Writing
How to democratise video content creation across a company
You democratise video by giving the whole company the tools, templates and guardrails to make on-brand video themselves, raising everyone's floor, while the video team stops being the only way video can get made. Instead they maintain the system and spend their time raising the ceiling. It's guardrails, not gates. You can get this wrong in a couple of ways: either let everyone loose and the brand turns to mush, or protect quality by keeping video locked to one team and become a bottleneck. Neither works. The answer is a brand system good enough that a non-specialist can make something recognisably yours on their own, plus a video team whose job shifts from making everything to enabling everyone — which frees them up to spend more time on the work only they can do.
Almost everything written about this is written by tool vendors, and their answer is always: buy our platform. Tooling is part of it, but it's not the first bit. This is the practitioner's version. What I've actually done to get more good video out of a company without drowning the team or diluting the brand.
If you're standing a team up from zero, start with how to build an in-house video team from scratch. And democratising is really the flipside of not becoming a ticketing system — it's how you empty the queue rather than just guard it.
What does democratising video actually mean?
It doesn't mean everyone becomes a filmmaker, and it doesn't mean lowering the bar. It means the large chunk of video a company needs that genuinely doesn't require a highly skilled specialist — an internal update, a talking head, a quick social cut, a screen capture with a voiceover — can be made by the people who need it, to a standard that's recognisably on-brand, without waiting in a queue.
Isn't letting everyone make video a recipe for off-brand rubbish?
This is the fear, and it's a fair one. The thing that keeps video on-brand isn't a person guarding the gate, it's the system. A well-built template with the brand baked in produces more consistent output than a busy team saying yes to everything and cutting corners under pressure.
And be honest about the real alternative. The alternative to democratised video usually isn't a beautiful bespoke video, it's no video, or it's the stuff people already make in the shadows on their phones with no guardrails at all, because they needed something and you were a two-week queue. You're not choosing between "everyone makes video" and "only this team makes video." You're choosing between guardrails and no guardrails on work that was going to happen anyway.
Where do you start?
Start by looking at what people are asking for. Every video team is sitting on a list of requests, and a big share of them are the same low-craft, high-volume jobs (the self-serve tier). You can start to hand those back.
Template it properly. One format that someone can use without you. Show it works, then do the next one. Trying to democratise everything at once is harder to get right across a whole business, but it can be done with the right approach and training.
What do you give people?
Templates, a playbook, tools and training.
Templates are branded, pre-built assets living inside the tools people use (think of it a bit like a deck template), so making the thing is closer to filling in a form than starting a project. Intro and outro, lower-thirds, captions, approved music, and so on. If your brand is in the template, staying on-brand is the path of least resistance rather than a rule someone has to remember. It also helps elevate the final video, since you've made and approved these already.
A playbook is the bit vendors skip. People need to know how to make their video, as well as what good looks like, and when they should actually come to the video team instead. A short recorded tutorial and a one-page "when to use this" beats a 40-page brand bible nobody opens.
Tools come last, and you need fewer than you think. Something for recording (such as Riverside FM), something for assembly that's genuinely usable by a non-specialist (Canva, Google Vids), and whatever your company already lives in. The tool is only ever as good as the template and playbook you put on top of it.
Training runs both through your playbooks and through comms with the teams you're sharing the resources with. Usually when they first get started people need more hand-holding — it's a new process and skill, and they'll want to ask questions, they'll get things wrong, or they just won't read your playbook and jump straight in. That's fine. Be there to answer questions, point them to the relevant resources, jump on a call. Give them the confidence they need to create for themselves long term.
Where does AI fit?
AI raises the floor. Auto-editing, captions, cleaning up audio, cutting a long recording into social pieces, as well as things like interactive intake, where a chatbot (EG a Gemini Gem or Slack bot) guides a requestor to the right template and answers their questions.
But AI raising the floor is only half the job. Reinvest the time it saves into the video team's craft. If democratising plus AI just means you make the same work cheaper, you've missed the point. It should mean a lot of content gets made by the tools and non-specialists, which frees the specialists to spend their time raising the ceiling: better stories, better formats, the work that actually moves the brand and, if we're being honest, is the reason creatives will want to stay in your team.
How do you keep it on-brand as it grows?
With a shared definition of "good" and a team that owns the system, not every output. You are not going to review every LinkedIn post, and you shouldn't want to. What you maintain is the template, the playbook, and the standard. You could spot-check once a month, notice where people are working around the template, update it and push out comms. Boringly simple.
Conversely, I think the brand tends to drift when the system goes stale, not when more people use it. A template that's a year out of date, or a playbook that doesn't cover the thing everyone now needs, is what pushes people back to making it up themselves. Democratised video is a system you keep tending, not a thing you ship once.
What's the video team for once everyone can make video?
We're still needed — I'd argue even more so. Freed from the low-value queue, the team finally gets to do the hero work: the stories only a creative team within your business can tell. It's the highest-value work, the kind that requires institutional knowledge, craft expertise and an understanding of your brand's story and goals. An agency will take years to learn that, and charge a lot for it. Oh, and we also maintain the self-serve system, plus work across, improve and scale the repeatable video formats the company will be known for.
The TL;DR
Democratising video means giving the whole company (or a vertical within it) the templates, playbooks and tools to make the everyday stuff themselves, on-brand, without a queue. The video team maintains the system and frees itself for the work only an internal creative video team can do (like brand stories and repeatable formats). It's guardrails, not gates. Start with your highest-volume request, template it, and build out from there. Let AI and tooling shorten the ticket queue, then spend the time you get back on raising the ceiling. Do it right and you get more good video out of the company and free your best people to make the work that was the whole point of hiring them.
Written by Ben Jay, who is building Trustpilot's global video function from scratch. He was previously at Google, where he grew from shooting producer to leading the video department — ultimately managing 26 producers across the US and Europe — and where his campaigns won two Webby Awards. Full bio → · Get in touch →