Advertisers Should Turn to Original Content by Filmmakers

And Filmmakers Should Turn to Data

Written By Sam Sabawi — Sam is a director and producer in digital entertainment. He has directed content for Walmart, Disney, and dozens of other forward-thinking brands and media companies around the globe.

As a USC film-school-trained director, I was taught to champion the film language established by our predecessors — the artisans of cinema, filmmakers both classical and contemporary. However, we didn’t just study the cine-files and traditionalists, we also learned about the brave voices who ventured out into the world of commercial-fare, taking with them a cinematic elegance they had refined in theatrical storytelling and applying it to advertising for the world’s biggest brands.

Brands have always looked to filmmakers for their unique voices: Ridley Scott, David Lynch, Wes Anderson. Some got their beginnings in commercials but mostly crafted them as a means-to-an-end or a lucrative business venture. They created a language of commercial storytelling that was condensed, fast-paced, punchy, but poetic, flaunting their unique voices and moving the medium forward. They built works of art that were focus-grouped, workshopped, meticulously scrutinized by C-level executives, then burned into retinas of the television viewers watching the evening news or the flagship sporting event of the season.

The narratives always painted the lifestyles consumers should live, the products they should be seen with, the trends they should be hooked on. And, they worked. But over the years, consumers became aware that they were being advertised to — and that meta moment in time killed the commercial. The brands that seemed to control the tides of pop-culture and consumerism became mere annoyances. Then, people found a way to turn the noise off completely.

Brands were being “turned off” because they could no longer move the audiences even with the help of the storytelling prowess of some of the world’s most moving filmmakers. Traditional advertising was a one-way conversation where brands did all the talking. And that was the problem. No matter how many focus groups that agencies and brands could assemble, no small group of viewers could represent the masses.

The Birth Of Growth Marketing

With the era of streaming services edging out linear television, it wasn’t long before the major OTT players would weaponize the stigma around commercials as a pain point for their viewers, incentivizing them by up-selling to commercial-free tiers. Nevertheless, brands continued to scream louder with exorbitant media buys on the channels that coaxed their viewers to monthly membership options. Brands were throwing money at a non-solution in a desperate plea for relevance.

If brands could only take a page from the E-Book of streamings services themselves (spoiler alert: they did). Streamers toppled linear entertainment by curating content relevant to each viewer based on their preferences. The transaction? Audiences let OTT players in on their behavioral patterns and they curate and create the viewers’ favorite stories in return. No one had to “find something good to watch” anymore — the content that was “good to watch” would find them. Historically, the frustrations of viewers being served irrelevant content had been so great that users were willing to give up privacy for their preferences to be heard.

Brands, of course, have always had a history of aggressively collecting and analyzing the patterns of their target audience. Still, they could never speak in a meaningful fashion to the audiences they self-reportedly understood so well. Why? The digital tools didn’t exist until now. Now, brands are making massive strides, mobilizing entire teams of growth marketers to tackle the barrage of data that comes from paid digital advertising as they track buyers down the entire marketing funnel and try desperately to understand their preferences. The number one struggle, however, is determining what to do with that data. The simple answer is, well, hand it over to the creative folks (in this case, filmmakers) and see what they can do. And, this is where most brands hit a roadblock.

A Storyteller’s Case For Data

Most directors I know in the business have a complete disregard for interpreting data. Admittedly, I was one of them. At first, I was dragged into this new world kicking and screaming, feeling like I was compromising my art because, god-forbid, someone tells me what makes good storytelling. KPIs, CTRs, CPAs, the alphabet soup of digital marketing terms made referring to a clothing pin as a C-47 seem less ridiculous.

Numbers are great. I have always believed in numbers: box office numbers, Nielsen ratings, they’re a barometer of failure or success. But, no one could convince me that data this granular was going to help me decide how to make someone feel something. That is until I realized that data actually created an opportunity for storytellers: it made storytelling a two-way conversation.

Cinema has always been a medium through which stories reach people where they are and then gradually move them. If data can tell a filmmaker more accurately where her audience emotionally and behaviorally resides, then the filmmaker has an opportunity to deliver them relevant art. A skeptic might argue (as I did) that art isn’t about giving people what they want to see; it’s about showing people something they’ve never seen before. Yes, you’re right. But using data to create art isn’t about amplifying the echo in a consumer’s social media chamber. It’s about finding a way in and offering new perspectives, new lifestyles, and ultimately, for brands, new products.

Directing With Purpose

Rather than amplifying a brand’s status quo, why aren’t filmmakers tailoring their stories to prospects at different levels of the marketing funnel? Audiences’ behaviors, preferences, interests, and needs are at a director’s disposal. Yet, directors are quick to dismiss them in a style of filmmaking that is purely self-pleasuring.

Data can guide the technicalities of a filmmaker’s craft too. It can inform technique, giving directors insight into the efficacy of their narratives, editing style, shot choices. It allows them to isolate elements and test them. Not sure if that opening image makes a viewer stop scrolling? Release three versions with varying opening shots and test them. Record your learnings then iterate. Audiences’ preferences are continually evolving. Directors need to be able to listen. Try things again and again. Use the data to make informed decisions about craft.

What Can Video Directors Do?

Developing this expertise makes a commercial director irreplaceable. What can a director do? Learn how to interpret data, use it to create a unique film language, and talk to audiences about things that matter to them. A director can develop her technique so her stamp is a sort of intellectual property. She doesn’t need to eliminate her instincts but support them if she can and be willing to be proven wrong. A director can evolve, adapt, test, be curious, and analyze audience behaviors so she knows more than the brand she is servicing. A filmmaker should become a master of “the first three seconds” of her narratives, create content that offers social capital (incentivizing people to share), know what angles work, what camera moves go against the direction of the scroll on someone’s device, and crack the algorithms playfully — like a puzzle.

It’s up to directors of this era to help re-design our new language of commercial storytelling through the lens of data and enable the two-way conversation between brands and consumers that our predecessors never could.

Sam Sabawi is a director and producer in digital entertainment. He has directed content for Walmart, Disney, and dozens of other forward-thinking brands and media companies around the globe.

Thoughts? Send Sam an email at sam@samsabawi.tv