Part one of a three-part series on strategic communication in the resources sector.
By Tristan Gray
Every mining executive can recite the risks that keep the board awake at night. Commodity price swings. Permitting delays. Grade variability. Cost blowouts. Each one gets a line in the risk register, a mitigation plan, and a slide in the quarterly.
There is one risk, though, that rarely makes the register at all, and it may be quietly shaving value off ASX-listed miners every single day. It is the risk of being poorly understood.
For a sector that spends hundreds of millions proving up an orebody, the amount of thought that goes into communicating that asset to the people who fund it is often startlingly thin. According to a seasoned strategist in the field, this lack of clarity often leads to businesses being significantly undervalued by the market, a predicament for which the companies are solely responsible.
“You might say, ‘We’re not getting cut through to retail investors. We’re not getting interest from them, and as a result we’re missing out on a whole sector of the market. Our shares are undervalued because of that,'” says Darryl Anderson, Chief Executive of video and communications firm Anvil Media. “That’s a real risk. And it’s a communication problem before it’s anything else.”
The hidden cost of being misunderstood
The structural hurdles facing Australia’s small and mid-cap resources firms are well-established. In an oversaturated and under-analysed market, there are simply too many entities for fund managers, the financial press, and analysts to comprehensively monitor, leaving the microcap sector with negligible coverage. For developers and explorers who are yet to produce cash flow, this lack of visibility is a direct threat to valuation rather than a mere aesthetic concern.
The influence of retail investors in this segment is often underestimated by boards. Data on ASX share ownership indicates that smaller shareholders hold approximately 23% of issued capital in the ASX 20, compared to about 11% in the ASX 300; in specific resources companies like Chalice Mining (ASX:CHN), retail ownership has reached nearly 50%. These investors lack dedicated analyst teams to interpret technical quarterlies, meaning they base their decisions entirely on what they can easily perceive and comprehend.
The structural problem is well documented. Australia’s small and mid-cap resources companies operate in a crowded, under-covered market. There are simply too many names for analysts, fund managers, and the financial press to follow in any depth, and coverage of the microcap universe is thin to non-existent. For an explorer or developer that isn’t yet generating cash, that lack of visibility is not a cosmetic issue; it is a valuation issue.
That is precisely where most miners are leaving value on the table. Anderson’s central argument is that the problem is rarely the asset and almost always the way it is explained.
“The image in mining doesn’t always tell a story,” Anderson says. “A new, undeveloped mine site — what does that tell an investor about the asset? It tells them it’s there. It tells them this looks like country that might have potential for lithium. But if it were easy enough to tell by looking at the surface, you wouldn’t need exploration at all.”
In other words, the very thing that makes a resource story valuable, that the value is underground, technical, and probabilistic, is the thing that makes it hard to communicate. And hard-to-communicate stories get discounted.
Why “we need a video” is the wrong starting point
The instinctive fix, when a board finally decides it has a visibility problem, is to commission a video. A CEO piece to camera perhaps, or a slick site flythrough. Anderson, whose firm has spent more than two decades producing exactly this kind of content, argues that starting with the deliverable is the first mistake.
“People come to us and say that they need a video,” he says. “And I’m thinking in the back of my mind: you never think like that in your own space. You’d never say ‘I need a mine.’ You’d say, here’s the resource, here’s the result we’re after, and here are the steps to get there. Communication is exactly the same. It requires steps. You have to understand the audience and what’s stopping them from moving forward.”
It is a distinction he frames as the difference between thinking like a filmmaker and thinking like an engineer.
“A lot of communication companies think like filmmakers. They’re selling a big vision and inspiration, far more nebulous concepts, and hoping that will land in terms of a result,” he says. “We think much more like communication engineers. Okay, here’s the result you’re after. What are the steps to getting there?”
The implication for investor relations is pointed. A single hero video, no matter how polished, is being asked to do the work of an entire corporate strategy: build awareness, deliver information, support evaluation, and prompt a decision, all in one ninety-second hit. Anderson’s view is that this is why so many investor-focused videos underperform. It is not aligned with where the investor actually is on the path to a decision.
“Most generalist video companies will tell you they’re storytellers; ‘it’s all about the story,'” he says. “We say no. It’s all about the strategy, about the result and how to get there. Story is a critical tool, but it’s not always the solution. If you leap straight to ‘let’s tell a story,’ you’re really just being lazy and formulaic.”
