The Power of Documentary Film | Everything You Need to Know to get Buy-in from Your Leadership
My cousin is a vegan.
My friend doesn’t eat sugar.
Sea World ended their Shamu program.
What do these random statements have in common? They’re all the direct result of documentary films.
Building off of our last episode, I felt it was appropriate to finally dive into the power of the documentary medium, and why I fully believe in it for not just selling services and products, but ideas and movements.
If you need to make an impact or change minds - make documentaries!
I've been asked several times now: "How do I sell brand storytelling upstream?"
And while I hope you understand by this point my perspective on brand storytelling (that it's a methodology, not just brand films), what they're really asking is: "How do I convince the higher-ups to invest in brand films?"
For those who have asked, this episode is for you. I'm going to lay out the best business case I can for documentaries by digging into the power of the medium and the science behind how it affects our brains, influences our beliefs and subsequently, our actions.
You’ll Learn:
Real-world case studies of documentary film’s impact on individuals and corporate policy.
The business risks of using documentaries (e.g. you can’t control the precision of the message and need to embrace its flaws).
How the medium itself builds trust with the audience.
A need for ethics when wielding its power.
Documentaries as rhetorical storytelling. It’s a purpose-driven medium for the sake of making an argument.
An overview of your brain waves, how film impacts your brain and makes you more susceptible to influence.
3 levels of communication for film
Narrative transportation and narrative identification theory, and how the story is a ride that your audience goes on.
Key Terms:
Dual Coding Theory - the idea that people learn in a more holistic way when they have words as well as visuals supporting those words.
Narrative transportation - The experience of being absorbed in a story.
The psychological phenomena where an audience member is transported out of their current, waking reality, and immersed into the story world.
Narrative identification - When the audience empathizes and identifies with the main character. They see themselves in the main character’s shoes.
That character becomes their guide, their vehicle through which they experience the story world, as well as that character’s emotional arc.
Episode Transcript
How's it going? Brand Storyteller. In this episode, I'm talking about the documentary format, basically the power of documentary film. So I'm getting into in this episode and why you should be using documentaries as a part of your marketing strategy.
I've been asked several times now, like, how do I sell documentaries upstream? Really, the question is phrased How do I sell brand storytelling upstream? Right how do I convince the higher ups in my organization to approve a sort of like bold brand storytelling strategy? For marketing? Now, when they're phrasing this, I think what they actually mean is what they're actually asking is How do I convince convince these these executives to go ahead and let's start making a series of documentaries, right?
Like a series of customer testimonials, a series of brand films that are documentary style. How do I get buy in from that? In the past episode where I was talking about like brand storytelling is empathy, I basically make a strong distinction that brand storytelling is not cinematic marketing, that when most people think about brand storytelling, you immediately think of cinematic marketing, right?
So you immediately think of using documentaries as your primary marketing strategy. And I really wanted to make that distinction that that's not the case because you have to first have that strong marketing foundation in place first before you then switch over and start making documentaries. The reason for that, as I've explained several times, is you need a way of capturing your leads and you need a way of selling your services, selling your mission, selling your product.
You need that established first before you start making documentaries. Because after you start making documentaries, they're going to people are most likely going to love them, but they need something to do. After that, they need somewhere to go. You need a system in place so you can capture that customer. All right. So so that's kind of why I've been holding off talking specifically about documentary films and leaning into it because that over my career, because I primarily make documentaries for brands, I probably primarily make brand films, customer testimonials.
My sweet spot is that those emotionally engaging customer testimonials and brand films like that's that's what I do. But I've had way too many situations where clients have invested that too early and they didn't have that, that an actual like lead capture foundation set in place. So once they got the film, they didn't really use it to its fullest extent.
They didn't take full advantage of what they have because I don't really believe that they completely understood exactly what they had I feel like the documentary has a very unique power to it. It has a very it did medium itself is uniquely designed to cause significant attitude and belief change as well as inspire radical life change like radical life altering decisions.
