VIDEO SCRIPT INFOGRAPHIC COPY SAMPLE
VIDEO SCRIPT INFOGRAPHIC COPY SAMPLE
ASSIGNMENT: Create a three minute info graphic video for Fightfor15.org explaining from their perspective why CEO led stock buybacks are harmful to workers and the greater economy and should be again made illegal. Utilize conversational tone to explain the complex issue to lay people so that they not only understand but can pass on what they’ve learned to others. Target audience: Middle and working class Americans who are fed up and wanting to fight the battle for a higher minimum wage and for corporate executive accountability/responsibility.
VIDEO #1 Headline: What are stock buybacks and why should you care that they are ruining your life?
1. Narrator: So what are stock buybacks and why are reformers so eager to ban them?
2. Buybacks aren’t as complicated as you might think and they’re certainly nothing new.
3. Heads of companies first started buying back stock after the big market crash in 1929 to artificially increase their stock’s value.
4. After all, less stock available means the stock left is scarcer. Which means its worth more moula.
5. Before buybacks a company would’ve had to come up with a new product or streamline efficiency to create more profit to make its stock rise.
6. But how do you do that in the middle of a great depression?
7. You use the company’s wealth to buy back stock from sometimes on the take investors, and inflate your own and the company’s stock value. While the economy, workers, and often even the company itself stagnates and suffers. That's it, that's all a buyback is.
8. In 1932 FDR signed into a law a rule banning stock buybacks. It would last for some 50 years.
9. Without buybacks, companies had to go back to the 3 basic ways to spend profits. They could:
10. Put it back into the company: build new factories, make new products, or buy other companies.
11. Reinvest into raises for their workers and new employees at higher wages to attract better candidates.
12. Or they could invest in dividends to pay stockholders, to reward them for their investment.
13. Most companies did a combination of all three.
14. During this period, productivity and wages rose along the same line and created a booming middle class in America.
15. Investors still got paid, but when they did they had to wait for the company to deem dividends the best use of company profits.
16. Except Long-term investors were rewarded no matter what the company did. When the company bet on itself and its workers and grew value in itself, the investors profited because their stock slowly grew.
17. But in 1982 Ronald Regan appointed a new chair, the first financial exective in 50 years, to run the SEC. Big surprise that he blocked the rule banning buybacks, which opened up a new era in which vast wealth transferred hands from workers to high level traders and corporate execs.
18. Did we mention buybacks are the laziest, easiest way to get stock prices to go up? Big investors were now free to flex their power to make stock shoot up fast.
19. Companies' boards of directors (the companies largest stock holders) had the bright idea to reward CEO’s with big time bonuses in stock and cash when stock went up. Soon everyone on the high end of the food chain (investors and CEOS) made out with the lion’s share of corporate profits.
20. And boy did their new tactic work -- for them.
Companies started dumping their money into buybacks instead of reinvesting into the company and workers.
Productivity and prices continued to rise but worker’s wages stayed the same.
21. While CEOs and wealthy traders used the companies’ leger sheets like ATM’s.
22. No wonder so many Americans from economist watchdogs to workers to activists to union heads are clamoring for buybacks to go bye-bye. So, now you can explain to your friends what a stock buyback is. But for those who can stomach the full story, in part two we’ll show you just how lucrative, insidious and damaging TO YOU stock buybacks have really become.
VIDEO #1 Animation shot list
1. TEXT: What are stock buybacks?
Suddenly a bunch of mice protesters with signs pop up, boycotting the text that is left onscreen: “Stock buybacks.”
All but one of the mice protesters and the text disappear.
2. The last mouse protestor is left onscreen growing quickly overwhelmed as different complex market symbols, charts and graphs scream by its face.
3. Text: 1929
A chart and newspaper featuring stock market crash appears. Mice dressed in ratty clothes line up on the street in soup lines… while far up above in skyrise offices, wealthy fat cats in top hats plot and scheme.
4. The wealthy fat cats in top hats buy back stock over the old fashioned telephones and shove half of the papers off the table, leaving the other half. They smile at each other, excited at what they’ve achieved.
5. From the top office, we shoot to the factory floor where a cat executive announces a “new product” to a team of applauding mice workers… and further on down the line in the factory a different cat executive touts a “new assembly line” to less enthusiastic but still enthusiastic mice workers.
6. From inside the factory we go back outside to where more mice are starving and in a soup line during the great depression.
7. Fat cats in top hats buy stock from other wealthy investors in top hats, shutting out the workers from the assembly line who are watching the money party with dollar bills being lit from behind a closed door.
8. Animation of FDR mouse signing a bill that creates the Securities and Exchange Commision. 1932-1982.
9. A sad fat cat in a top hat sits at his CEO desk longing for the days of old as he studies his three options.
10. We zoom in on the first of the three options he was looking at. TEXT: Build new factories, make new products, or buy other companies. For each we see an animation illustrating that choice. We see new factories being built. New products being designed. And a handshake commemorating a factory being acquired.
11. TEXT: Reinvest into raises for workers and hire new employees at higher wages to attract better candidates.
The Fat Cat sighs with sadness as he gives all his mice workers raises and hires more mice for the factories. The mice celebrate.
12. TEXT: Invest in dividends for shareholders.
The Fat Cat sighs with sadness as he gives other sad fat cats low level dividends (balls of string) that they are far less happy with.
13. Animation of money flowing to all symbols representing all three choices: workers, factories, and fellow fat cats.
14. An Infograph showing the rise of wages and productivity following the same upward growth path from 1932-1982.
Happy mice buy the American dream home with three car garages and have plentiful, happy suburban baby mice.
15. A Fat Cat checking yawns in his larger but not crazy large house up the block as he checks his stock portfolio.
16. The Fat Cat is much older and retires happy, still fairly well off, finally selling off his stock to a bunch of mice investors.
17. But just as he’s about to do the deal, the fat cat retracts his money. Hearing out news blast over the radio.
Cartoon Ronald Reagan appoints new fat cat to the SEC who in press conference announces: “BUYBACKS ARE BACK!”
18. The Fat Cat about to go into retirement licks his lips and kicks out the mice. He’s on the phone to CEO Fat Cat, giving him an earful.
19. Board of Director’s meeting of Fat Cats. They all offer a huge bribe of money to the CEO Fat Cat and get him to sign a fat contract. When he does all the fat cats party as dollar bills fly everywhere!
20. Animated chart showing the insane rise in stock buybacks from 1982 to present day.
21. Animated chart showing the rise of the 1 percent’s wealth in the U.S. and partying fat cats bust up a piggy bank growing enormously fat while mice are growing hungry.
22. Outside of Corporate headquarters. Economist watchdog dogs, worker mice, activist foxes and union head gophers protest with picket signs… [the protesting animals are shocked when they hear the narrator say that the state of buybacks are even worse than what they’d seen so far.
