Inside the Shoot: Producing an Industrial Testimonial Video for OilQuick and C.S. McCrossan
There's a moment in the OilQuick testimonial video we produced where a C.S. McCrossan operator is describing how much time the system saves on rubble operations, and he stops mid-sentence. "It's, it's — I don't even know if you can measure how much time it saves."
No copywriter would have written that line. It's repetitive. It hesitates. It doesn't land on a number.
It's also the most persuasive eight seconds in the video.
That moment is a good summary of how we approach industrial testimonial video production at New World Productions — and it's worth unpacking, because the instinct in B2B marketing runs hard in the opposite direction.
The product, and the people running it
OilQuick manufactures the best-selling fully automatic quick coupler system in the world, with product lines for excavators, wheel loaders, tilt rotators, material handlers and cranes, and forklift trucks. The premise is straightforward: instead of an operator climbing out of the cab to break hydraulic hoses, pound pins, and reconnect couplings every time an attachment changes, OilQuick makes every hydraulic connection automatically at the push of a button.
Straightforward to describe. Much harder to feel — unless you've spent a shift doing it the other way.
Which is why the customer mattered as much as the product. C.S. McCrossan is a family-owned heavy civil contractor headquartered in Maple Grove, Minnesota, now in its second generation and better than 70 years into building highways, bridges, and transit infrastructure across Minnesota and the surrounding Midwest. Earthwork, underground utilities, structures, bituminous paving, material supply — the kind of work where equipment either earns its place on the job or it doesn't.
A testimonial from a contractor like that carries weight with the exact audience OilQuick needs to reach, because the person watching knows what McCrossan's days look like.
The brief
OilQuick didn't need a product explainer. Their engineering documentation already handles specifications, and a spec sheet can tell you that an attachment change takes roughly 30 seconds.
What a spec sheet can't do is convey what those 30 seconds replace: the hoses, the hot hydraulic oil, the spill containment, the trip out of the cab in whatever weather the job site is having that day. The value isn't in the number. It's in everything the number eliminates.
So the brief we worked to was simple: get the McCrossan people who actually run these machines to describe the before and the after in their own words, and stay out of their way.
Why we didn't script it
Unscripted, authentic storytelling is the core of how we produce industrial video. It's a deliberate choice, not a shortcut.
Industrial buyers are among the most skeptical audiences in marketing. A fleet manager evaluating a capital purchase has sat through hundreds of vendor pitches. They can identify a rehearsed line in about four seconds, and the moment they do, everything after it gets discounted.
Real operators talking about real job sites sound different. They use the wrong word and correct themselves. They trail off. They reach for a comparison that only makes sense if you've done the work. Those imperfections are the credibility signal — the thing a scripted spokesperson read can't manufacture at any budget.
Our job on a shoot like this is interviewing, not directing: asking questions specific enough to get past the marketing answer, then letting the silence do its work.
What came out of it
The through-line assembled itself in the edit, because the McCrossan crew kept independently landing on the same three themes.
Speed. "The difference between OilQuick and your standard quick coupler is that OilQuick makes all your hydraulic connections with a push of the button. Switching attachments takes roughly 30 seconds — your breaker, a rotating grapple, a processor, or any other type of hydraulic attachment."
Efficiency. No downtime between attachment changes. No labor spent on hydraulic change outs in the field. And that unmeasurable time savings on rubble operations.
Safety — the theme that carried the most weight. "OilQuick increases job safety by keeping the operator in the cab throughout the day. He doesn't have to get out, work with tools, pound pins, change hydraulic couplings." And then, plainly: "Keeping the operator inside the cab is what I think is the safest place to be."
That last one is worth sitting with. C.S. McCrossan lists safety first among its core values — a commitment the company has built seven decades of reputation on. So when a McCrossan operator says the safest place to be is in the cab, and that OilQuick keeps him there, he isn't reciting a benefit from a sell sheet. He's applying a standard his company already holds itself to, and reporting the result.
For a safety manager watching, that's not a feature claim. It's a peer making an argument they already agree with.
The finished piece closes on a line we structured the entire edit to arrive at: "You hit a button, you switch your attachments, and you just keep working."
Where a video like this actually earns its keep
One of the most common objections we hear from industrial marketers is that a testimonial video is a single-use asset. It isn't — not if it's produced with distribution in mind.
A piece like the OilQuick and McCrossan video works as:
A sales tool. Sent ahead of a demo, it pre-answers the objection a rep would otherwise spend fifteen minutes on.
A trade show loop. Booth video that holds attention because real people are talking, not a product animation.
A landing page conversion asset. Video on a product page increases time on page and improves inbound inquiry quality.
Dealer and distributor enablement. Channel partners get a professionally produced asset they'd never fund on their own.
Search and social. Properly tagged and described, the video keeps working on YouTube long after the campaign ends.
One shoot. Five placements. That's the math that makes industrial video production pay for itself.
Working with New World Productions
For over 30 years, New World Productions has helped manufacturers, equipment makers, and industrial B2B brands turn complex products and processes into video that technical buyers actually believe. We're based in Minneapolis, serving Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, with production capability nationwide.
Our industrial work includes customer testimonial and case study videos, product demonstration and equipment overview videos, manufacturing process videos, facility tours, trade show content, training and safety video, and recruitment video.
Our thanks to OilQuick and to the C.S. McCrossan team for the access and the candor. If you have a product, process, or customer story worth showing, we'd like to hear about it.
Or reach us directly: (612) 338-6448 | todd@newworldproductions.net
Comments