What is B-Roll Footage and How Can it Help You Get on TV?

In broadcast PR, strategy needs to be watertight, pitches carefully crafted, and spokesperson media trained and briefed – but once all this has come together, what can make an offer really come alive for journalists? In the modern multichannel media landscape, the answer may well lie in B-Roll.  

What is B-roll and what purpose does it serve?

B-roll is the supporting footage that sits alongside an interview or news package. It can include location shots, close-ups, or action sequences that give a story texture and visual momentum. Without it, an editor is left with a static shot of one person talking, which in television terms, is rarely enough to carry a piece. What tends to follow is a lot of jump cuts, awkward transitions, and tight-framing to hide the gaps.

But the value of B-roll goes well beyond smooth editing. In a world where newsrooms are running leaner than ever – fewer staff, more platforms, faster turnaround – footage that arrives ready to use is not just convenient. For time-pressed journalists, it can be the deciding factor between a story that airs and one that doesn’t. 

As Jessica Bulman, Deputy Editor at Five News, put it – picture is king. The reality of modern broadcast PR is multichannel, with even radio shows and podcasts creating video and social clips. We think about the way stories are carried through these channels as “The Many Waves of Broadcasting” – first the broadcast hit, then the social surge, then the longtail of podcasts, search and YouTube playlists. 

When a story doesn’t come with the visual assets to support it, the bar for getting it on air not only rises significantly, you are also missing key opportunities across these Many Waves. Approach producers with an asset pack that demonstrates that not only have you thought about how the story may play on air, but that you also have a strategy for social clips and multichannel sharing, and you transform your pitch from a standard press release into something far more collaborative and enticing. 

How does B-Roll help in the Newsroom?

The pressures on broadcast teams have intensified. Newsrooms are getting leaner and restructured, and journalists are producing more output across more platforms – television, digital, social, podcast – with the same hours in the day.

Into that environment, a well-produced B-roll package is a genuine gift. It saves time, reduces the need for a camera crew to travel and gives the producer choices. And for a story that might otherwise be deprioritised because the visual element is too thin, it can be the thing that gets it over the line.

This is not new thinking – we’ve discussed B-Roll as the “unsung storyteller” before – but the stakes are higher now than ever. 

What good B-roll looks like in practice

Effective B-roll packages share a few consistent qualities: they are shot with an editorial goal in mind, they provide variety (wide shots, close shots, movement, static), and they are sensitive to the environment they are capturing.

The Pampers World Prematurity Day campaign is a good illustration of what that last point means in practice. Filming took place inside the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Kingston Hospital, working alongside nurses, medical staff, and the Wright family at a moment of real vulnerability. The brief was not just to capture footage of premature babies and the nappies designed to support them, but to do so in a way that respected the weight of the environment.

The resulting package was observational and unhurried, with natural moments of parental involvement, specialist care and the quietness of a NICU at work. That tone carried into how the story was received. The footage was used across digital, social, and broadcast channels, but its value was rooted in the care that went into making it. Footage that feels forced or intrusive in that kind of setting would have been unusable regardless of its technical quality.

B-roll as campaign architecture

Some of the most effective uses of B-roll are not reactive but structural, built into the campaign from the beginning as a deliberate mechanism for driving coverage.

Consider the RBLI VE Day 80 campaign, which aimed to honour veterans while driving sales of charitable merchandise to fund veteran housing. The anchor of the editorial strategy was the unveiling of a major new art installation on the cliffs at Dover. Because the visual was striking and emotionally resonant, it was treated as the core asset from day one, not a byproduct of a press release.

By combining emotive veteran interviews with drone aerials of the installation and scenes from the veterans’ village, a comprehensive visual package was ready to ship the moment the story broke. Tailored edits were cut for different broadcast outlets so that each package arrived ready to integrate into a news bulletin without additional production work from the receiving team.

The resulting coverage across BBC, ITV, Sky News, GB News, and BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme -reaching over 10 million people – proved a vital point: the B-roll did not just support the story. It was the mechanism that allowed the story to exist at scale across multiple competing outlets simultaneously.

The unbranded rule: Why corporate logos kill coverage

There is a trap here that trips up commercial brands: the urge to treat B-roll like a television commercial. It is a fatal mistake to splash corporate logos across the footage or encourage subjects to hold a product unnaturally in front of the lens.

Editorial newsrooms have strict regulatory guidelines regarding product placement and commercial promotion. The moment footage feels like a free advertorial, a producer will reject it out of hand.

The Snap Hidden Black Stories campaign, launched around an educational lens in partnership with the Black Cultural Archives, offers a good example in navigating this balance. The asset suite required footage that could work across online titles and broadcast news simultaneously. Instead of focusing the lens on corporate branding, the B-roll focused on the cultural asset itself – featuring Tukwini Mandela and the actual experience of interacting with history.

Because the footage prioritised editorial value over corporate logos, it successfully travelled into high-integrity environments like ITV News at Ten and BBC World. And in a multi-platform world, unbranded, high-quality footage doesn’t just clear the broadcast hurdle; it easily transitions into social feeds, online news packages, and the longevity layer of evergreen digital content long after the initial news cycle ends.

What B-roll requires

Shooting B-roll is not a matter of point-and-shoot. Capturing footage with purpose requires looking at the viewfinder through the eyes of a time-strapped news editor.

The question behind every shot must be editorial, not promotional:

• Is it wide enough to establish the scene without looking like a staged corporate event?
• Is it close enough to land the human emotion or the specific detail of the story?
• Is the sequence held long enough (at least 8 to 10 seconds per shot) to give the editor real choices on the timeline?
• Are we making the most of filming time to capture supplementary assets for owned and media brand social channels? PR’s are used to thinking about “broadcast days”, but “content days” are often overlooked. With a film crew on hand, it’s the perfect opportunity to capture behind-the-scenes footage, social snippets and to-camera interviews.

In a media landscape where newsrooms have less time and more platforms to fill, B-roll that arrives answering these questions is no longer a secondary asset. It is often a key reason a story lands with impact.