Director, Fleur Fortuné, & Cossette Toronto lift the bar for branded content sky high

Black. Tense. Dystopian. Gripping. Drama. The film, created by Cossette Toronto for Canadian financial tech start-up, Koho, and made by director, Fleur Fortuné, was launched in July. It’s so right for Australia at this time, with its royal commission into banking set against a backdrop of ads that promise banks are your friends. It’s also so right as an example of how branded content should be.

In the thirteen-minute branded film, banks are seen as the harvesters of people’s dreams, grabbing in military fashion at both their money and their aspirations. It was an extremely brave campaign by Koho. An inordinately ambitious campaign idea by Cossette. And a magnificent film by Fleur Fortuné and production company, Division, who had to inject into it the senses of evil, injustice, powerlessness, despair and finally, rebellion and hope.

There are dozens of little sci-fi references, including cues from A Clockwork Orange, Poltergeist and Apple’s 1984. The film’s attention to detail is remarkable.

It also had to walk the hair’s-width wire of credibility for Koho. It had to be seen as a metaphor, not a parody. Its exaggeration of banks’ behaviour had to be seen as representative, not unrealistic. The aim of the film was to promote Koho’s alternative banking, built on an app and a reloadable card without fees. (In fact, the company makes its money from merchant transaction fees on its card rather than by charging customers.)

Lastly, it had to take hold of people’s attention and not let go. It does. It’s branded content at its best, and there’s precious little of that.

The full thirteen-minute video debuted at Toronto’s Fringe Festival before it ran on YouTube, Instagram’s IGTV, and Snapchat. A 120-second cutdown ran in Canadian cinemas from August.