Respondents
+650
Verified industry leaders.
2026'S VIDEO PERFORMANCE REPORT
The big video gap
We surveyed +650 marketing, comms and internal comms leaders to find out why so few teams can prove the impact of their video — and what the fastest teams do differently.
Research methodology
How we built this report
Regions
EU • US • UK
Primary economic hubs represented.
Method
Online Survey
32 in-depth quantitative questions.
Fielded
Q2 2026
Recent research timeframe.
Roles & company size
Teams from Mid-Market to Enterprise companies
MarketingCommsInternal comms
Behind the data
The stats we couldn't ignore
94%
of team report creating video content in their company.
28%
of teams (only) can confidently prove video ROI.
63%
miss out on trends or events because production is too slow.
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The big insight
Video effectiveness isn't a content problem. It's an execution problem.
Finding 1: Speed Wins
Production speed is a 5x video performance multiplier.
Speed is the single strongest predictor of performance in our data. Same-day teams are 5x more likely to call their video a hit than teams taking over a week, yet only 9% currently move that fast.
Finding 2: Video Strategy That Runs
A video strategy only counts if you actually follow it.
Having a video strategy is not the differentiator. Living by it is. Teams that actively follow their strategy are almost 3× more likely to say their video performs very well than teams with a strategy on the shelf.
Finding 3: Friction Kills Performance
Nearly 2/3 of teams still depend on creative specialists to create video.
Video creation is still gated behind a small group of specialists in most companies. That bottleneck explains most of the speed and volume problems in the rest of this report.
Finding 4: Measurement Gap
Only 28.2% of teams can confidently prove video ROI.
This one gap makes every other problem harder to fix. No proof means no budget, no case for hiring, no green light to fix the process, so nothing gets better, and the numbers stay exactly where they are.
Finding 5: The Authenticity Paradox
Marketers say "authentic wins." The way they spend their budgets say otherwise.
Almost half say scrappy, authentic video outperforms polish, 2 to 1. Yet the budget keeps going to production value. It's the clearest case in the whole study of teams not acting on what they already know.
Finding 6 : The Repurposing Multiplier
91% of teams that systematically repurpose see strong results. Only 11% actually do it.
This is the cheapest win in video, and almost nobody takes it. Teams that treat one video as raw material — cutting it into multiple pieces instead of shipping it once and moving on — report success almost every time. Yet nearly 9 in 10 teams still ship a video once and never touch it again.
2026'S VIDEO PERFORMANCE REPORT
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Frequently asked questions
Questions people ask about this report.
The Video Effectiveness Gap is the distance between how widely video is used and how well it actually performs. In PlayPlay's 2026 study of 688 professionals, 94% of teams create video and 75.6% say it performs well or better but only 24.9% say it performs very well. The gap is driven by process, not creativity.
Video ROI measures the business return generated by video content relative to its production and distribution cost. In practice, most teams struggle to calculate it: only 28.2% are very confident they can prove their video ROI, and 42.2% have no clear KPIs at all.
Start by defining KPIs before production, then tie video performance to a business outcome (pipeline, retention, applications) rather than views alone. The main obstacle is fragmented data: 47.1% of teams cite it as their top measurement barrier, and 42.2% have no clear KPIs.
The KPIs that matter depend on the goal: engagement for brand content, pipeline influence for marketing, completion and comprehension for internal comms. What matters most is having them at all, 42.2% of teams track no clear video KPIs, which is the single biggest reason video ROI stays unproven.
Publishing speed. It outweighs budget, team size and production quality: teams that publish within 24 hours are nearly 5× more likely to be confident in their video ROI than teams taking more than a week (58.1% vs 7.7%), according to PlayPlay's 2026 study of 688 professionals.
Within 24 hours whenever the topic allows, and within three days as a working standard. Only 9% of teams publish in under a day while 34.2% take more than a week and 63.2% sometimes or often miss trend windows because production is too slow. Speed is increasingly a tooling question: 87.4% of teams already use AI somewhere in the process, though only 36% use AI video generation to create or edit the video itself (PlayPlay, 2026, 688 professionals).
Mostly at the edges of production, not at the core. 87.4% of teams use AI somewhere in their workflow, but the most common uses are supporting tasks: 58.3% for AI subtitles and AI video translation, 57.4% for video scripts, and only 36% to create or edit the video itself. Post-production work such as AI voiceover follows the same pattern, it compresses delivery time without replacing the creative decisions (PlayPlay, 2026, 688 professionals).
More often, simple wins: 46.5% of teams say simple, authentic video outperforms highly produced video, 23.5% say the opposite, and 29.9% see no difference. Production quality still matters, but it ranks behind clear storytelling as a driver of performance. For teams trying to hold both, AI design keeps visuals on-brand without adding production time (PlayPlay, 2026, 688 professionals).
Video creation is still concentrated: 35.3% of teams rely on specialists with support from others, 28.4% on specialists only, and just 9.9% let anyone create video independently. Counterintuitively, full autonomy performs worst. Collaborative models reach 80.9% good performance versus 60.6% for fully independent creation. The pattern points to guided autonomy, where an enterprise video editor gives non-specialists video templates and brand guardrails rather than a blank canvas.
This report is free to cite with a link to this page. Suggested citation: PlayPlay (2026). The Video Effectiveness Gap: a study of 688 video professionals across France and English-speaking markets.. Charts on this page can be embedded using the embed button, which includes the credit link automatically.