Stephanie Murg of mediabistro.com’s design blog, UnBeige, had a look at the promotional film for Squeaky Clean, an eco-friendly housecleaning guide from Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan, the founders of Method, a cleaning products company. The video suffers a bit from what I call “sitting around talking about what the book is about” syndrome; instead of telling me about the book’s chapter-based infrastructure, I’d plunge straight into the hard data—which they start to do in the second minute, but then the presentation is largely limited to a talking head shot and a couple cutaways to pages of eye-catchingly designed text from the book.
If I’d been directing this video, I’d have gotten Lowry and Ryan off their butts (although those chairs do look mighty comfy) and followed them all around the house, opening cupboard doors and turning water faucets on and off, taking an active role in showing people what’s at stake instead of leaving that for the second unit crew. (Take a cue from just about any show on Planet Green, guys!) And if I could ban the phrase “the overarching message of the book is” from all future book trailers, I do believe I would.