15 of the Best Corporate Video Examples of All Time (and Why They Work)
Most "best corporate video" lists are a parade of famous adverts with the word "engaging" stuck underneath each one. Fun for ninety seconds, useless if you actually have to commission something on Monday. So this is a different kind of list. Every one of the corporate video examples below earns its place, but the point isn't to admire them. It's to work out what each one did that you can borrow.
A definition first, because "corporate video" is a baggy phrase. It covers any professionally produced video a business uses to communicate with the people who matter to it: brand films, explainers, case studies, recruitment and culture pieces, internal training. The best ones all share a single trait. They have a job to do, and they do it without boring you. Here are fifteen that manage exactly that, and the lesson to take from each.
The famous ones (and what they actually got right)
1. Dollar Shave Club, "Our Blades Are F***ing Great"
The one everyone cites, and rightly. A start-up founder walks through a warehouse delivering deadpan jokes to camera, shot for a reported few thousand dollars. It launched an entire brand overnight and helped the company sell to Unilever for a reported billion. The lesson: budget is not the variable that matters most. A sharp script and a clear voice beat gloss every time.
2. Dove, "Real Beauty Sketches"
A forensic artist sketches women twice, once from their own description of themselves and once from a stranger's. The strangers' versions are kinder. It is a quietly devastating piece of film that never once mentions soap. The lesson: emotional honesty earns more trust than product promotion, and the product can afford to sit in the background.
3. Volvo Trucks, "The Epic Split"
Jean-Claude Van Damme performs the splits between two reversing lorries to demonstrate the stability of Volvo's dynamic steering. It is a genuine engineering demonstration disguised as a spectacle. The lesson: a dry technical feature becomes unforgettable the moment you dramatise it rather than describe it.
4. Apple, "Shot on iPhone"
Apple built an entire campaign out of footage its own customers had filmed. No feature list, no specifications, just proof of what ordinary people could make. The lesson: showing what your product lets someone do is far more persuasive than listing what it is.
5. Google, "Year in Search"
Every December Google turns a year of search data into a short, emotional recap of what the world worried about and celebrated. It is raw statistics made to feel human. The lesson: data does not have to be dull. Frame it through real experiences and numbers start to carry weight.
6. Slack, "So Yeah, We Tried Slack"
A product demo shot as a straight-faced office mockumentary, more comedy than software walkthrough. The lesson: even enterprise software can have personality, and personality is what makes a demo watchable rather than endured.
7. Dropbox, "What is Dropbox?"
For years the clearest explainer video going: a simple host, clean motion graphics, and a plain answer to a genuinely confusing question. The lesson: if your product needs explaining, clarity is the whole job. Resist the urge to be clever before you have been understood.
8. Chipotle, "Back to the Start"
A stop-motion animation tracing a farmer's move away from industrial farming, set to a wistful cover of a well-known song. It sells values, not burritos. The lesson: animation lets you tackle a big, abstract subject that would be impossible or preachy in live action.
9. Wistia, "One, Ten, One Hundred"
Wistia hired a filmmaker to make the same advert three times, on budgets of one thousand, ten thousand and one hundred thousand dollars, then filmed the whole process as a documentary. The lesson: showing your working builds more trust than presenting a polished final cut and hoping people believe it.
10. Red Bull Racing, factory tour
A behind-the-scenes walk through the team's Formula One factory, guided by the people who actually work there. The lesson: letting outsiders behind the curtain humanises an organisation faster than any amount of polished messaging about culture.
11. HubSpot, culture and recruitment video
A knowingly silly, retro-themed piece designed to show what working at HubSpot is like rather than tell you. The lesson: recruitment video works best when it stops selling and simply shows the reality a candidate is signing up for.
12. General Electric, advanced manufacturing animation
GE turned smart factories and 3D printing, subjects most people would glaze over at, into slick animated pieces built around bold headline statements instead of a droning voiceover. The lesson: for complex or industrial topics, animation and strong on-screen text can carry an idea a talking head never could.
Closer to home: corporate videos from our own studio
Famous examples are useful for inspiration, but they were made with resources most businesses will never have. These next examples are ours, made for real UK companies with real briefs and budgets, which makes them a more honest guide to what is actually achievable.
13. Expend, SaaS explainer
An animated explainer for a fintech expense-management platform, turning a genuinely complex product into something a prospect understands in under two minutes. It is the clearest illustration of the Dropbox lesson applied to a real client. You can see the full piece in our Expend case study.
14. Epilepsy Action, charity awareness film
An awareness piece built entirely around lived experience rather than statistics, the Dove principle in a charity setting: lead with the human, let the cause follow. It is one of our favourite examples of restraint doing more than a hard sell ever could. The Epilepsy Action case study has the detail.
15. Lowell Financial, corporate training and onboarding
Proof that internal video counts too. A training and onboarding film that had to make dry, essential information genuinely watchable for new staff, which is arguably a harder brief than any glossy brand piece. See how we approached it in the Lowell training video case study, and for a technical subject handled through animation, our Henniker Plasma 3D explainer is worth a look too.
What the best corporate videos have in common
Strip away the budgets and the celebrity cameos and the same three things keep surfacing. Every video on this list has one clear job, whether that is to explain, to build trust, or to make someone feel something. Every one of them shows rather than tells, trusting the viewer to draw the conclusion. And not one of them is really about the product. They are about the customer, the cause, the people or the idea, with the product earning its place quietly in the background.
None of that requires a Van Damme budget. It requires knowing what the video is for before anyone picks up a camera, which is the part most businesses skip and the part that actually decides whether a corporate video works.
So if you are mining this list for ideas, copy the thinking, not the format. Dove's lesson is not "hire a forensic artist", it is "lead with a human truth". Slack's is not "make a mockumentary", it is "let the product have a personality". Start from what you actually need the video to achieve, then work backwards to the format that serves it, rather than falling for a style you admired and reverse-engineering a reason to use it. And if you are weighing up who should actually make the thing, our guide on how to choose the right video production company is a sensible next read.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a good corporate video? A single clear objective, a story told by showing rather than listing, and a focus on the audience rather than the product. Budget helps, but it is a long way down the list. The videos that fail usually failed at the brief, not the edit.
How long should a corporate video be? Shorter than you would think. Most corporate videos do their best work between 60 and 120 seconds. Long enough to make the point, short enough to hold attention, with anything longer needing to justify every extra second.
How much does a corporate video cost? It varies widely with scope, crew and whether animation is involved. We break the numbers down properly in our video production cost guide.
What types of corporate video should a business start with? For most, a brand film that explains who you are, or a single strong explainer or case study, earns its keep quickest. Our practical guide to corporate video production walks through the main types and where each one fits.
Make your mark
Rune Films is a video production company based in Leeds, working with businesses across West Yorkshire and beyond. If a video on this list gave you an idea, or you want to work out which type would actually move the needle for your business, get in touch and we will talk it through.