% of business buyers are in the market at any given moment. The other 95% will buy later, from someone they already remember. A stream of disconnected posts rarely builds that memory. A consistent story does.

Strategy directs creativity, it doesn't limit it

People sometimes hear "strategy" and think of spreadsheets that squeeze the life out of good ideas. I see it the other way around. Strategy gives clarity to the chaos. It doesn't limit creativity, it directs it. Like light through a lens, focus is what makes it powerful.

The marketing research world has been saying something similar for years. Les Binet and Peter Field's work for the IPA, The Long and the Short of It, argues for integrating long-term brand building with short-term activation rather than treating them as separate jobs. That's the same principle at a bigger scale: the creative idea and the business goal belong in one plan.

What it looks like in practice

In real projects, the difference is easy to recognise:

• A recruitment video that doesn't just look cinematic, but actually fills job openings.
• A product launch that whispers elegance instead of shouting features, and still drives sales.
• A founder story told in a way that builds trust, not just awareness.

In each case the creative part is what people see. The strategic part is why it works. The dots are creative. The line between them is strategy.

Why trust is the real outcome

That last example matters more than it looks. When a founder or leadership team tells a clear, consistent story, people start to trust the organisation behind it. In the 2024 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 73% of decision-makers said thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for judging an organisation's capabilities than its marketing materials. Content with a point of view earns more trust than content that's just there to fill a feed.

AI makes this even more relevant. Making content has never been cheaper, so the value moves to deciding what's worth making in the first place. I wrote about that shift in why AI didn't kill creativity.

Where I like to work

The most successful brands won't be the loudest. They'll be the ones who connect creative ideas with strategy so smoothly that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. That's when a campaign stops being just a campaign and starts to feel like a movement. The ideas can stay as bold as you like. They just need somewhere to go.

It's also the space I enjoy most: where creative direction, video production and strategic clarity meet, and every dot finds its place in the bigger picture. It's the role I describe in why companies need a strategic creative partner.

If your content feels busy but not quite connected, I'd be glad to help you find the line between the dots. You can read more about how I work, see selected work, or book a 1-1.

— Joost