We’re all very aware of the famous Jerry Maguire line…”show me the money!” 

Well, at Inside Edge, we are all about screaming…”save you the money!”

Here’s the brutal truth: UK SMEs will collectively spend £20.4 billion in 2025 on recruitment marketing, with medium enterprises often investing £15,000-£50,000 annually. And most of this budget goes toward expensive corporate content that is overly polished, transactional, and features the bosses.

Meanwhile, your employees sit on the sidelines watching it all happen, remaining totally excluded, disengaged, and maybe even thinking about leaving.

Let’s kick things off in this 3-part blog series comparing costs between EGV and PPV — professionally-produced video.

Do you have £5,000 minimum in your back pocket right now? 

Let’s be honest: creating company videos the traditional way, i.e, hiring a production company, it can feel like you’re hiring James Cameron to direct it. 

When you bring in the pros, the quote isn’t just for the filming day itself. You’re also paying for:

  • Concept, scripting, all pre-production & prep 
  • A full crew with expensive equipment
  • Locations, logistics, and/or any travel
  • On-camera talent (if needed)
  • Editing, graphics, and rounds of revisions
  • Turnaround time that depends on their schedule, not yours

Add all that up and suddenly your “simple company culture video” is starting to look like one line item from the $200M Titanic budget. It gets ridiculous!

In London, a mid-range 1-day corporate shoot usually runs around £5,000. That’ll get you one polished video, with a first cut after 2-3 weeks. Then add the feedback cycle, more edits, and final approval — you’re often looking at 6-8 weeks before the thing even sees daylight.

Now let’s talk value: What is your metric for return of investment on the video? Views? Reach? Engagement rate? Leads and conversions? Brand image impact? 

How do you justify spending this £5,000? Sure, the video looks incredible in shiny 4K alongside slick drone footage…but what does this actually achieve for you?

EGV costs you approx £200, it takes a maximum 2 days, and your employees feel like a million bucks!

Now, what if we were to tell you that one piece of EGV content would cost your organisation around £200? What’s needed:

  • A smartphone
  • One employee directing and shooting
  • Another employee being the on-camera talent

Lets give them an average beginner’s videographer rate at £20/hr, and it takes them 5 hours in total to create a piece of EGV content (2 hours for planning/shooting, 2 hours for any redos and/or any editing, and 1 hour for publishing and marketing) — that’s £200 (£100/each).

Or, don’t use time as the calculator…use equipment. A smartphone stabilizer rig, few lights, a microphone — that’s £150-£200 off Amazon.  

Or perhaps stop thinking objective cash…and start thinking opportunity cost

Or finally, nevermind using numbers…simply see it as an opportunity cost. Look, your employees already spend 1.5-3 hours every workday doing “non-work” activities. Chatting in the break room, going to meetings, lunches, grabbing coffee, playing table-tennis, and so much more. It sounds crazy, but these moments represent an untapped recruitment marketing goldmine to build your employer brand internally.

Think of the opportunity here to build your brand’s image and let your people have fun doing it with EGV. 

It’s no longer company time “wasted,” it’s now precious time gained. Hell, the more downtime your employees have, the more opportunity and value there is for your employer brand. 

Still with us so far?

In the next article, we look at the cost of EGV vs traditional recruitment agencies.