Filmmakers love to surprise their audiences with a plot twist – think Faye Dunaway's shocking confession in "Chinatown" or the gasp-inducing reveal of Keyser Söze in "The Usual Suspects." Trade show exhibitors, on the other hand, are less fond of late-in-the-game bombshells. And nothing could have prepared Creative Dimensions Inc. (CD) for the M. Night Shyamalan-caliber curveball coming its way.

Based in Connecticut, CD's bread and butter is the design and fabrication of branded environments, be they trade show booths, pop-up activations, or TV studio sets. If you've spent an appreciable amount of time on any sports channel, chances are you've see CD's Emmy-winning studio work. In December 2019, the CD team met to plan the company's presence at the upcoming National Association of Broadcasters Show (NAB), which was slated to open in April 2020. As a longtime exhibitor at NAB and other events for broadcasters, CD marketers knew that video elements often play a key role in making impressions on this industry's trade show floors. "A lot of the exhibitors at these shows are video producers who are on the top of their game and making ridiculous promos," says Joel Roy, president of CD. "In the past, we had gone in with some homemade videos that showed our shop and our workers. Attendees liked seeing what we're all about, but we knew we needed to step up our game."

Enter Colony Video Inc., a video-production agency in nearby Rhode Island that specializes in commercial films and had done some work for CD clients. Colony's founders, brothers Brian (executive producer) and Michael (creative director) Fagan, met with Roy and his team to brainstorm ideas for a short film that would play on a large LED wall in the company's NAB booth. "Creative Dimensions knew they didn't want a traditional video with interviews and generic B-roll," says Brian Fagan. "I remember I asked Joel what he wanted people to know about the company and what sets it apart, and he responded, 'We take our clients' pain away.'" That kernel of insight, coupled with Roy's desire to convey his company's humorous and sometimes irreverent culture, sparked an inspired concept: CD is a cure-all for broadcast and trade show professionals' problems, sort of like the supplier equivalent of a miracle of modern pharmacology.

The brothers' initial pitch involved a doctor's office, a patient plagued with broadcasting woes, and a prescription for CD. Roy applauded the idea, but when the budget for sets, actors, etc., came to $50,000, or about twice as much as CD wanted to spend, it was back to R&D for a retool. The Fagans thought why not go for broke on the humor front and satirize the tropes of pharmaceutical commercials, those mainstays of midmorning and prime-time television whose predictable format and style are frequently fodder for SNL parodies. In other words, CD's spoof would position the company as the newest wonder drug – with a lengthy list of side effects read in a monotone voiceover, naturally.

Quiet on Set
Just like in Hollywood, the project had to start with a script. After viewing a few reference videos to familiarize themselves with the tone and content of what they were mocking, the CD team, led by business developer Luke Yost, whipped up a draft that then went through a few revisions to ensure it had spot-on nods to the source material while communicating the company's differentiators. Once the script was finalized, the Fagan brothers went to CD's facility to scout locations. "Joel made it clear that he wanted to show certain parts of the operation and its capabilities, so we built the shot list around those spaces," Brian Fagan says. "Thankfully, the fabrication areas were very conducive to filming – a lot of visual contrast and interesting lighting.

Offices, on the other hand, don't often come across too good on camera because of their fluorescents and bland colors." As to who would star in the film, the Fagans sent CD the headshot and résumé of only one actress: a local talent whom the brothers had worked with before and believed was a perfect fit.

Out of respect for CD's roughly $27,000 budget, Colony Video's filmmakers restricted themselves to just one day of shooting. "Even though this film didn't have a massive budget, it still needed a high production value," Brian Fagan says. "So we brought in a really nimble, dynamic crew that handled everything: camerawork, setting and striking lighting, sound, electric, the works. We also had a small, separate team gather our B-roll to make sure we'd be in and out in one day." Postproduction entailed some relatively easy editing, inserting music from an audio library Colony Video had a license for, and color correcting the film for an A-list aesthetic. To supply the requisite voiceover listing – in this case – the beneficial side effects of using CD, Michael Fagan turned to Voices.com, an online directory of voiceover actors, found a performer with the proper timbre, asked him to provide a few readings of the lines, and then added the final audio track to the film.

A brief synopsis of the one-minute 45-second-long parody goes like this: A frustrated sports marketer, overcome with hatred and contempt for her lackluster broadcast studio, destroys the set with a golf club. Smash cut to CD's facility, and the same marketer, looking quite a bit happier, talks about how the old her was overwhelmed by the complications of staging events and environments. "That's when a friend recommended CD," she says, and goes on to talk about the company's capabilities. The male voiceover then takes over and lists side effects such as "an uptick in happiness" and "85-percent lower stress" while the marketer silently strolls through CD's shop floor and observes employees hard at work. At the end, the marketer is seated in her new-and-improved studio and remarks, "Life is better with Creative Dimensions, where you're not just a customer. You're a friend."

The Show Must Go On
The CD team loved the finished product. "It had the energy, the snark, and the spunkiness that we wanted, and it told a story," Roy says. "The video really communicated who we are as a company, and we couldn't wait to debut it on the show floor." Sizzle Awards judges were equally enamored, calling the film "definitely memorable" and "clever but not cutesy." Then came the plot twist. On March 11, just a little over a month before NAB was to open its doors in Las Vegas, show organizers announced they had to bring down the curtain because of COVID-19. And unlike a darkened movie theater, a pitch-black exhibit hall is no place to premiere a film.

With no show floor on which to debut his brilliant parody, no word of a virtual alternative, and almost no orders coming in from broadcast and trade show clients, Roy was eager to find some way to make the best of things. "Here we were with a pretty expensive video and nothing to do with it because there's no work happening anywhere in the country," he says. But necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and the shutdown gave the CD team good reason to make initial strides in the realm of digital marketing.

Roy admits that the company wasn't exactly a heavy hitter when it came to social media, email outreach, and the like. "Prior to the pandemic, we were basically at a zero," he says. Thankfully, a couple of younger employees came up with a plan to make the film the cornerstone of CD's first email campaign and modest social-media push. Using the online-marketing platform Constant Contact, the CD team uploaded a list of slightly more than 6,000 emails gathered from its client database and attendee directories from past trade shows, drafted an email containing the parody and descriptions of the company's new virtual-event offerings, and clicked "Send." The video was also posted to CD's LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram pages, each of which was at a varying degree of nascency.

This being CD's first concerted effort at digital marketing, Roy wasn't entirely sure what to expect and didn't set any firm goals apart from getting at least 10 unique views from the email campaign. After all, many of the email addresses came from older directories, and at the height of the pandemic everyone and their brother were battling exploding inboxes. Apart of those views, Roy hoped for some social-media attention to keep the company in front of prospects' eyeballs and an uptick in orders from clients needing help with virtual events.

A Box-Office Smash
CD may have been an e-marketing ingenue, but its last-minute pivot generated results on par with a Hollywood heavyweight. The email campaign garnered 92 unique video views, and more than 1,000 LinkedIn members watched it as well. And according to Roy, CD's sales team accounts for 14 orders being placed as a direct result of the video, and the company grossed more than $250,000 in virtual-event sales by the end of the year.

When asked to what he attributes the film's success, Roy says, "I think people like working with professionals whom they can also enjoy, and this video shows that we know how to have fun." As they say in showbiz, "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." So bravo to CD and Colony Video on a hard job done incredibly well.E