The one thing every great bank video gets right (and most miss)

As a video producer, I’ve noticed a pattern that shows up in almost every bank video that works — the ones clients still reference two years later, the ones the sales team actually uses, the ones that hit unexpectedly hard on LinkedIn.

The videos that miss usually make the same mistake, and the videos that land usually make the same choice.

Here's the choice:

The videos that work cast a non-banker as the co-lead.

Not a bank employee talking to a customer. Not a CEO monologue. Not a testimonial where the customer says three sentences and the bank fills the rest. A real person — a small-business owner, a nonprofit director, a coach, a farmer, a doctor — anchoring the story alongside a bank representative who is clearly there to serve them, not sell to them.

This sounds obvious when I write it out. It is not obvious in practice. The default at almost every bank’s marketing team is to make the bank the hero. It's their brand. It's their dollars. Of course the bank should be the star.

But the videos where the bank is the star are the ones that sit at 300 views forever. The videos where the customer is the star are the ones that get shared internally at competitor banks, saved by marketers, sent by sales teams to prospects who wanted to hear from a real customer.

If you want to see this thesis executed at a bank scale that isn't Chase or Regions, look at First Bank in North Carolina and their documentary work with Amazing Studios.

Their "Our Story" campaign is a video series featuring small-business owners across the Carolinas — restaurants, skate parks, hang-gliding tour operators, a family-run salad dressing company called Little Black Dressing. Each entrepreneur tells their own story. First Bank shows up as the partner who helped that story happen, not as the star of it.

Two things about the execution worth stealing:

The lesson is that First Bank made a strategic choice years ago to let their customers tell their own stories, and they've built a library of videos that compound in value because the format is repeatable.

If you want proof this isn't a new insight — just one most banks still ignore — look at what TD Bank did in January 2013.

They killed a years-long celebrity-driven ad platform and launched "Bank Human, Again," a campaign that explicitly repositioned real customers and employees as the campaign's stars. The New York Times covered the shift at launch.

The campaign was celebrated at the time, and — here's the interesting part — thirteen years later, most community banks still haven't made the equivalent move. Their video output remains bank-first: CEOs on stages, product explainers, branded intro sequences, employee spotlights that read like recruiting material. All of that has a purpose. None of it is the video that actually breaks through.

If you're planning bank video content for Q4 2026 or Q1 2027, three moves I'd make:

1. Cast one non-banker per video. A customer, a nonprofit partner, a local business owner, a coach. Anyone whose story is bigger than banking. If you can't name that person before the shoot, you're not ready to shoot.

2. Give them the majority of the screen time. Your banker's job is to make the customer look right, not to talk. If your video has a two-person interview format, the banker should be the listener, not the lead.

3. Plan for multiple cuts from one shoot. A brand-story long-form, a 30-60 second social cut, a 15-second vertical for reels. Same day, same crew, three deliverables. That's how you make the production budget pencil.

The banks that get this right in 2027 will not spend more than their competitors. They'll spend it differently.

ABA Bank Marketing Conference lands in Austin September 23-25. The biggest bank-marketing gathering of the year kicks off tomorrow. I'll be there for all three days. If you're going, reply to this email and let's find time. Issue #2 will be the full recap.

RBC just made the opposite bet. Royal Bank of Canada launched "You Deserve" in September 2025 with Will Arnett as their new celebrity pitchman — a direct reversal of the TD-style customer-first playbook. Interesting counter-move from a bank with mega-budget to spend. Worth watching whether it lands.

Community bank storytelling to keep an eye on. Vye's client work for Falcon National Bank — including a 3-minute Leedstone testimonial published in September 2025 — is a working example of the customer-as-lead format at a genuinely small bank. Longer than I'd usually recommend, but the framing is right.

One thing worth watching this week. Pull up First Bank's Little Black Dressing documentary case study on Amazing Studios' site. Two minutes to skim. The reason I flag it: the video isn't "a bank ad about a customer." It's a documentary about a family business, sponsored by a bank. That difference is everything, and it's the difference most bank videos never make.

I just spent a week on a shoot in Duxbury, Massachusetts — and now I'm home in Tampa unpacking gear before packing again for Austin. The whiplash is the job.

The unexpected keeper from this run: a small bakery in Duxbury called French Memories. Coastal Massachusetts town, brick-and-clapboard main street, and the pastries would fit right into a Paris arrondissement. If your bank works with small businesses like that, ask them for a shoot day. Twenty minutes with the owner behind the counter beats a corporate brand video every time.

One week until BMC. If you're going, I'll be the guy asking too many questions about your video budget.

— Brian

If this hit for you, forward it to one bank marketer. That's how this list grows.