When the surprising movie is actually content marketing

Before becoming the king of souvenir shops in Portuguese cities and even before being the quintessential writer of 20th century Portuguese literature, Fernando Pessoa was an office worker who worked in an advertising office – his was the first and frustrated Coca-Cola campaign in Portugal – and took an interest in the emerging world of cinema.

In the 1920s, in fact, he wrote different movie ideas, which did not come to light until a few years ago when they were published in a single volume. One of those ideas was The Idol, one of those classic detective novel-style mystery stories that were all the rage then. A banker has to bring a valuable idol from New York to Southampton, but decides to create a game with a group of passengers. Murders, disappearances and mysteries follow.

Just as Pessoa’s film ideas were recovered in writing a few years ago, now they have been recovered in images. O Ídolo has become a short film that recreates the glamor of the ocean liners and the fashion of the 1920s, with a cast that recreates the main lines of history in English and Portuguese. It would be a curiosity, but it is also content marketing.

The short is a work by the director Pedro Varela for the Uzina agency and, ultimately, for Samsung Portugal. Obviously, being a story from the 20s of the last century, nobody uses Samsung devices, but that hardly matters. Everything, absolutely everything, was recorded with a Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G, the giant’s latest smartphone model.

The story is news because of the uniqueness of recovering one of Pessoa’s lost film plots, but it also works as a lever for the brand to be talked about and to sell the quality of the company’s new generation devices. If you see the almost half hour that the short lasts, you will do it out of literary curiosity or to try to discover who is the culprit, but in the end you will end up thinking about Samsung terminals.

A career to be the new source for movies or documentaries

The idea is not exactly new, but that does not mean that it is not increasingly important. Consumers are fed up with ads and traditional brand messages, but they still welcome the content. If you add to that the fact that the streaming boom is dynamiting traditional media audiences and with it those of advertising breaks, the complicated state of things is generally understood.

To enter this new environment and new content consumption habits, companies must think in a different way. It is the potential boom of product placement, but also that of series, documentaries or branded films, in what is almost a revival of how television began at the time.

The great giants are already doing it. Nike has its own content production company and companies like Pepsi or Patagonia have turned their ads into starting points for films or documentaries.

These contents are also integrated in an organic way in the content offer of the streaming giants. It is no longer just that the Samsung short can be seen on YouTube, it is that one of Nike’s documentaries premiered on HBO and the film that starts from a Pepsi ad – Uncle Drew – can be seen in Spain on Prime Video.

In addition, companies generally bet heavily on documentaries, because they allow them to address topics that interest them in depth and with some solvency. The content is of extreme quality, so much so that it has even entered award season.

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