The Intersection of Documentary and Branded Content

Can “docummercials” be the perfect blend of high quality content with financial backing?

In the Dumbo district of Brooklyn, there’s a rare unicorn of a media company called Blue Chalk Media. They posses the ability to produce award winning long and short-form documentary style videos with stunning visuals, but a majority of their work is branded content. Now why aren’t more media companies buying into this model? And why is this an effective model for Blue Chalk?

Blue Chalk Media is a media company that produces work for clients and work for journalistic outlets. Their clients range from Nike to BBC World News and everything that they do showcases their stunning visuals. Pam Huling, Blue Chalk COO, talked to us about all the different outlets that they cater to, but the point that she drove home was that they produce content that visualizes the human experience.

“It’s all about who you know and how awesome their stories are”

Both Pam Huling and Greg Moyer, CEO, have experience with documentary filmmaking and television production. Greg Moyer held senior positions at the Discovery Channel and Pam Huling was at MediaStorm prior to starting Blue Chalk in November 2013. Blue Chalk spreads itself across two coasts with their creative team on the west coast in Portland, Oregon. In Portland they have their creative director, Rob Finch, who aggregated the creative talent that Blue Chalk possesses today. A University of Oregon School of Journalism alum, Julianne Parker, works as a producer after interning with Blue Chalk for around two years.

Greg Moyer explained how Blue Chalk is able to engage viewers for both their documentaries and branded content. He said, “Authenticity is the key to building trust”. This trust in Blue Chalk due to their transparency allows them to produce 90% client work and still engage with those viewers who watch them for their journalistic stories. Many hands shot up in the air when the term “branded content” was thrown around because we wanted to know what their ethical standpoint on branded content was. They explained to us that, “brands and publications can work to be mutually beneficial”. The content can engage the viewers because of strong characters and a narrative arc while reaching a wider audience, because of the commercial platform. For example, watch this advertisement done for Subaru:

As journalism students, we all wanted to know about their documentary work, so they showed us a piece that just recently won a Communicator Award for their activism piece titled, “Burned Girl”:

This piece really did show the human experience, but we were all surprised when at the end it was revealed that this too was promotional content. The real take away from this incredible meeting with Blue Chalk is that there are ethical questions to ask when creating promotional content that appears to be journalistic, but that it can also work and connect with an audience. At the end of our session, Greg Moyer left us with this quote:

“The secret to documentary filmmaking is figuring out what part of the story that everybody can relate to”

If you want to watch more work by Blue Chalk Media click here