For years, “video is the future” was a slide in every agency pitch deck. As someone who prizes the power of words over the quick hit of the visual, that’s something that hits hard. But I guess I’m a dying breed, which is why I’ve been expanding my ability to talk as well as write.
But, leaving aside my personal preference, that framing (of video being the future) has quietly stopped making sense, because the future arrived and settled in.
UK advertisers now put more new money into video than almost any other digital format, investment grew 20% year on year to £9.3 billion in 2025, video’s fastest growth rate of any major category, and it now accounts for 23% of all UK digital ad spend (IAB UK Digital Adspend, 2025). That’s real money following real audience behaviour, not agencies talking their own book.
The video adoption story is basically over
Wyzowl’s long-running annual survey, now in its twelfth year, puts business adoption of video at 91%, matching the highest level they’ve ever recorded (Wyzowl, State of Video Marketing 2026). When a format goes from 61% adoption in 2016 to a plateau above 90% for three years running, the interesting question stops being “should we use video” and becomes “is our video actually any good”. Worth flagging honestly, these figures are self-reported by marketers about their own results, not independently measured, so treat them as a read on sentiment and adoption rather than hard proof of causation. Still, the direction across a decade of consistent surveying is difficult to argue with.
What consumers say drives the preference
The consumer-facing numbers are the ones I find genuinely persuasive, because they describe a preference rather than a marketer’s self-assessment. Wyzowl’s most recent consumer research found 63% of people would rather watch a short video than read an article, view an infographic or sit through a webinar when learning about a product or service, comfortably the most popular format by a wide margin (Wyzowl, 2026). Video quality also does real work on trust, 89% of consumers say a video’s production quality affects how much they trust the brand behind it. That’s worth sitting with if your instinct has been to treat video as the cheap, quick option, poor execution appears to actively cost you credibility rather than being merely unremarkable.
That’s not to say video needs to be expensive. I happen to know that much BBC local radio content is made on relatively cheap (industrial) cameras costing about £150 each and mixed by a BlackMagic switcher costing under £250. There are other tools available such as Open Broadcast System and the genuinely brilliant DaVinci Resolve, that has actually been used in multiple Oscar winning films, that will cost you nothing at all.
Where the ROI figure needs a pinch of salt
I’d be doing you a disservice if I presented the ROI numbers uncritically, particularly after everything we’ve covered in the AI citation pieces about being sceptical of vendor-supplied stats. Wyzowl’s 2026 data shows 82% of video marketers reporting a good return on investment, which sounds strong, but it’s actually down from a high of 93% the previous year. The most plausible explanation isn’t that video stopped working, it’s that near-universal adoption means a lot more mediocre video is now being produced and measured alongside the good stuff, dragging the average down. That’s a useful reminder that “we made video” isn’t the same achievement as “we made video worth watching”. The businesses still reporting strong returns tend to be the ones treating it as a proper discipline, not a box-ticking exercise.
What this means for a professional services business specifically
I wouldn’t tell every client they need to be pumping out short-form content daily, that’s a strategy suited to consumer brands chasing reach, not necessarily to a solicitor’s practice or an accountancy firm building trust with a smaller, more considered audience. What’s more relevant for professional services is video’s demonstrated effect on comprehension and trust rather than raw reach, explaining a genuinely complex service, showing the people behind the firm, or walking through a process that’s difficult to convey in text. Wyzowl’s marketer data shows video is widely credited with increasing understanding of what a business actually does, which matters enormously when the thing you’re selling isn’t a simple product but a service someone has to trust you to deliver well.
The honest summary is that video has moved from differentiator to baseline expectation, in the same way a website did fifteen years ago. The competitive advantage isn’t in having video any more. It’s in whether yours is worth the ninety seconds someone’s about to give it.
My other tip, from me having a radio background, is to make sure that you pick a nice room that doesn’t echo too much or have loud air con, and use a proper microphone suited to the job. People will put up with poor visuals to some degree if the content is good, but they won’t stay with you if the sound makes their ears bleed.
Rich Jarrott, founder of ZenithSpark, is a Digital Marketing professional who has a bit of a fetish for volunteering in community radio. If you’d like his honest take on how to use video as part of your digital marketing mix, then get in touch or call 0138 468035.
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