We commissioned the current Oscar holder for best documentary short to make entertainment, not a commercial. This film places our work of digital transformation in a larger cultural context, showing how the biggest problems facing our society --- everything from COVID relief to criminal justice --- can be addressed by putting the right digital tools in the right hands of people. This content is not meant to directly “sell” our products and services; rather than pushing our message, we’re pulling audiences in with compelling storytelling, which starts dialogues for us to participate in.

This is a film, not a long-form commercial. We set about creating something that people would opt-in to watch and that would leave them wanting more, just as any other form of entertainment would do. Rather than directly pitching our products and services within the film, we are instead using it to start conversations––around digital as a force for good; the power of transformation; the role of tech in government; adapting to a post-COVID world; and more––each of which opens the door for us to run related marketing and communications campaigns that grab the public’s attention. This is the purest form of entertainment because it’s about creating authentic, intimate connections that outlast any one campaign, and which plugs into deep cultural currents that go beyond the products and services that we sell.

In the course of developing case studies, we discovered a unique differentiator for our company: unlike our competitors, we approach all of our client work by putting real people, our clients’ customers, at the center. This enables us to look at digital business transformation holistically, focusing on the outcomes for our clients, their customers, their employees, and the communities they live in.

This spirit of organic discovery, rather than pre-planned messaging, has extended to our community building and amplification approach. We did not plan to have a global screening tour on 4 continents, or to premiere at The New Yorker Festival, or to invite clients to spend a weekend in Nantucket brainstorming how digital can be a force for good, but rather these things came to us as we continued screening for new audiences and learning about where we could lean in to create the biggest splash.

In mid 2021, CMO Teresa Barreira and Head of Content Alex Kahn were brainstorming whether we could ever get the general public to care about digital business transformation.

We hit upon a “aha” moment: rather than showing a digital business transformation from the perspective of one of our clients, we could show it from the perspective of one of our client’s customers.

And so we decided to use non-branded documentary, a format more commonly reserved for CSR, and use it as a lens to explore not a tangential ESG initiative, but rather our core everyday work.

Showing our impact from the lens of real people was risky, because as a B2B brand, most people, including our clients’ customers, have never even heard of us. But it turned out to be the perfect medium to provoke the question, “why should people care about our brand?”

Never Done started from a hypothesis, not a brief. Our hunch was that a character-driven documentary could get the general public to care about digital business transformation. Funds were initially a barrier, but COVID left us with unutilized travel funds, and we placed a risky bet: we cold-called director Ben Proudfoot, sold him on our vision, and moved to pre-production in only 5 days.

The release of Never Done has motivated our workforce, created over 1M EUR in new business opportunities, and earned millions of organic impressions.

Execution:

* 28 screenings in 4 continents

* Invited prospective clients to a sneak peek at The Nantucket Project

* Premiered at the New Yorker Festival

* Launched a new people-focused brand campaign

This film is aimed at clients, but also recruits, press, analysts, and anyone who believes that the problems facing society are fixable with the right tools in hand.

More than anything else in the 30 years since our company was founded, this film has actualized our brand purpose, motivated our employees, and gotten the attention of the general public:

- For years, we’ve been trying to get a company profile on CNBC. Never Done landed us a 25-minute dedicated segment, along with editorial coverage by Adweek, Variety, and The New Yorker, totaling over $5M in media value.

- The film has explained to global analyst research firms why our approach to digital business transformation is so impactful, earning us a #1 vendor assessment ranking from IDC MarketScape.

- Never Done and its portrayal of the positive impact of digital business transformation on people’s lives has been featured on Constellation Research’s Disrupt TV, reaching as many as 6.1 thousand live viewers.

- The film has brought together our workforce for 28 in-person screenings on four continents.

In the US, compared with Europe and other parts of the world, there is a very thin social safety net. Vulnerable people are made even more so by tenuous access to housing, food, healthcare, and other essentials. And so, it’s a big deal when our federal, state, and local governments takes action to help vulnerable citizens. The thing is, it’s more complicated than the government simply snapping its fingers: actually getting assistance into the hands of those who need it is a nearly insurmountable logistical problem.

In the States, this story is perceived as one of the increasingly rare instances that government was able to rapidly come to the aid of its citizens. It’s optimism in the face of darkness, and it’s all true, there’s no spin. We are proud that the enabler of this government assistance has been the digital systems that Publicis Sapient helped to build.