ASK Partners: Investor Testimonial Films

The brief

ASK Partners is a boutique property lender, offering real estate finance across the capital structure. It had always grown through word of mouth and its track record, with investors recommending it to other investors.

ASK brought us in to build a video strategy that would bring in new high-end investors. Its investors were already happy to talk about their experience, so the question was how to turn that word of mouth into something people could watch and pass on.

How it works

We made it as a funnel, with three stages that take a potential investor from first hearing about ASK to knowing the team. Each stage hands the viewer on to the next.

The first stage is a short film cut from the best moments of our interviews with three of ASK's current key investors. It's short and to the point, it's made to be shared, and it has to look and feel as high end as the people it's aimed at. It's also meant to reach people outside the investors' usual circles.

The second stage is the full interviews. Each investor has a film of their own, running between two and three minutes, so anyone who's interested can hear in more detail why that person chose ASK.

Putting faces to the company

Once someone has watched the investor films, the next thing they want to know is who they'd be dealing with. So the third stage was a set of films with the ASK team.

We made a homepage film that gives the overview of ASK, and short films with key members of staff about how they work with investors. There's also a film on the state of the economy with the chief executive, Dan Austin. We also cut short clips from all of it for social media, which raise ASK's profile and point people back to the full films.

Why we filmed it this way

Testimonials in financial services often fail because the people in them have been handed approved lines. These interviews were unscripted. The investors knew roughly what we'd cover, and the answers were their own, which is why the films can carry a recommendation the way a conversation would.