Video thought leadership is the consistent use of video to communicate informed, distinctive and useful perspectives. A strong thought-leadership video helps a defined audience understand an issue, make a decision or reconsider an assumption.
The bar is higher than it sounds, and lower than the term implies. Higher, because visibility, seniority and production quality alone do not create thought leadership: the content needs relevant expertise, a meaningful contribution and enough reasoning for the audience to evaluate it. Lower, because the contribution does not need to be unprecedented; a better explanation, a practitioner's interpretation or a well-argued disagreement all qualify.
One discipline runs through everything here: the confidence of a statement should not exceed the strength of its support. Facts, experience, interpretation, opinion and prediction are five different things, and keeping them distinguishable is most of what makes expert video credible.
Six guides: what it actually is (and is not), how to build a strategy, executive and founder-led variants, LinkedIn specifically, and how to record experts so their knowledge survives the edit.