A fellow Renegade recently sent me an interesting article from the September 06 issue of Fast Company called Moving Pictures. Okay, so I’m a little behind on my reading–who isn’t? Anyway, the article is about Jeff Skoll, founder of Participant Productions, the film company behind Good Night, and Good Luck, Syriana, and An Inconvenient Truth. Jeff made a lot of dough and decided like many moguls before him to get into the picture business. But unlike his predecessors, Jeff took an entirely different approach. This paragraph from Fast Company sums it up:
Participant Productions is the first film company to be founded on a mission of social impact through storytelling. But it’s no charity. It’s a pro-social commercial operation, a hybrid emblematic of the social-entrepreneurship movement. “Ultimately, the goal here is to build a brand around social relevance in media,” Skoll says. He staked the company $100 million for its first three years; every script is evaluated equally on its creative and commercial potential and its ability to boost awareness of one of six issues: the environment, health, human rights, institutional responsibility, peace and tolerance, and social and economic equity. For each project, Participant execs with nonprofit backgrounds reach out to public-sector partners, from the ACLU to the Sierra Club, for their opinions. If those partners don’t think they can build an effective action campaign around the film, it’s a no-go. At the same time, “It can’t be good-for-you spinach, or it’s not going to work,” says Participant’s president, Ricky Strauss, a former production and advertising exec at Columbia and Sony Pictures Entertainment. “The more mainstream the story, the more opportunity to make an impact.”
This is a stellar example of marketing for good. The movies entertain and inspire when conventional wisdom said you couldn’t do both and still make money. Skoll has proved once again that the more people say that you can’t do something, the more you ought to think about trying.