OK, and that's on a micro level, on an individual level as well as on a macro level, on a social and corporate or even cultural level. OK, a documentary, well structured and well told can have a significant lasting impact. And there's there's essentially scientific evidence for why this occurs, why this happens. But let's just kind of throw out a couple look at a couple of examples of what has actually occurred.
Food, Inc. All right. So my cousin is now a vegan because he watched Food Inc and several this is not not even several because it's probably thousands of people, thousands of people have transformed their entire eating habits. You understand this when you change your diet, when you change how you eat you change what you buy. You're changing not just your your dietary what am I trying to say?
You're not just changing the rules around your diet. Those impact your entire way of living. They impact potentially where you shop, the impact, what you buy. They're going to impact how much you're spending on your groceries, right? Like it's a significant commitment to radically change your diet and go from being an omnivore to a vegan. OK, and and you're you're also making a social decision to because veganism is still I make fun of vegans, whatever.
It's funny, OK, probably shouldn't, but you're going to get some sort of a social harassment for being a vegan, right? Like that's a bold, courageous move to make, OK? Because you know that you're going to come up against a narrow minded people like myself. All right. So so there's that thing. All right. Super size me, super size me, which was the documentary where the guy every time he went to McDonalds and they asked him if you would like to super it, he just said yes and ate it like and filmed his entire body transformation over that process ended McDonald's super size me offer data.
You look at a McDonald's menu they don't even have super size size on the menu anymore. They went back to small, medium, large because at first it just ended their consistent question of of offering it and then they just took it off completely. Right. Blackfish, which is one of the more recent examples. Blackfish was a documentary that basically looked at the mistreatment of orcas within SeaWorld's ORCA program, their Shamu program it was they didn't just focus on SeaWorld.
They went and looked at looked at other like attractions. But really, it was it was a sort of like targeted effort to to unmask what had happened because, you know, trainers have been killed by them. OK, ended SeaWorld's Shamu program, ended it. I'm not sure if you understand this. The logo of SeaWorld is the dadgum orca like the the identity of that corporation is the Shamu, like Shamu and SeaWorld are like completely synonymous.
That would be like making a documentary about Mickey Mouse and Disney having to wipe their hands of Mickey Mouse. That's the level. OK, ended it. But you like your core identity. That's ridiculous. That is that is an insane amount of change. So it they have this crazy ability to make significant changes on not just individuals, but but but entire corporations and change entire cultural thought some immediate risks.
Is that the first thing is you're trading off there's there's a huge trade off of precision of information and control of the entire process. Right. You can't be precise.
You're probably hoping and a lot of things I feel like this is a misinterpretation of a lot of my clients is the the false belief that they will still be able to control the entire message and control the precision of the entire message. You can't do that in a documentary. You you really have to let that aspect of things go you have to be OK with a certain level of flaws in the video itself because those flaws, those natural flaws are inherent are an inherent byproduct of the medium itself.
You're relying on your message being communicated by people as an answer to questions essentially, and not as a reading of a script, unless, of course, you're doing a scripted voiceover that will drive the narrative. OK, but primarily that's the big that's one of the biggest risks is you're you're being open to a an imperfect, a flawed, imperfect, imperfect nice message, but it's not completely imprecise.
You're really kind of you're looking at like, baby, it's like 10%, 5% 3%. These things are very minor when you actually look at it towards the the overall thing, right? It's like the other thing. So aside from the information and then the lack of a control, another thing that that is risky is things change right? So so things change.
People change. So people like your staff or even your customers, if they play a role inside of your brand film or if they play a role inside of your customer testimonial and the relationship changes or they're they leave the company, you know, like that is a potential risk because now they are forever solidified as a what am I trying to say as a representative of this organization?
But they're no longer at that organization or they've solidified themselves as a champion of this organization. But now the relationship isn't as awesome as it once was. That's a genuine concern. OK, and there's really there's nothing you can do about that, aside from not showing that that video or trying to edit that person out and replace them with somebody else and say like an updated interview or something, or you just bite the bullet and just keep using it because you understand that it was accurate at that moment in time.
