How Do You Measure the Success of a Film?
It’s a question I get asked quite a lot.
“How will we know if the film has worked?”
It’s a perfectly reasonable question.
If a business is going to spend £10,000, £20,000 or considerably more on a film, it should want to know what it’s getting back.
The difficulty is that the question often gets asked too late.
The film has been made.
It’s been signed off.
Everybody likes it.
It’s gone on the website and LinkedIn.
And then somebody asks:
“So… how are we going to measure whether this has actually worked?”
By then, we’ve made the job considerably harder.
Because I think the best time to decide how we’re going to measure the success of a film is before we’ve made it.
It comes back to the job
I wrote recently that a film should have a job.
I think measurement starts there too.
If we can’t explain what we want a film to change, it’s very difficult to decide whether it succeeded.
“We want lots of people to see it” isn’t really a job.
“We want more people to understand what we do” is getting closer.
“We’re losing good candidates because they don’t understand what it’s actually like to work here” gives us something much more useful.
Now we can start asking what success might look like.
Perhaps it’s more applications from the right kind of candidates.
Perhaps it’s fewer unsuitable applications.
Perhaps candidates arrive at interview with a much better understanding of the company.
Perhaps the recruitment team notices that the conversations they’re having have changed.
Those things won’t necessarily give us a lovely graph to put in a presentation.
But they might tell us far more about whether the film worked.
Views tell us something. Just not everything.
I don’t have a problem with views.
They’re useful.
If nobody watches the film, it’s going to have a fairly difficult time changing anything.
But I’ve never been convinced that a large number automatically means success.
Imagine we make a film for an organisation employing 500 people.
Its purpose is to help those employees understand a major change within the business.
Four hundred of them watch it.
In internet terms, 400 views is nothing.
For that organisation, it could be enormously important.
Now imagine another film gets 100,000 views on social media.
Wonderful.
But what if most of those people weren’t the audience we needed to reach?
What if they watched for ten seconds and carried on scrolling?
What if nothing changed?
Which film was more successful?
I’d take the 400 useful views.
I think about three things
When I’m trying to understand whether a film has worked, I find it useful to think about three fairly simple things.
Attention. Understanding. Action.
Not every film needs to achieve all three, and they won’t always be measured in the same way.
But they give us somewhere sensible to start.
Attention
Did the people we needed to reach actually see it?
Notice I didn’t say:
How many people saw it?
Those are different questions.
Ten thousand random views might be less valuable than 200 views from exactly the people we needed to reach.
That’s why audience matters long before we start talking about distribution.
Who needs to see this?
Where are they likely to encounter it?
Why would they bother watching?
Without attention, nothing else happens.
But attention on its own isn’t enough.
Understanding
This is where things become more interesting to me.
Did somebody understand something after watching the film that they didn’t understand before?
Perhaps they finally understood why your product costs more.
Perhaps a patient understood what was going to happen during a treatment and felt less frightened.
Perhaps employees understood why a business was changing direction.
Perhaps customers saw the expertise behind something they’d previously assumed was quite simple.
This is particularly important when we’re trying to make invisible value visible.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that people haven’t heard of you.
They simply haven’t understood enough of what makes you valuable.
That change in understanding can be difficult to put into a spreadsheet.
It doesn’t make it unimportant.
Action
Then there’s the most obvious question.
Did anybody do anything differently?
Did they enquire?
Apply?
Buy?
Donate?
Book?
Share?
Ask a different question?
Have a conversation that wasn’t happening before?
Sometimes that action can be measured very clearly.
Website analytics can tell us whether somebody followed a particular journey. Enquiry systems can tell us where leads originated. Recruitment teams can compare applications. Campaigns can use specific landing pages or calls to action.
Tools such as Google Analytics can certainly help us understand some of that behaviour.
But we need to be careful.
Because not everything that matters leaves a digital footprint.
“We saw your film”
I’ve heard variations of that sentence many times over the years.
A client tells me somebody mentioned the film during a meeting.
A salesperson says prospects seem to understand the business before the first conversation.
Someone gets in touch because a story connected with them.
An employee says, “I didn’t know we did that.”
A patient feels reassured.
A family understands something they previously found confusing.
Those moments are difficult to attribute neatly.
You can’t always draw a straight line between somebody watching a film and something happening three months later.
Human beings don’t behave like that.
We see things.
We remember things.
We talk to people.
We forget things.
We encounter them again.
Eventually we make decisions.
Film can be part of that process without being solely responsible for the result.
And I think we should be careful about pretending otherwise.
What about return on investment?
This is where the conversation usually gets more difficult.
Because understandably, businesses want to know:
“If we spend £15,000 on this, what will we get back?”
Sometimes we can answer that quite directly.
If a film forms part of a clearly defined sales campaign and we can track enquiries, conversion and revenue, we may be able to make a reasonable connection between investment and return.
But sometimes the job isn’t immediate sales.
What is the financial value of attracting one exceptional employee?
What is the value of helping a patient understand their treatment?
What is the value of explaining a complicated piece of research clearly enough that people actually engage with it?
What is the value of helping customers understand why your business is different?
Those things have value.
They’re just not always easily converted into a tidy ROI percentage.
I’d rather be honest about that than invent numbers that make everybody feel comfortable.
Decide before we make anything
This is why the measurement conversation belongs near the beginning.
Before production, I want us to be able to complete this sentence:
“We’ll know this film is working if…”
That’s a deceptively useful sentence.
We’ll know it’s working if candidates mention it during interviews.
We’ll know it’s working if enquiries become better informed.
We’ll know it’s working if people spend longer exploring the service afterwards.
We’ll know it’s working if staff understand the change we’re trying to make.
We’ll know it’s working if patients tell us they feel better prepared.
We’ll know it’s working if sales conversations stop getting stuck on the same misunderstanding.
Now we have something to look for.
Better still, sometimes we can establish where we are before the film exists.
If we’re currently receiving 50 applications but only five are suitable, that’s useful to know.
If customers repeatedly ask the same question, record it.
If people leave a particular webpage without taking the next step, measure it.
If the sales team constantly has to explain the same thing, ask them about it.
Then, after the film has been working for a while, we have something meaningful to compare.
That’s considerably more useful than publishing it and hoping the numbers go up.
Success might actually mean smaller numbers
This is something I think businesses occasionally overlook.
Success doesn’t always mean more.
A recruitment film might reduce the total number of applications while dramatically improving their quality.
A sales film might reduce the number of enquiries while increasing the number from people who genuinely understand what you offer.
A film explaining a complex service might discourage people for whom the service isn’t appropriate.
Those could all be successful outcomes.
Sometimes better communication doesn’t make the funnel bigger.
It makes it better.
The measurement should follow the problem
This is really the point.
There isn’t one metric that tells us whether a film has succeeded.
Views might matter.
Watch time might matter.
Enquiries might matter.
Sales might matter.
Applications might matter.
Feedback might matter.
A conversation in a meeting room might matter.
The right measurement depends entirely on what wasn’t happening before we made the film.
Which brings us back to where I think filmmaking should begin.
Not with cameras.
Not with duration.
Not even with the story.
But with the problem we’re trying to solve.
Because if we understand that clearly enough, we can decide what we want the film to do.
And if we know what we want it to do, we have a much better chance of answering the question:
Did it work?