There’s a particular kind of film that complex businesses keep making.
Aerial drone shot of a city at dusk. Slow push on a server rack. Abstract particles resolving into a network. A voiceover explaining that we live in an increasingly connected world. Six seconds of a diverse team laughing at a laptop. Logo.
It’s competent. It’s expensive. It’s completely interchangeable with a film made by a competitor, a client, and an unrelated company in a different sector, and everyone who watches it knows this within four seconds and stops paying attention.
Humanising a brand is the work of not making that film. It is not a tone-of-voice adjustment. It’s a set of specific craft decisions, and they’re harder than the generic version.
Why complex businesses drift into abstraction
It’s not laziness. There are structural reasons, and understanding them is how you resist them.
The subject genuinely is abstract. A decentralised network, a settlement protocol, a spectrum-sharing model: there’s nothing to point a camera at. Abstraction feels like the honest response.
Everyone internally already understands it. Once you’ve spent two years inside a business, the jargon stops registering as jargon. The film gets approved by people for whom it’s perfectly clear.
Specificity feels risky. A concrete claim can be challenged. A concrete person might leave the company. A specific example might not represent everything the business does. Vagueness is safe, and it’s also invisible.
Multiple stakeholders each add their piece. The film that survives eight rounds of internal approval is the one that offended nobody, and that film says nothing. Abstraction is often just the residue of consensus.
The core move: find the person the thing happens to
Every business, however technical, exists because something changes for someone. The entire craft of humanisation is locating that person and putting them on screen.
Not as a testimonial slot near the end. As the structure of the film.
A telecoms infrastructure company is not really about infrastructure. It’s about a person in a place where connection was previously impossible or unaffordable, and what they can now do. A financial protocol is about someone who was paying a fee, waiting a week, or excluded entirely, and now isn’t. A social impact project is about a specific named individual whose situation is different, not a category of beneficiaries.
The technical layer then becomes the explanation for the human change rather than the subject of the film. Same information. Entirely different experience. And crucially, the audience now has a reason to want the technical explanation, because they’ve been given a stake in the outcome.
Specificity is the engine
The single most reliable technique we have is replacing categories with particulars.
“Communities in remote regions” is a category. One named village, one named person, one specific thing they can now do at 7am that they couldn’t do last year. That’s a particular, and it does far more work.
This is counterintuitive for anyone worried about representativeness. The instinct is that a specific example is narrower than a general claim and therefore weaker. The opposite is true. Audiences generalise instantly from a vivid particular and cannot generalise at all from an abstraction. One person’s story is understood as representative. A statement about “users” is understood as marketing.
The same principle applies at every scale:
- Not “our team is passionate”, but one engineer explaining the problem that annoys them.
- Not “trusted by industry leaders”, but one client describing the specific decision they were nervous about.
- Not “innovative technology”, but the one thing it does that the previous approach couldn’t.
Craft decisions that carry humanity
Humanisation isn’t only structural. It shows up in production choices that seem technical.
Let people finish thinking. The reflex is to cut on the clean sentence. The moment where someone pauses, reconsiders, and says something less polished is almost always the moment the audience believes. It survives the edit only if someone protects it.
Interview like a conversation, not a data capture. If the contributor is reciting approved messaging, the film is dead regardless of how well it’s shot. Getting past that requires the discovery work to have happened first. You can only ask a disarming question if you understand the subject well enough to have one.
Use real environments. A founder in their actual workspace carries information a studio backdrop deletes. Mess is evidence.
Sound before picture. Room tone, the noise of an actual place, an unpolished voice. Audiences forgive imperfect images far more readily than sterile sound.
Resist the music cue that does the feeling for you. A swelling score over an emotionally empty sequence is the most common tell that a film doesn’t trust its own content. If the material works, the music can be restrained. If it doesn’t, no score will rescue it.
Humanisation is not softening
An important distinction, because it gets confused constantly.
Making a brand feel human does not mean making it feel gentle, casual, or friendly. It means making it feel like it was made by people who mean it. A film can be rigorous, technical, unsentimental and intensely human. A serious engineer explaining precisely why the hard problem is hard is one of the most human things you can put on screen.
Conversely, plenty of deliberately warm brand films are the least human things in the category: heavily art-directed, over-scored, populated by people performing emotions on cue. Warmth applied as a finish is not humanity. It reads as costume.
The test isn’t tone. It’s whether a real person would recognise themselves in it.
Why this matters more as content gets cheaper
Generic content is now essentially free to produce, and the volume of it is going to keep climbing. Which means the baseline is rising and the generic film is not merely ineffective. It’s actively invisible.
What remains scarce is the stuff that can only come from somewhere real: a specific person, a specific place, a genuine opinion, an unrepeatable moment. Those things require access, time and trust to obtain. They cannot be generated, and they can’t be borrowed from a competitor’s film.
That’s the whole argument for humanisation, put commercially. It’s the part of your communication that nobody else can make.