Me either…

I honestly don’t understand how it’s not more well-known.

Friends AND Windows 95?! It’s a mid-90’s explosion.

When I saw it pop up on my Twitter timeline, I had to watch it immediately.

(Click here to tweet this article and video out to your followers)

So many things ran through my head while watching it...

How in the he** did they get Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston to be in this training video? Had to have been a big payday, right?

Which made me think...

This has to be the most expensive corporate training video I’ve ever seen, at least in dollars per finished minute.

Not only were Aniston and Perry probably expensive, but Microsoft paid several other on-screen actors, scripted a fake sitcom, built sets, and added some very legit production value.

Who wrote it??? I need to meet that person.

And I swear I recognize the actor who plays the nerdy guy at 16:43. Do you know who it is?

But my biggest thought was…

This specifically relates to training videos like this one. And this one, in particular, is targeted at consumers so grabbing and holding their attention is key.

When the opening voice over starts, we learn very quickly that we’re about to see some kind of entertaining faux sitcom or story.

Of course, not everyone has the deep pockets Microsoft.

But the lesson is clear:

Draw in your audience by having the voice actor tease something compelling at the outset.

People love stories. If you tease a good story right away and reveal the story throughout, the audience will want to know what happens next.

Then, you can insert your important learning points throughout as cleverly and seamlessly as possible.

This is more of a structural thing than actual scripting but I think it's important.

Not only does this Microsoft training video use several on-screen talent to talk about the features and uses of Windows 95, they also use multiple off-screen voice over talent at the end when they’re really diving deep into the content.

While this may be a bit more expensive, it could be well worth it for audience retention.

You need change throughout the video to keep your audience from dozing off or exiting out of the training. Using multiple different voice overs is a good way to keep things lively and sustain interest.

(These cats are repeating themselves, right? Something like that...)

Users learned quite a bit about this brand new operating system in a relatively short period of time during the opening “sitcom” section.

It would have been easy to simply end the video when Rachel and Chandler, I mean Aniston and Perry, walked off the set. 

But the 2nd part of the video (the heavy voice over section) did a good job of once more going through exactly what the viewers learned during the first section as well as going a little bit more in depth on some key features.

And to repeat myself…