Davos is one of the most concentrated gatherings of influence anywhere in the world. For one week in January, a small Swiss ski town fills up with chief executives, heads of state, researchers, journalists and a great many people hoping to bump into all of the above.
We spent last January there, filming for the Wall Street Journal's custom content team at Journal House. It taught us a lot, most of it the hard way.
If you are planning to film in Davos, here is what we would tell you before you book anything.
There is no shortage of things to point a camera at in Davos. That is exactly the problem.
Turn up without a plan, and you will come home with a hard drive full of handshakes, lanyards and people holding drinks. It cuts into a perfectly nice highlight reel that stops being useful about a day after you post it.
The content that lasts has an editorial point of view. Work out what your audience actually needs to hear, then build interviews and conversations around those themes. The useful question is not "what happened this week", it is "what does this tell the people we are trying to reach?".
Decide that before you travel. You will not have time to decide it there.
The best material we captured at Journal House was not the room. It was the thinking in it.
We set up proper roundtable conversations with chief executives, hosted by a journalist, shot on several cameras with a bit of movement to lift the look. Those sessions gave us substance. Real arguments, properly made, by people worth listening to.
That is the raw material that still works in March and in June. A shot of a busy reception is not.
So look at what you are bringing to Davos that nobody else has. A piece of research, a point of view, a group of people who genuinely know something. Build the content around that and the week starts to say something rather than just document itself.
This is the one people underestimate.
Everything takes longer than it should. Davos is small and during the Forum it is completely full. You will queue. Roads close, pavements clog, and a walk that should take ten minutes takes forty. Last January, Donald Trump flew in and the town effectively stopped. We lost most of a morning to it. That is not a freak event; it is the Forum working as intended, and you should assume at least one day will go like that.
Sort access and badges early. Hotel badges for the secure venues can only be requested by the host, not by you. If your executive has a speaking slot somewhere else, someone has to ask that venue for crew access, and it needs doing weeks out. Turn up hoping, and you will film the outside of a building.
Book accommodation far earlier than feels sensible. Prices during the Forum are extraordinary and the good options go months in advance. If you are hosting a space, the cheapest way to house a crew is usually to add them to whatever you are already block booking. It is much harder to find three independent beds later.
Watch the daylight. This catches people out every year. In mid-January you have light from roughly eight until five, and less than that in practice, because Davos sits in a valley and the mountains take a chunk off each end. If you want architectural shots of your space, exteriors, or anything that needs the sun, there is a narrow window and it closes early. Schedule around it rather than hoping for a gap.
Delegates are busy and timings will move. Someone's ten o'clock becomes their two o'clock. Build that in. Know which two things matter most each morning so that when the day slips, you lose the third thing rather than the lot.
Agile is not the same as reactive. The difference is having a ranked list before you arrive.
A week in Davos can fill a content library for a year, but only if you go in intending to.
Alongside the hero film, capture the things that do quieter work. Interviews and expert commentary. Session and workshop content. Architectural shots of your space, empty and busy. Photography that will still be useful when the week is a distant memory.
Think about format at the point of capture rather than afterwards. If something is headed for LinkedIn or Instagram, frame it vertically while you are shooting. Cropping later loses the shot.
And log your rushes properly, tagged by speaker and theme. It costs almost nothing on the day. Six months later, finding the right ninety seconds in a minute rather than an afternoon is worth more than most people expect.
This is the mistake we see most often, and the most expensive one.
It is tempting to send a single very capable person to shoot, interview, photograph and edit. It looks efficient on a budget sheet. In practice, you get someone sprinting between venues, trying to mic up a contributor while framing a shot, then editing late at night on whatever is left of them.
The work suffers, and so does the person.
Split the roles. Someone shooting, someone on stills, someone editing on the ground, and ideally someone producing whose entire job is getting the right people in front of the camera at the right time. That last role is the one clients cut first and miss most.
It also changes what you can turn around. With an editor on site, yesterday's panel goes out this morning while everyone is still in town. Without one, it goes out next week, when nobody cares.
The opportunity in Davos is not really to capture what happened. Everyone there is capturing what happened.
It is to take the conversations, research and ideas in the room and turn them into something that keeps earning attention long after the town empties and the slopes get quiet again.
That takes a clear plan, a crew built for the environment, and the discipline to chase insight over atmosphere. Get those right and one week in January can feed your channels for the rest of the year.
Build in a day at the end.
Once you have wrapped, you are standing in a world-class ski resort in January, and everyone who booked out the town has just flown home. The lifts are running and the slopes are empty. It is genuinely one of the best weeks of the season to be there, which almost nobody realises because they are all in a conference centre.
Your crew will have earned it. So will you.