The efficacy of “talking head” videos
Standard ASX investor updates often feature a CEO reading rigidly from an autocue to ensure compliance. While these presentations are frequently criticised for being wooden, Darryl Anderson notes they are born out of a necessity for precision in investor relations. He argues that this format can actually be appropriate depending on the audience.
For professional analysts, a direct, straight-to-camera briefing is a familiar and accepted format for digesting technical data. In this specific context, the traditional “talking head” approach remains functional.
However, Anderson suggests that retail investors require a different strategy. To make complex metrics like internal rates of return or project schedules accessible, companies should utilise more engaging methods such as:
- Interview-style formats
- Professional voiceovers
- Dynamic graphics and animations
Spend any time watching ASX investor updates and a pattern emerges: the CEO, seated, reading a script off an autocue, working hard not to say anything that hasn’t been cleared by compliance. It is easy to mock, and Anderson understands exactly why these videos exist.
“In investor relations, you have to be completely careful about every word you say,” he says. “So I understand why those videos come about.” The problem is that the format fights the medium. “CEOs aren’t actors. You can tell when someone’s reading off an autocue, they can’t pull it off.”
His more interesting point is that the talking head is not always wrong. Context decides.
“One of the critical things to consider is the situation in which your audience is going to view the video,” he says. “When you’re addressing an analyst audience whose job it is to sit there, understand and digest the content, that actually lends itself to a straight-to-camera presentation. There’s an agreement between you and the analyst that you’re going to give them a briefing, and that’s the format they’re accustomed to. I’m not going to sit here and say those things are boring and don’t work. In that context, they probably do work.”
Retail investors are a different proposition. With them, Anderson argues, there is room within the bounds of full and accurate disclosure to shape the material so it lands emotionally as well as factually, through interview formats, voiceovers, and the kind of graphics and animation that make an internal rate of return or a project schedule legible to a non-specialist.
The market data increasingly backs the value of getting this right. Investor engagement platform InvestorHub reports that listed companies that include videos with their ASX announcements generate 4.9 times more reach, and points to a company whose consistent use of video summaries on key exploration updates accompanied a 5.3-times share-price lift across 2025. The broader research on retention is older and softer than it is often made to sound. The much-quoted claim that people retain 95% of a message from video versus 10% from text traces back to a small, directional survey by agency Insivia rather than a peer-reviewed study, but the directional pattern, that video imprints more strongly than text, is real and consistent.
The question every board should be asking
Anderson’s sharpest framing is one he says he now puts to clients directly. As in-house teams increasingly lean on AI to draft their own communications strategies, the value of an outside partner is no longer in writing the plan; it is in knowing what is possible.
“The question I ask is: what are you missing out on by building your comms strategy without a strategic video content creator in the room?” he says. “Because you’ll go, ‘We need a video for that, and that, and that’ without really knowing what that looks like, or whether one bigger thing should actually be a sequence of smaller pieces of content. That’s strategic thinking, and you only get it from people who make this content every day.”
For a mining company, the parallel is exact. No competent operator would design a process plant without the metallurgist in the room. Yet boards routinely design the communications that carry their valuation to market without anyone in the room who understands the medium doing the carrying.
The cost of that omission does not show up as a line item. It shows up as a share price that lags the underlying value of the asset, a retail register that never quite forms, and a capital raise that is harder and more dilutive than it needed to be. It is, in Anderson’s phrasing, the lost value of the success you miss out on, and it is the one risk most miners are still not pricing in.
Next in this series:
Why video is becoming the backbone of workplace health and safety on Australian mine sites — and what a near-miss under a truck taught one major equipment company about getting the message across.
References
- InvestorHub, ASX video examples — companies including video with ASX announcements generate 4.9x more reach; case of 5.3x share-price lift in 2025. https://investorhub.com/guides-and-resources/asx-video-examples
- Australasian Investor Relations Association (AIRA), An Analysis of S&P/ASX 300 and NZX 50 Share Ownership — retail ownership ~23% of issued capital (ASX 20) vs ~11% (ASX 300). https://www.australasianir.com.au/common/Uploaded%20files/AIRA%20Documents/Survey%20Results/Shareownership_in_Australasia_Report_Final.pdf
- Simply Wall St / Yahoo Finance, Chalice Mining: retail investors own 49% of shares. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chalice-mining-limited-asx-chn-224146690.html
- Insivia, Why does video convert better than text? — origin and limitations of the 95% vs 10% retention figure. https://www.insivia.com/why-does-video-convert-better-than-text/
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored article and may contain promotional content.
Image Credit: gonnevilleproject.com.au
