Last Updated: 4 months ago
Last Updated: May 2025
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What Is a Company History Video?
A company history video is a visual storytelling tool that highlights the origins, milestones, and achievements of a business over time. These videos often include archival footage, interviews with founders or longtime employees, animations, and key company events. By combining narrative with visual elements, they provide an engaging way to showcase a brand’s legacy and evolution. Whether it’s for internal onboarding, investor presentations, or public branding, company history videos are a powerful way to convey authenticity and establish credibility.
Why You Need a Company History Video
Creating a company history video is more than just a celebration of the past – it’s a strategic asset for building brand trust and emotional connection. These videos can help differentiate your company in a crowded market by emphasizing your unique journey, values, and long-term vision. They also serve as compelling content for marketing campaigns, social media, recruitment, and PR efforts. Most importantly, they show potential customers and clients that your business has a story worth telling – and worth trusting.
How to Introduce Your Company’s History
When crafting a company history video, the introduction sets the tone and hooks the viewer. Start by identifying a key moment or theme that represents your company’s founding purpose – whether it’s a personal story from the founder, a pivotal challenge, or a breakthrough innovation. From there, guide the audience through a timeline that highlights major milestones. Use a conversational tone and include visuals or footage that evoke emotion and reflect the company’s core identity. A strong introduction helps viewers feel invested in your story from the very beginning.
Benefits of a Company History Video for Marketing
From an SEO and digital marketing perspective, company history videos can significantly boost engagement on your website and social media platforms. Videos tend to increase time-on-site and are more likely to be shared, which can improve your search engine rankings. Additionally, embedding a video on your About Us or Company page can enhance user experience, making your brand more memorable. Pair the video with optimised metadata, transcripts, and keywords to maximise visibility and accessibility.
Company History Video Examples
Lego
This is a fairly long-form corporate video compared to many others. It’s essentially a short film in its own right, that just happens to be about the conception of a brand. It is animated, keeping it in in line with the brand, which is essentially for kids (although we all know a few adults who love it too!). The use of animation also helps keep the sadder parts of the video from being too heavy.
Even though the video is animated, a lot of thought went into the production design and lighting, which helps push along the narrative. It also tells the story through a narrator who, we discover, is a descendant of the characters in the video. This helps give it an emotive family link, which is a way of instilling the brand with a wholesome feel that parents and children alike will buy into.
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Nike
This video is portrayed a timeline format, showing the evolution of the Nike brand. It uses a popular film device of moving the images from right to left to represent progression and moving forward. Since Nike started back in 1964, the older video footage and photographs aren’t going to be perfect. The video utilises mixed media throughout the video, which makes it less jarring to the viewer when one encounters a lower quality photo.
One way in which Nike made the video more trustworthy is retaining some of the setbacks that the company encountered. By letting the viewer glimpse, but not dwell on, the negative moments, it gives a better rounded history than if it had just kept the company’s successes.
Levi Strauss
This videos features Levi Strauss’s historian to tell the story of the popular jean brand. The company is quick to align themselves with social change, included the anti-war movement and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The filming is documentary in style. They use archive photographs and memorabilia to help demonstrate how the brand developed throughout history, from the 19th century to present. The goal of the video is to relate to the masses, and in particular, their target audience: the working class.
Looking to get a video produced for your company? Have a look at our brand videos for some more inspiration!
Chanel
This is a video fully executed by motion graphics. It pulls together archive assets, mainly pictures of the designer Coco, her designs, and the people and places she knew in her life. It then manipulates the images in a creative way, so the story moves seamlessly from one graphic to the next without any hard cuts.
This editing style helps demonstrate how everything that happens is connected to create the Chanel brand we know today. The video also has a very well written and delivered voiceover.
This company history video also cleverly uses it’s logo branding, which is black and white, throughout the video. The animations themselves are also stripped-down and simple in style, reflecting the brand’s logo design.
Budweiser
This video feels very cinematic, and has high production value. The shots have been chosen very carefully, and is able to convey a long story in a short amount of time.
This video shows the struggle of an incoming immigrant to the U.S. Some careful thought went into the portrayal of class and race: being a German immigrant and being an African American at this time period were both difficult positions to be in. Budweiser also engages in a social commentary by emphasising that one of their founders was an immigrant, as there is still a streak of anti-immigration in the United States. This helps sell the brand as a liberal drink for the open-minded American.
HSBC
Finally, we have the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC). HSBC’s company history video takes a fresh and engaging approach by chronicling the bank’s technological journey over time. Rather than focusing solely on dates and milestones, the video tells a dynamic story of innovation – from the days of banking by ship and telegram to today’s cutting-edge use of AI, biometrics, and blockchain. Narrated with a playful tone and enriched by historical clips and quirky anecdotes, it emphasises how HSBC has continually leveraged new technology to enhance security, improve service, and remain a global banking leader.
Another option for companies who want to tell their story, but don’t necessarily want to jump into their full history are brand videos – click the link to learn more
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