What I want to say to both of those things is that those risks are valid, but they there is still a level of that risk, even when you are controlling your message. So say you're making a a narrative ad where you have the ability to write the entire script or you're making, say, an animated explainer video. And he sort of controlled conventional video marketing where you are in control of the process.
It's not a documentary there's a risk in having precision over the information in the fact that you have to guarantee that what you're communicating is exactly what the audience needs to hear. Right. So, yeah, you can have complete precision and control over the message, but now you're you're really making sure that, like, is it exactly the right message that's going to work?
OK, the beauty of the documentary is that if you're doing a customer testimonial, it does have the benefit of that question answer format. So as you're asking questions to your to your loyal customers, they're answering those questions in their own language, from their own perspective. All right. That is significant. Right there because customer language, understanding their perspective. You go back to my philosophy about like the disease and how we're siloed off and how we have the inability to fully see our organization from their perspective.
The whole process of a documentary is kind of like getting direct customer feedback, but you also just happen to be filming a a marketing piece at the same time. And then you can take that transcript of their interview and then even use that to like update your copy or or update positioning statements, just whatever. Right that it there's a significant amount of value in that.
But if you're just going about it of, hey, let's just make the assumption that we know what's going on we're going to shape that message, but we still might be wrong. All right. So there's still always a level of risk when we're writing our own scripts. Let's other take the point of change so so the thing of like staff or customers can can change or leave.
There's also a risk of investing in a character and then being stuck with that character. So Subway, for instance, they had Jared, right? So they had Jared as the face of their of their brand. So they essentially had a character and they were kind of stuck with them. And then that character went off to I'm pretty sure the dude got caught like with like drugs and prostitution.
This this seems to happen a lot where there's usually a face of some sort of branded campaign. And then that person ends up like getting involved in drugs and prostitution and it that because they're so strongly tied to the brand, it has a negative impact on the brand itself. This happened with Jared with Subway the ShamWow guy. It is it is a repeated pattern that you keep seeing.
So even if you try to like take the safe route and the more controlled route of we're going to hire somebody, there's still a level of risk involved in that. It's not as big as employees leaving because those are going to happen more often. I'm just saying there still is a level of risk but when you look at when you kind of you take that into consideration, is that level of risk enough to deny you the rewards of that significant attitude, belief and life change that a documentary and documentary videos have the potential to create the medium itself is part of the message.
So if we start to look at like, why, why are documentaries so powerful? You know, what is the what is the reason behind their ability to cause such a significant change? OK, and I think the first thing that you look at is the medium itself. So I actually saw a post from from one of my colleagues where they were talking about things that they had learned from making video ads.
And one of the points was that that the medium of video is merely just a vehicle to communicate the message. And I don't I can't agree with that. I can't agree with that at all. I believe that the the medium of the documentary format is part of the message itself, that choosing that medium you're already communicating certain things.
You're already signaling a specific message to the audience just by the fact that it is a documentary. What do I mean by this? Well, it it's a true real life story. So that's what you're signaling. You're signaling to the audience that this is true, that it's real life, that it's authentic, that you're being transparent. Right. That it's genuine that this is a real person.
It's not an actor, OK? That with all of those things, what's even happening to you is I'm explaining these things defenses are going down as I'm eating, walking you through this because you're just like, oh, oh, it's true. This really happened. This is a real person. Therefore, I can trust the message. I can trust it. It's trustworthy. The the documentary has its anchor in journalism, in news broadcasts.
And we see journalism as our cultural arbiters of truth. They are the the the lens that guides our perception of reality, that guides our perception of fact and fiction. And so when we already frame our story in a documentary, we are framing it as this is factual. You can trust this message. We are being boldly transparent here, OK?
