Fearless M&A: Mastering the Art of Video Announcements
Communication is paramount in the high-stakes world of corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Haystack’s video team, Fearless Company, has spent the past 15 years developing techniques and processes to shepherd executives through the highly sensitive process of announcing, revealing, and heralding mega moments. By prioritizing authenticity, empathy, and genuine connection, we transform typically tedious white papers into engaging and meaningful communiques that resonate with stakeholders and beyond. Creating impactful M&A announcements has become an integral part of our Fearless DNA.
The Importance of Authentic and Engaging Communication
The M&A announcement is a pivotal moment for any corporation. It signals significant changes that can affect lives and industries. From slightly rearranging the corporate structure to veritable teardown, rebuild, and rebranding explosions, these seismic junctures represent cataclysmic shifts for everyone up and down the ladder. Reading about such consequential news on a PDF can be unsettling.
On the other hand, seeing decision-makers — and watching their body language — creates an opportunity for the power of video to shine. When someone looks you in the eye and earnestly explains how the coming changes will be beneficial, there’s a much better chance you'll listen and understand. This emotional component lowers the temperature in a vital way, at a vital time.
Given all that’s at stake, it's alarming how often M&A announcements fall flat, devolving into monotonous talking-head videos that fail to engage their intended audience. Our mission is to extract the maximum amount of warmth, empathy, and reliability from sometimes stoic executives, transforming their crucial messages into impactful narratives. While our approach to supporting all the key players varies from person to person, company to company, and year to wildly-different-economic-climate year, we’ve developed some tried-and-true techniques over our decade-and-a-half in the biz.
Techniques that Transform
M&As are top-secret, fast-moving endeavors that create unique challenges for a video team. Upon learning of an upcoming merger announcement, we often have only a matter of days to assemble a crew, produce the shoot, edit the video, and launch it on a dedicated landing page made by Haystack’s website team.
But despite the tight timelines and high-pressure environment, our team consistently delivers high-quality merger and acquisition videos that meet the needs of our clients. Much of our success can be attributed to the following credos:
Dare to be unscripted. One of our most effective M&A announcement methods requires presenters to put down the script, turn off the prompter, and speak from the heart. This approach blends courage, temperance, and trust from our clients as well as our director, producer, and crew.
Be the umpire they need. The days, hours, and nanoseconds surrounding M&A announcements are pressure cookers inside pressure cookers. Surrounding every executive is an intense cadre of lawyers, advisors, PR reps, department heads, and even family members. A considerable part of our job (and a key differentiator for our team) is our ability to separate signal from noise. If a CEO is coming off as too stiff or didactic, we let them know. If the room buzzes too loudly with distracting chatter, we reduce the volume.
See the forest AND the trees. M&A announcement videos are the production equivalent of landing a widebody jet at Reagan National Airport (where the runway is only 5200 feet); the pressure is immense, and room for error is nonexistent. This often sets our producers and directors on divergent paths, where one needs to lock down shots quickly enough to get footage into the editing room, and the other needs to keep the talent engaged and energized long enough to get it right. More than anything else, negotiating this balancing act has kept us in demand and on the go.
The results, like our talking-head subjects, speak for themselves.
As George Kachedorian (Fearless Company's Creative Lead Director and Editor) notes, "We cut through the noise and offer the viewer a sense of genuineness. There are times when a teleprompter is necessary, but even Hollywood actors struggle to make it look believable."
Audiences today are sophisticated and savvy when it comes to content. By prioritizing authenticity and spontaneity in M&A announcement videos, we ensure that genuine sentiment cuts through the noise, fostering a deeper connection with target audiences. Our ability to help C-suite executives navigate the M&A highwire is one of the many ways we live up to the name Fearless Company.
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