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Anatomy of The Blackfish Effect

BY CATY BORUM CHATTOO


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Courtesy of Dogwoof
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:

1) Amplified Community and Sustained Grassroots Activism


The issue of animal rights is supported by an existing and vocal community of advocates,
and the opportunity was ripe for cultivating new activism by the time Blackfish came
along. The Oceanic Preservation Society, the organization elevated by the 2009 Academy
Award-winning documentary The Cove, publicly and immediately
supported Blackfishthrough its own communication channels, including posting and
distributing an online open letter to support the film, and joining with the filmmakers in
a public statement. The major contribution of the grassroots infrastructure to
the Blackfish movement came from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals);
in fact, the intersection between the film and the organization's activism amplified the
ongoing impact dramatically. In an expansion of its own efforts targeting SeaWorld as far
back as 1998, PETA launched an aggressive renewed campaign that combined physical
protest and digital social action. After the film's major premiere on CNN, donations to
PETAformerly on the declinespiked, enabling the group to finance continued
grassroots and media stunts well after the film's premiere. (In 2015, as reported by
the Los Angeles Times, PETA reported a budget of $4.5 million after a deficit of more
than $250,000 just two years earlier, as well as $43 million in contributions in 2015, a 30
percent increase.)
With the new public spotlight well beyond the animal welfare community, PETA
continued to leverage the momentum of the film at every possible moment in the
distribution and media cycle. Among its public actions during the past three
"BlackfishEffect" years, PETA organized anti-SeaWorld actions at the 2014 Rose Bowl
Paradecovered by major media outlets, including CNN, Blackfish's
broadcaster, Huffington Postand othersand financed an ad campaign about orca
breeding (an angle covered in the film). PETA's website, SeaWorldofHurt.com, continued
the pressure and momentum, and the public followedfrom about "30 visitors per day
before the Blackfish broadcast premiere to more than 1 million in 2015.
In short, the film wasn't released into a cultural or grassroots vacuum. It fell into a prime
spot with a social-change infrastructure ready to leverage a strategic distribution strategy
and well-produced story. In its seminal 2008 report, "Assessing Creative Media's Social
Impact," The Fledgling Fund notably wrote about this crucial elementdeeply
understanding the social issue and a movement in order to understand where and how a
story might be positioned to fuel change. The intersection between
SeaWorld, Blackfishand PETA is a textbook example.
Adding to the well-orchestrated and vocal NGO activism, celebrities' tweets and support
for the film engaged their own fans and followers, which raised and deepened the level of
public awareness about the story. Combining the multiplying factor of celebrity
endorsements and public attentiongreatly enabled by a smart distribution strategy
allowed the story to reach outside the animal welfare community. It stretched well
beyond the choir. The outcry became louder and louder, impossible to ignore or dismiss
as insular, niche activism.

Courtesy of Dogwoof
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

2013,SeaWorld's PR firm released a statement that spotlighted claims of


misrepresentations in the film. Film critics and other media outlets picked up the
SeaWorld statement and the filmmakers' response, which amplified the coverage and
raised public awareness of the film. In a New York Times article prompted by the
exchange, writer Michael Cieply mused, "The exchange is now promising to test just how
far a business can, or should, go in trying to disrupt the powerful negative imagery that
comes with the rollout of documentary exposs." Well after the theatrical premiere, the
campaigns continued, with the filmmakers responding publicly on the movie's website in
January 2014. The PR war magnified the media coverage and the public's interest in the
story and crucially, not only during the theatrical distribution period in July 2013, but
also during its TV premiere in October and streaming release at the end of the year.
(Read SeaWorld's statement, "Blackfish: The Truth about the Movie," here.)
4) Social Action Embedded in the Story
Social action campaigns around documentary films can vary from the filmmaking teams'
intentional strategies to organic responses from viewers to a story. In an ideal strategic
scenario, the organic viewer response to the story is matched by an intentional campaign,
if it exists. But in either case, the call-to-action efforts tend to succeed when the action is
clearand when it is conveyed by the film's story itself (not only the marketing materials
around it). In stories with institutional or complex solutions, articulating a call to action
can be challenging, but offering concrete individual actions works. In the case
of Blackfish, although the social action directives were not directly articulated or
advanced by the filmmakers, the identification of Tilikum's captive home was clearly
embedded in the story itself. The audience understood SeaWorld's role, and the film's
advocacy story about orcas in captivity issued a clarion call. (It's important to note that in
an early interview, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite did not advocate shutting down
SeaWorld but instead discussed other ways to help captive orcas. Of the final SeaWorld
announcement, though,Cowperthwaite said, "The fact that SeaWorld is doing away with
orca breeding marks truly meaningful change.")

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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.

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