And so there's already a sense of of that before you even begin saying your message. There's there's a specific theory to how people learn called dual coding theory. Dual coding theory basically shows that or I'm not sure if it's completely proven. I think it makes sense that that this whole sense of that there's like people that learn visually or they learn like by reading or analytically or whatever that that that distinguish that division between learning styles doesn't really exist, that people learn in a more holistic way where you have to have words as well as visuals if you if you learn in a way where you have words and visuals supporting those words, you're going to retain that information a lot better. Right? Like it's going to it's really going that concept is really going to sink in. It's kind of like thinking about if you're if you're communicating an abstract idea, but you have a model to look at to help you understand that abstract idea, you're going to understand it a lot faster and it's going to stick with you a lot more because you have a visual model of visual representation to make sense of the information as well to process all of that.
This is this is part of the reason why I believe like why branding is so important, like the colors that you're selecting, the fonts you're selecting your logo, your entire brand identity design is important because it leverages this this understanding of dual coding that essentially meaning is multilayered. You're already leveraging a layer of meaning of meaning through the documentary format that's already adding to the believability of the message just by the fact that it is a documentary it's already helping you bring your customer through that process and know like trust, just because it's a documentary I think this is a great time to insert a bit of code and an ethical asterix as I'm going
through this. I'm not saying these things to encourage you to lie to people. I'm not saying these things to encourage you to take advantage and, and, and manipulate people. It's not what I'm saying. However, as we continue to go throughout this episode, I'm explaining to you how to do that.
Because it's I have to explain why these things are so powerful, why this film is so powerful for you to understand why it has the impact that it does. But you have to have an ethical foundation to you. I can't control your moral stance I am incapable of of telling you what is right and wrong for you because you are ultimately going to make that decision for yourself.
Right? I mean, I'm not going to turn this into a moral conversation. I'm not going to turn this into a like a social conversation. Right? Like that's between you and God. All right? It's not between you and me. OK, so how you use this stuff that's on you? I know how I use these things. I know that when I when I tell stories and when I get into the edit and I craft these stories that I never rearrange someone's sentence.
So that way they say something they would never say, right? It's always I'm always communicating and being authentic to the person. My stance is that that I'm creating these to best represent the people that I interview and as a blessing, not just to the company, but also to the person who's on camera so that I'm representing everyone. Well, all right.
I never go about this to misrepresent somebody, to bash them, to trick them, to get their get their trust so I can come in and interview them and then I'm going to turn that into a smear piece. OK? Like, personally, I would never do that. I understand the type of people who are capable of doing that to other people.
OK, so you have to approach this with your own ethical codes. I am simply explaining to you the reason behind why these things are powerful. OK? It's only that as I explain that I will seem manipulative, but if we be completely honest about what we're doing here, we are marketing and the entire point of marketing is to cause behavior change.
That's the whole point. It's not my responsibility to get you to be honest about what you do as your job. You're probably listening to this podcast for more insight on how to convince somebody to do something, how to persuade them to do something, how to influence them to do something. And let's use storytelling to do that. OK, so if we can just take all that pill and understand that, that's why we're all here, let's move forward all right.
The documentary Medium is essentially visual rhetoric. So if we kind of try to figure out, like, how are they able to have such a significant change in someone's belief system and someone's attitudes about something, it's the fact that a documentary is rhetoric in story form. It is an argument within a story way more than a fictional narrative.
Is an argument. So if you if you just, like, compare a feature length documentary to a feature length narrative film. So like let's look at Blackfish versus Star Wars, OK? Like Star Wars might thematically be communicating a a moral right. Like based on its themes of good and evil. There might be some sort of like thematic meeting, mythical meaning within Star Wars itself.
Maybe it's a case for pantheism. I don't know. Like, if we're stretching, it's like, what's the meaning in Star Wars? That's a great case for pantheism. Right? Like, maybe that's it, right? It it's it's there's not really a clear argument of what Star Wars is setting out. To say. And aside from the fact that it's a great daggone movie that has made in its own right a significant impact on our American culture.
