In my opinion, the explainer video marketing trend is dreadful.

Marketers want visitors to understand their solutions. Try as they might, marketers can't whittle that evasive selling proposition down into a sentence, so they make an infomercial—er, sorry—an explainer video. It's not an infomercial because there's no bonus if you act now. No operators are standing by.

It gets worse.

Often, they don't yet have customers, so they can't splice together a happy customer reel. The inventor of the solution is camera-shy, so the talking head approach is out. They have no revenue stream, so it never even occurs to anyone to bring in professionals to produce a commercial.

But heeeeeey... What about explainer videos? They explain stuff.

It gets worse.

What if the things that you marketers are marketing, which need explaining, are largely invisible? Marketers do what marketers do. They copy bad marketers (in the habit of taking cues from other bad marketers) who earn big bucks marketing invisible products.

In this case, they dig into their startup marketing budget, extract a fiver, and visit Fiverr, the spot where 5,000 out-of-work artists—each dimmer than a dime—somehow manage to make a living landing clients willing to pay those pals a virtual five spot.

It gets worse.

As it turns out, though the animation thing sounds like a good way to sex-up a product that has no users, can't be shown, and doesn't yet exist, it's actually is going to cost several George Washingtons more than an Abe Lincoln.

But wait. Look at how many genius whiteboard animators are fishing for fives.

The video might not be boring after all because it can feature a real robot reading a script while simultaneously showing someone drawing the words. For as little as five dollars more, the hand holding the dry erase marker can draw icons, stick figures, digital devices, you name it. It's been said that one whiteboard Warhol actually drew a Coca-Cola bottle.

Let's get to the real problem.

The real problem is marketers need the ability to present a selling proposition—a WHY—in one sentence. Not one minute. Not one elevator ride up the Empire State building. One sentence.

Explainer videos don't do this. They don't even come close.

Here's a typical explainer video script from a fictitious product, Killer Sauce. Most products resemble Killer Sauce, so I hope you can relate.

That meal you've been eating tasted good for a while, but now it's too plain. You might have tried pepper, but pepper's a commodity.

What you really need is Killer Sauce. Killer Sauce is based on years of research in sauce science. We hired the market's most innovative minds who then poured themselves into sauces the world over to develop a new sauce unlike any ever bottled. Killer Sauce has ingredients extracted from plants you've never heard of indigenous to nations you've never heard of.

It's been formulated with a proprietary process that could only be explained in a much longer explainer video. However, watch this. Look how we secretly mixed a bunch of secret ingredients into one secret sauce. (Keep your eyes on the arrows. Don't try this at home—and look! The test tubes have captions, and the beaker produces happy people.)

In test markets, with test dummies, whose identities cannot be revealed, our state-of-the-art sauce tested to be ultra-saucy. One sauce taster, who has a best-selling book about sauces, even said, "Killer Sauce tastes like no other sauce I've ever tasted."