My mother told me I could become anything I wanted.
So naturally I decided to become a filmmaker, in a country where almost no films were being made.
I phoned the company that distributed films in South Africa. Eventually someone senior took my call. He told me my chances of making a successful film were, mathematically, 0.01%.
It turns out my mother knew me better than he did.
My first film became the most successful Afrikaans film of its decade. It grew into the first Afrikaans film franchise. I kept going for twenty years: four British features, a film sold to Netflix USA (the first by a South African filmmaker), campaigns that sold 176,000 cinema tickets in 44 cinemas, an event that sold 35,000 tickets in two weeks, a brand film with Stephen Fry, a broadcast delivered five days after the brief.
Then, one day, I stopped.
Something about the world had started to bother me.
I kept meeting people who told themselves stories that kept them small. "I was born this way." "People like me don't do that." Then they built a cage out of those sentences and lived inside it.
I know we do not all start the race from the same place. Some people face obstacles others will never fully understand.
But I believe this too: whatever you repeatedly tell yourself, good or bad, you will eventually find evidence that you are right.
If a kid from South Africa could build a life in Hollywood, Vancouver and London on the back of the films he made and the stories he told himself, then the question that now runs my working life is simple:
What would the world look like if more people told themselves better stories, and then built their lives, businesses, and products from that place?
Campaign Producers is my answer.
We find the story that is true about you and your company. We turn it into a format that becomes your company’s signature. Then we build campaigns around the stories your customers love until your company owns its market’s attention instead of renting it.
Let’s make money from who you become when you tell yourself better stories. It’s a better way to live, one where selling becomes an organic extension of who you are.
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