Significant impact. But Blackfish Blackfish is an argument. Blackfish is is setting out to prove something, and they are setting out with an end goal. And they kind of achieved that end goal by ending the Shamu program inside of SeaWorld. OK, so there's a much more targeted mission within documenting this. This is why activists and mission based organizations embrace the documentary format, because it is complementary.
It itself is a mission based genre. There's a purpose to it. There is an objective that is setting out to accomplish. Whereas within a narrative film, there's less of an of a straightforward objective that it is setting out to accomplish. However, you can totally make the argument that Top Gun and and other similar films, their objective is to inspire you to want to join the Air Force.
OK, That people are like saying like people are commenting that Top Gun is Air Force propaganda. Like, that's not a debatable issue. Like, they came up with that. It's like, duh, duh. Why? How on earth would they possibly get so much support from the Air Force if that wasn't the purpose of that film? OK, but what I mean to say is that within a documentary, your argument, your argument is more explicit, it is more targeted.
Your goals are transparent. You're not really hiding the fact that you're trying to enact some sort of change. We're in the fact that why Top Gun is even debatable is because it's not out. It doesn't like blanket statement like, hey, we're trying this is a recruitment piece. We're trying to get you to join the Air Force. Right. It's it's more subtle because it's it's more so just like inspiring a cultural dream.
Whereas within a documentary, it is inspiring and an idea shift. OK. A belief shift. And it's going hard at that because it's an argument. All right. So that's why it has that attitude change. Or that ability to reinforce attitudes about a topic, because that's the whole point of the thing is to convince you to double down or change.
That's the whole point, which is why it's it's effective in marketing, because that's the point of marketing is to get you to buy in to this organization literally or figuratively.
If we go more into the power of a documentary, we first just have to look at the power of a video story. So the power of a film and what makes a film so powerful? There's a guy his name was Herbert Krugman. He actually forget his exact position within G.E. study. The marketing did a bunch of like marketing research, published a lot in marketing and advertising journals within the the sixties into the seventies.
A significant study that he did. And they were trying to basically show that the the difference of engagement between when you are reading something versus when you are watching something. So so how is the mind differently engaged when we're reading a magazine versus watching television? So what they did is they had like a 20 year old like research assistant
They put her in this mock living room where there were some magazines there and there was like a television set in the corner and they just told her to go read some magazines. They attached an electrode to her head, which was at the time attached to a polygraph. But even back then they understood the difference of brain waves and, and how to how to measure those brain waves.
OK, so so when we go real quick, in the different brain waves, you got data which is which is active. That's problem solving, focused attention. You're working something out alpha, which is neutral You're just relaxed. You're you're chillin. All right. Then you got I think it's theta and Delta Theta and Delta are your deep brain waves those those are when you get into like deep, relaxed, unconscious thought.
So kind of like hypno hypnosis area is when you're getting into theta and delta. All right. When they when the woman was reading, they measured that that her and essentially your brain is kind of like producing all of these waves all the time. But what you're really looking at is where is the weight of distribution at. OK so when she was reading the weight of distribution is more towards active because her mind was active so they're like, OK, great, it's our hypothesis.
The mind is active. Then they played a series of commercials for her and they even had her like take a survey at the end of like what she felt about the commercials after she watched them Now, what was interesting is, is what am I trying to say? Independent of her feelings about the commercials, how her brain responded to the process of watching these commercials was the same every single time after 30 seconds of watching the commercials.
Her brain pattern moved from weighted towards active into weighted towards like deep brain waves. So so your mind shifted from being actively engaged with what she was doing to not even passively engaged. The weight distribution was into the more on the Delta side. So she was kind of like hypnotized by the video. This is what happens. So as you watch something, within 30 seconds, your brain shuts off.
Basically, you stop actively participating in the processing of the information and now you just become a passive recipient to it. Because when you're in Delta Theta Wave territory, you're in hypnosis territory kind of like hypnotized by it. That means you're more susceptible to messages. Videos kind of communicate on three different layers. They communicate on direct, indirect and induced.
