Marketing Masterclass: Dojo Films on Producing and Maximising Content

Sep 1

What goes into breaking a world record?

Quite a lot, when you’re rowing across the Pacific, but even more so when you’re moonlighting as a documentary crew AND simultaneously raising awareness of ocean pollution. That’s what Ocean Sheroes set out to do last year, with help from production company Dojo Films.

To find out more about how Dojo Films got involved, and to pick his brains about producing and maximizing the value of content, we spoke to founder Sam Ramsden as part of The Marketing 7 series.

Dojo’s Films takes a sustainable approach to the production phase of their content, taking care of pre and post-production but cutting out unnecessary travel by employing localized crews to do the filming. Ocean Sheroes became one of those crews.

A four-strong team, they used Go-Pros to document their successful effort to be the faster women to sail from LA to Hawaii in just 35 days – a Guinness World Record. They also used their cameras to expose the horrendous levels of plastic on the ocean surface, as part of the Seabin Project.

“I think it’s a really cool story and it’s been fun working with those guys on a really value-driven, emotive project” Sam told us. “As a policy, Dojo Films has been trying to find more value-driven projects to work on. When you’re working at pro rata or pro bono it’s quite hard to make things like that happen, so it was really great to meet these guys and get them onboard so we could put it together and let them tell their story.”

It's very much a passion project for Sam. “I started off my career working for an environmental NGO. Then I watched some amazing documentaries and suddenly thought imagine if I could just tell stories.

“You look at the likes of Game Changers and Cowspiracy, Seaspiracy, and how much change those documentaries are making in people. But it’s taken ten years to make my first environmental documentary, so hopefully, there’s a lot more to come.”

And it’s not the only area that Sam wants to see change. From his view as a content producer, he doesn’t think brands are always maximizing the value of what they’re being given.

Sam explains “The conversation that we have a lot, that we get told a lot of people don’t talk about, is using content across different teams in a brand.”

The problem is when content that could be used by multiple teams gets siloed.

“We’ve started to ask, “Ok, have you talked to the sales team about how they may be able to use this, have you talked to the fundraising team, the brand, product team, the customer success team?

“Because actually, this could be useful to them if they use a little end card, make a little tweak, or reversion it. My main tip would be to try and cross-pollinate between teams within a brand and see how you can maximize the value of a piece of content.”

So remember the next time a piece of great content lands in your lap – sharing is caring. Don’t let the efforts that went into the production of that content go to waste by not sharing it with other teams, especially if those efforts involved rowing 2700 miles.