Having a documentary commissioned is a great way to get your brand recognised and expand your potential consumer base. There are multiple ways to go about creating your piece: you could feature employees or executives, founders or consumers. You could showcase your charity work or your workplace community. You could use multiple ways to display this information: stock footage, talking head interviews, testimonials, stills, animation. There are endless ways to combine these aspects, and more. Here are five great examples of corporate documentary in the works, and how they put together their message:
Coca Cola’s 5by20 Campaign
5by20 is a Coca-Cola backed initiative to enable the economic empowerment of 5 million women by 2020. This is an exceptional example of a documentary that displays a business’s corporate social responsibility, or CSR. It shows that they have a world-wide community and gives an illustration of the direct impact their initiative is having on these women.
Starbucks
This corporate documentary tells the viewer a story while using Starbucks as a setting. It plays on the audience’s emotions by describing the heartbreaking journey of a mother who loses her daughter and finds some peace in scrapbooking. This scrapbooking club she joined meets in Starbucks, and a testimonial by the club founder describes the coffee house as a place people ‘feel comfortable’.
Stella Artois
Stella Artois has done an excellent job of creating a documentary that is interesting to watch while essentially using the entire video for product placement. The documentary features the dying form of painted advertising and the artists struggling to keep the method alive. It appeals to the viewer through the passion of the painters it features, and utilizes the impressive visuals of the giant Stella murals.
Photoshop
This video is a great sample of a corporate documentary that uses the founders as it’s main subject. It traces the journey of Adobe Photoshop’s birth and success by speaking with the creators of the software. It combines news archives, old photograph stills, and a group interview with the four founders who discuss the circumstances that led to the program’s development.
Declan Dunne – David Lloyd Leisure
This short documentary tells the inspirational story of one person overcoming a huge challenge. It uses an interview as a voice over and the visuals really bring the story to life.