There's a three layers of communication of of meaning that that a video is communicating. So direct is really like what is spoken so right now I'm speaking to you, that is direct communication. I have words that are on the screen. Those are also forms of direct communication. It is it is words images that are that are directly communicated.
But then you have indirect. An indirect often is what I choose not to say and how I say what I'm saying. So my tone of voice, how I'm framing the message, body language, what I'm choosing not to say emotional themes that we're getting into. OK, like the the overall meaning that we're that we're communicating. These are social like kind of like social communication, like these these are more like indirect things.
And then you have induced and induced is the level of symbols. OK. Metaphor, primal emotions. Those are things that are communicated on the induced part and in a powerful story, a powerful documentary is communicating on all three parts. Majority of marketers that that I've encountered, you know, they tend to think only on the direct message. They tend to put way too much emphasis and way too much weight on what is directly being communicated.
And they don't think and consider the the bottom to levels of communication where you're your most important one is the induced language. Because when someone is watching a video, they're in that lower brain wave state where they're more vulnerable. You're literally talking to their subconscious mind at that point, right? So really, you should put more weight on the induced stuff Symbols, colors, primal meanings, primal, primal themes.
You know, if you go back to my my episode where I talked about primal themes, this is why I'm talking about and trying to help you understand using primal themes and finding your theme in controlling idea is because it really does matter So essentially when you're watching a when you're watching a video or any type of video, you kind of shut your mind off.
I mean, if you think about it, people watch videos to relax, like part of my relaxation. I watch movies. I watch movies to relax, OK? Like, it's it's what we do because we are literally relaxed when we watch them. OK, but you kind of shut your mind off when you're in that process of watching this film and in the film itself thinks for you.
And they've also done studies where they have proven this. So research conducted by Yuri Hazan has shown that your brain waves, your brain patterns mirror as a recipient, as a viewer, as an audience member, mirror that of the storyteller. So they did an interesting experiment where they had somebody under an MRI machine and they had them tell a life story.
And then they had a they had a audience member, right. Put them under an MRI machine, and they played that story for them. And they mapped they mapped the brain functions. And what they saw was that though there was a bit of a delay with the audience because they're in the process of hearing and processing the brains, their brains sync up the brainwaves, like how their brains were processing the center as if there was a the storyteller itself had the power to set a track upon which the audience then rode upon.
OK, this is why I believe that stories are essentially rides that we create for the audience, because they literally are. It is a ride that we take the audience on because the story itself starts thinking for the audience. So the importance there's a there's a need for a well-structured story to understand how to structure your story well, because that's what you're structuring.
You're structuring leading them through your argument and leading them on that journey because they've literally handed you the keys to their mind.
And then if you go even one step further, that process of handing the keys of the mind over to the storyteller as we do that, we get transported from our waking life, from this normal reality into the story world. The world of the story reality. This phenomenon of that transportation is called narrative transportation. It is the it is the the known phenomenon that happens that when we get invested in a story, either we're reading it, listening to it, watching it in a film, we literally get invested in that story, like our reality.
OK, that's kind of going a little deep here, but read up on it. This is what it says our reality, this external world that we're in, what will happen is it will fade away. If you pay attention to this when you watch a film or if you're reading the book, you're you'll start to even notice this yourself. Your vision is going to blur here.
You're going to get completely focused on the story to where you forget where you even are, because now you're literally inside of the story. This phenomenon is called narrative transportation because you are literally, as the audience member transported into the narrative, you're transported into the story. You exist within that story world because you're following along on that ride the other thing that happens when you get transported is called narrative identification.
Narrative identification is when we identify with the protagonist of that story This is why I believe that that single character stories, human, human what am I trying to say? Human centric pieces, like character driven stories, have the ability to be more powerful than just an idea based story. So I'm usually in favor of having less characters on screen because it gives the audience member more.
The more time to invest in that character, trust that character, and identify with that character than if we're constantly throwing a bunch of people on camera talking to them and the more people that you have on screen, the less invested in the story the person is, and ultimately, potentially the less effective that story is for that person. Some interesting studies have been done by this research team, Green and Brock on narrative transportation, where they basically have have shown that the more someone is invested in the story, so the more powerful that transportation is, the more significant their attitude and emotional change is through the story.
