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The final chord of "the Blackfish effect" has finally resounded, with a stunning and
unprecedented corporate policy announcement from SeaWorld.
In January 2013, the documentary Blackfish premiered at the Sundance Film Festival,
telling the story "about Tilikum, a performing killer whale that killed several people
while in captivity," according to the official film synopsis. Three years latera period
marked by sustained activism, multi-platform distribution and unrelenting media
coverageSeaWorld officially announced on March 17, 2016, that it will officially end
its orca breeding program and end orca shows at all of its theme parks.
The decision didn't happen overnight, and neither did the social impact. The pathway to
change was paved over three years of ongoing pressure, sparked by an emotional story
told in an intimate, authentic way unique to documentary storytelling. The signs of social
impact appeared quickly. In December 2014, about a year and a half after the film's July
2013 theatrical premiere, the stock price of SeaWorld had already declined by 60 percent.
A California state lawmaker proposed legislation in April 2014 that would have banned
California aquatic parks from featuring orcas in performances. Although the proposed
law was unsuccessful, it garnered national media coverage and elevated the issue.
How and why did Blackfish inspire this kind of impact over a three-year period of time?
From a vantage point at the intersection of documentary storytelling, grassroots activism,
multi-platform distribution and media strategy, the explanation can be broken down into
six key elements:
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2) Strategic Distribution
Following the Sundance Film Festival premiere, the filmmakers licensed the US rights
forBlackfish to Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films, not only for a theatrical run, but for
TV distribution, a move that has become increasingly strategic for documentary
filmmakers in the contemporary marketplace. In at least one study about contemporary
documentary viewers, watching at home on TV is the top way to access documentaries,
and streaming is increasingly crucial (although avid documentary enthusiasts are also
willing to find documentaries in theaters). For Blackfish, in terms of a broad-appeal TV
outlet with aneven-handed ideological audience composition, a premiere on CNN was not
only a mass-viewer distribution strategy, but one that fired up a synergistic publicity and
news media machine. Not only did the network use its news platform to air stories about
orcas in captivity, the network published an interview with a SeaWorld spokesperson the
week of the premiere, assuredly contributing to viewer and media anticipation. CNN was
rewarded for its publicity strategy with a ratings sweep on the October 23, 2013, premiere
date; according to The New York Times, "The channel swept the ratings among every
group under 55 years old. That meant not only the group that is most often sold to news
advertisers, viewers ages 25 to 54, but also the younger age groups used for sales in
entertainment programming." The network continued to keep the story on the agenda by
illustrating multiple sides of the issue, including at least one opinion piece criticizing the
film's lack of focus on marine conservation in aquatic parks. Following the CNN
broadcast, in a near-perfect multifaceted distribution strategy primed for
visibility,Blackfish was released on Netflix in December 2013, which enabled the film to
leverage the considerable publicity and buzz already generated by the steady media
coverage throughout every distribution phase.
3) Media Coverage
The film's profile increased as SeaWorld and the filmmakers engaged in a prolonged
public relations battle, in addition to the media coverage already garnered by activist
stunts from PETA. In the days leading up to the film's theatrical distribution in July
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5) Emotion
The story evoked empathy, an emotional response that is an evidence-based powerful
driver of attitude shift and intended action in response to storytelling. Blackfish focused
on a specific named orca living in captivity, Tilikum, as the key character, a deliberate
narrative choice made by the filmmaker. She did not lead with or rely on statistics, and it
turns out, this really matters in a story's ability to spark emotion and action. Although
research in the area of narrative persuasion focuses primarily on human victims of
suffering, according to psychologist Paul Slovic, "When it comes to eliciting compassion,
the identified individual victim, with a face and a name, has no peerBut the face need
not even be human to motivate powerful intervention." This core notion of empathy and
an individual story can help to explain why the story evoked such resonance from a
narrative perspective. Tactics alone won't do the trick.
6) Measurable
Capturing the measurable social impact of a documentary is highly individualized,
withvarying research methods and approaches that work. The best method depends on
either the goal of the project or simply a hypothesis and a deep understanding about what
kind of impact the film may have on the issue, based on an understanding of where the
issue resides in media or public discoursefrom changing personal behavior to
instituting policy change and beyond. In the case of Blackfish, the intersection of both
organic and organized social action, constant media coverage, and accessible financial
data from a publicly traded company provided some metrics of correlational impact. The
readily available metrics emerged steadily, from mid-2014 media reports about
SeaWorld's financial trouble to a Washington Post analysis from December 2014, which
detailed a steady stock-price decline throughout the film's life cycle from theatrical to
streaming distribution in 2013. The ongoing metrics of doom offered encouragement for
the grassroots efforts. Each publicly available signal of decline, from attendance to stock
price, offered a new opportunity for the ongoing SeaWorld-Blackfish media story to
renew itself and keep the issue in the public and journalistic spotlight.
Can the film claim a final causal connection to the reported financial misfortune and
sustained public outcry and the final SeaWorld announcement? In the same way that
much social change can't be unequivocally attributed to a particular and exacting turn of
events, not precisely. But causal connection is an artificially high bar. It's hard to deny
the role of the "Blackfish effect" in the steady negative impact that culminated in a
dramatic corporate policy change.
Considering documentary film and TV's increased role as advocacy-infused, emotional
investigative storytelling, as well as the increased ability for audiences to watch
documentaries on places like Netflix, CNN Films, HBO, PBS and other outlets,
individuals and organizations working at the intersection of social justice and media are
right to learn from this example.
Caty Borum Chattoo is a documentary film producer, media strategist and researcher,
professor and co-director of the Center for Media & Social Impact at American
University's School of Communication in Washington, DC. She was a juror for the
international 2014 BRITDOC Documentary Impact Awards, which honored Blackfish as
a film that demonstrated positive social impact.