Company year-end video: how to script the year in review

On December 3, 2025, Spotify released Wrapped, the annual retrospective that shows each user what they listened to during the year. According to the company, more than 200 million people opened the retrospective in the first 24 hours, and it was shared more than 500 million times, according to TechCrunch. The idea behind its success fits in one sentence: each person sees their own year. That is what your team expects from the company's year-end video when the lights in the hall go down and the big screen lights up.

Year-end video and year in review: when interest shows up

In the Google Trends data gathered by Mentoniano in October 2026, interest in the term "vídeo de fim de ano" stays at zero from January to September. The monthly average for the last five years reaches 1 in October, 3 in November and 27 in December. The term "retrospectiva" (year in review) follows the same pattern, with 16 in November and 28 in December. The scale goes from 0 to 100 and measures relative interest within each term, without indicating the number of searches.

Between October and December 2025, searches for "retrospectiva 2025" (2025 year in review) reached a peak of 100, and the related queries were dominated by brands and broadcasters: Spotify, Steam, PlayStation, SBT and Band. As we read it, your team arrives at the party used to tailor-made retrospectives, with their own names and their own numbers. The company video will be watched against that yardstick.

What Spotify's year in review teaches the company video

The recent history of Wrapped has a useful chapter for anyone about to script a company year in review. According to TechCrunch, the 2024 edition was criticized for offering few detailed statistics and for betting on a podcast made with artificial intelligence. For 2025, Spotify added nearly a dozen features and more detailed data about what each person listened to, without a user-facing AI experience.

As we see it, the audience responded to detail. A company year-in-review that opens with revenue, moves on to stock footage and closes with a line about the team that "made it happen" leaves the audience with no place in the film. The team wants to see the moments it lived through: the week a system went down, the branch that hit its target on the last day, the colleague who retired. The material for a good year-in-review lies in those details, and only the people who lived the year inside the company can gather it.

Company year in review and nostalgia: why looking back at the year brings the team closer

Psychology has studied the effect of looking back for years. In 2006, researchers Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt and Routledge published seven studies on nostalgia in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Nostalgic memories tend to feature the person alongside people close to them or at memorable moments. They carry more positive than negative emotion and often show a difficult scene that gained meaning through a later achievement. The authors concluded that nostalgia strengthens social bonds, improves the way people see themselves and generates positive affect.

This description works almost like a script. A year in review that shows people together, goes through a difficult moment and arrives at an achievement follows the path that nostalgic memory already tends to take. The studies dealt with personal memories, and applying them to the company video is our own interpretation.

This second study speaks directly to the year-end period in companies. December usually arrives with a tired team, and the party video can be the moment when each person sees the meaning of the effort they put in.

How to script the company year-end video

Here at Mentoniano, the script for a year in review starts by listening to the people who lived the year: managers, frontline teams, sometimes clients. The story comes out of that conversation, and the structure comes afterward. The year-end video script is one of the jobs Léo Bento, our founder and scriptwriter, writes: the structure, the narration and the editing notes, delivered to your company's production company or editor. A company year in review usually works well with these steps:

• Open with a concrete scene, a moment most of the audience recognizes in the first few seconds.
• Organize the year into a few chapters, by month or by project, with a person or a team at the center of each one.
• Place the difficulty in the middle of the film and show how it was overcome, with names and faces, always with the consent of those who appear.
• Close with a sentence that points to the year ahead and connects with what the leader will say on stage.
• Write editing notes: where the humor comes in, where the soundtrack drops, where the image goes silent.

As we read it, the last item sets the pace of the film. In the Farmácias São Paulo case, described in the first article in this series, the video script came with editing notes, mixing the humor of the activity with the tension of the competition up to the final message revealed on stage.

In the narration, each moment gets a month, the name of the person who acted and what that person did, with the permission of everyone who appears. The 30th-anniversary campaign for CEMS Academia, which Mentoniano wrote with REC Mart, includes this line: "Há trinta anos, Maringá acordava para um novo movimento." (Thirty years ago, Maringá was waking up to a new movement.) It places the audience in a time and a place before any number.

Before going to editing, read the narration out loud to someone on the team who did not take part in the script. If that person recognizes the moment before the name appears, the text is on the right track.

Year-in-review material and the timeline up to the party

The company year-end video depends on material that is scattered around: event photos, videos shot on phones, screenshots of celebratory messages, short testimonials. Ask the teams for this material well in advance, with one simple question for each department: which moment of the year would your team like to see on the big screen? The sooner the script is ready, the easier it is to ask for what is missing and record a new testimonial.

If the party takes place in mid-December, the script needs to be approved by the end of November, so the editing has time to test pacing, soundtrack and subtitles. The video and the leader's speech also need to connect. The next article in the series covers exactly that: the thank-you message to employees, what the leader says at the party.

In the next article, the microphone: what the leader says at the party so the thanks is remembered.