That that as you invest yourself in that story, the the emotional arc that that story goes on is going to impact you more intensely because you're more connected to it. And so if the emotional arc is, say, that of a documentary where it's designed specifically to convince you of an idea to communicate the controlling idea as a hypothesis.
Right. So it's the whole point is to convince you of an idea. The more you get invest in that story, the more lasting that idea is on you. And so things that get you invested. Like I said, a lot of it is emotional connection to the characters. How well that story is structured, how that story is told, how is edited, you know, like, all right.
Are the visuals pulling you into the story itself? Are you having that connected emotional experience? OK, because the deeper that immersion the more likely you're going to cause that attitude change.
So this is often the confusion that I find with documentary storytelling is that that knowledge of the power of a documentary, why that power exists and where that power really comes from is lost. And unfortunately, sometimes people focus too much on the message and still trying to control the message. And they're fighting, in essence, the inherent kind of like, who am I trying to say qualities of the format itself when you're trying to put too much control over a documentary, you're you're inherently fighting what the thing is and you haven't really allowed trusted the medium itself to do the work for you that you need it to do.
The other thing, the unfortunate thing is that once people will have these things, your default approach is to take that video, put it on your website where it ultimately kind of dies. You need to create a rollout campaign you have to build some sort of a of a release for this documentary. There's been multiple times where the videos that I've made have spontaneously generated PR for, for the subjects in the film and for my clients.
So I made one about about a barber and a local magazine. Someone at that local magazine saw the video and they ended up doing an entire cover story of him because of the video that they saw. Didn't mention me in it, unfortunately. Right. But but awesome for him. Right. The video itself inspired them to do another story that featured him and his business exploded.
I did a documentary over during the pandemic about my dad and that video playing on the practice. That film inspired a journalist from The Washington Post who then called my dad directly to do a a feature story expanding on this this idea that family practice doctors were being negatively impacted by the pandemic. And so he did like an article as well as a podcast, right?
Like you have to realize that these things have the ability to go beyond just a normal marketing video context. If you plan for it that way, you really should be thinking about them as a PR tool. And and adding that into your idea of how should we go about releasing this thing? People love to watch these videos. So if you even make it right, you could create an entire event around premiering the film where you can invite more people, make a big to do about it.
And now you've created a situation where you've made a captive audience and then you're showing them this film, which these work when you have captive audiences, OK, these aren't these aren't for distracted audiences that talked about distracted versus captive audiences earlier. This is another thing that I probably should have said when I'm talking about risk first reward, but it's really a misperception.
People will often deny themselves taking advantage of the power of a documentary film because they're under the false notion that everyone they're marketing to is a distracted audience rather than understanding that that is a small portion of who you're marketing to, that who you're really, that what you want to create are your captive audiences. And your captive isn't just your funnel, it's also your current customer base.
Right. And so a lot of these documentaries can also be used as a way of reengaging your current customers as sustaining that relationship and pouring into them. And showing them that you still care about them and that you still want their continued business. So a heck of a lot easier to get them to continue to buy from you than there is to convince a new person to buy from you.
So that, in a nutshell, is kind of like the power of documentary film. And hopefully I've created a good enough business case for why you should start using documentary films, why you should use more of them. Hopefully I've helped to give you enough to go off of to sell this this strategy upstream, right? So these ambitions and these hopes upstream that you can do something cool with your marketing, right?
Because that's the thing. This stuff is fun. It's awesome, looks great. It adds significantly to your brand's value image when you have these professionally produced films as a part of your content campaign. I didn't even barely touch into that, aside from the fact that they're extremely powerful. So use their power wisely. All right. As always, you can get in touch with me on Instagram or Twitter.
Just send me a DM to you at Storyteller Agent or just contact me directly on the website, mcnabbstorytelling.com, and I'll see you in the next one. Take care.