Agencies avoid this question. The result is that comms directors at standards bodies go into board meetings with no number, and the project dies before it starts. Here is a straight answer.
Volume, not glamour. A single beautifully shot brand film costs more than ten technical explainers, and does less. Standards bodies need libraries, not showpieces. The economics change completely when you produce a series: crew, set-up, and subject-matter briefing are amortised across every video shot that day.
Subject-matter complexity. A generic agency will quote low, then bill for the four rounds of revisions it takes to get an FMEA explanation technically correct. Accuracy is not a revision. It is a production input. REAS runs an ISO 9001 certified production process, which is why our first cut is usually close.
Languages. This is where budgets are quietly destroyed. Producing in English and translating later costs far more than designing for localisation from the start. We produced 1,000+ videos in 12 languages for the IAOB and SMMT by structuring the source content so the visuals never needed reshooting.
On production value nobody asked for. Your audience is a quality manager watching on a factory laptop. They want the answer, clearly, in under six minutes. Drone footage of the building does not increase audit competence.
On one-off projects. Commissioning a single video every eighteen months means paying the set-up cost every time and never building an audience. The IAOB channel reached 12,000+ subscribers through consistency, not through any single video.
On the wrong metric. A video that generated 779 views from 7,295 impressions on a niche standards topic is not expensive. It is a channel of qualified reach that keeps working.
REAS video work for standards and certification bodies typically runs from £10,000 for a focused series to £100,000 and above for an ongoing production retainer with multilingual output. The retainer model is what most standards bodies land on, because it turns an unpredictable capital request into a predictable line item, and because it is the only structure that produces the consistency a channel needs.
If you need a number you can take to your board, book a call and we will scope it properly.
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