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The Corporation: Marketing Documentary to the Masses

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Posted on August 25 2004 in by austra

The Corporation: Marketing Documentary to the Masses

Published on August 25, 2004

By Shira Golding

As the 2004 Presidential election approaches, political pundits have characterized our nation as highly polarized. In this climate, documentaries have taken on unprecedented blockbuster status as vehicles for critique and resistance. Amidst the crop of political films celebrating theatrical success is Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan’s The Corporation.

An activist demands corporate accountability in The Corporation

With huge box offices successes first in Canada (where the film was produced) and now in the United States, buzz about the film has spread virally due to an innovative outreach and marketing strategy spearheaded by Katherine Dodds, Director of Corporate Communications.

Perhaps the most ambitious of the hot docs, The Corporation takes on the mega topic of the corporate institution and how its global practices affect people, animals and the environment. With over forty perspectives from an American CEO to a grassroots Bolivian activist, the film is a massive undertaking.

But the filmmakers were able to organize all of the ideas around one central principle: the notion of corporation as individual. In the 1800’s the American company became a “legal person,” entitled to the same protections and autonomy as any citizen. As the film lays out, this status in many ways liberated corporations from their social contract, allowing them to supplant public good with profit. The question The Corporation asks is, “If companies are ‘people,’ what kind of people are they?” The answer: very bad ones.

Using the Tools of the “Enemy”

The film is an indictment of corporate ethics, focusing on stories of exploitation and dishonesty. But less ironic than just plain smart, the marketing team has integrated corporate strategies into their grassroots campaign.

Step one was hiring Katherine Dodds to manage outreach efforts. Having worked for Adbusters from ‘93-‘97, Dodds founded her own mission-focused PR firm, Good Company Communications. An ad agency with a conscience, Good Company helps nonprofits and filmmakers spread their messages of social change.

The Corporation’s ubiquitous logo

Before The Corporation went into production, the filmmakers began working with Dodds to cultivate their marketing and outreach strategy. Early in production they decided to fashion a consistent brand for the film. Just as a corporation puts a tremendous amount of time into creating a cohesive visual image for their products, The Corporation team devoted time and creative energy into formulating their orange businessman with a halo and a devil’s tail. This image permeates all facets of the film and its byproducts: credits and intertitles in the film, the Web site, the poster, the postcard, the book, the T-shirt, milk cartons, and of course, the neon orange stencil that covers streets in cities where the film is opening.

As documentaries become increasingly viable in the mainstream movie market, corporate techniques such as consistent branding are one of the distinguishing factors in whether or not your film is a box office success. And the more people who see your film, the greater the potential impact. Whereas the end goal of corporate marketing is to create addicted consumers, a notion that is elucidated in the film, the goal with marketing a social-issue documentary is to educate and mobilize the public to take action. As Dodds explains, “Our approach is to use the tools of corporate marketing to empower rather than to manipulate.”

But you don’t need to have a fortune like Capturing the Friedmans Director Andrew Jarecki to employ these strategies. In the case of The Corporation, the producers were able to strike a deal with Zeitgeist and the film’s other distributors to actually put a good chunk of change into the Web site and the grassroots marketing team spearheaded by Dodds.

Filmmakers Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott examine the corporate infrastructure.

Grassroots Outreach to the Rescue

Indeed, for an independent film like The Corporation, corporate strategies will only take you so far. While branding is a great tool, Dodds explains that “there is no way to compete with the volume generated by the Hollywood industry.” Dodds emphasizes the importance of creating a grassroots street team to further the promotion of the film.

Comprised primarily of activist volunteers who feel strongly about the message of the film, Dodds’ outreach team includes street promoters from around the world who are dedicated to letting their community know about upcoming screenings. And, of course, e-mail and Web promotion also continue to be a large part of the equation. In the weeks preceding the Vancouver premiere of the film, Dodds’ team generated over 100,000 emails, leading to sold-out screenings throughout the city.

The momentum of this Internet campaign is being harnessed to create an online activist community of people who have seen the film and want to get in on the action. As the film screens in Canada and the United States, over 4 million people have visited the site and over 14,000 have joined the mailing list. “The short term goal is to catch people in the net after the theatrical release. The longer term goal is to bring people in and focus action around particular issues,” Dodds explains.

A street team volunteer promotes The Corporation on wheels.

The Corporation is undoubtedly an activist film, but one of the difficulties in generating concrete action is that the film takes on so many subtopics. Dodds sees this as an opportunity: “Because there are so many issues, the film creates multiple entry points. Each person responds to a different element, depending on their story.” Dodds’ task is to create a way to retain each of these people’s engagement.

The film’s Web site is not only a resource for information on the film, but a forum for discussion and action. i-Corp, the site’s interactive component features a personality test whereby visitors can gauge their stance on corporate practices (and which also cleverly echoes the personality test structure of the film.)

Another component of i-Corp is the “DocBack” section. Capitalizing on the notion of multiple entry points, DocBack focuses visitors on one issue at a time by creating a mini-site around one of the case studies from the film. Volume 1, No. 1, highlights the story of Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, two whistle-blowing Fox reporters who tried to caution the public about synthetic hormone rBGH used in cows. The site features a streaming short doc on the case and is organized into “Talk,” “Learn,” and “Act” sections.

Dodds reports that The Corporation team is hoping to expand the DocBack site into a series of “iDVDs,” interactive DVDs ideal for activists who want to use short, issue-focused films to galvanize support. They’re looking for money to develop and produce these DVDs as well as to create future volumes of the DocBack site. Also in the works is the “Global Referendum on Corporate Power,” an effort to generate a group of campaign promises for a system of Global Harm Reduction.

In short, the outreach campaign around The Corporation is, like the film, an ambitious enterprise. As the film launches in Australia and in the U.K. this fall, the film will reach larger audiences and in turn the potential for creating a global movement to overturn corporate institutions will grow. The times are a changin’, one blockbuster documentary at a time.