Editor’s note: This article is presented in partnership with the Holland Marketing Alliance and their award-winning “Holland. The Original Cool” travel series. You can watch their new short film, “The Tale of Kat & Dog: A Holland Cool Movie” here:
That’s changing thanks to groups like the Holland Marketing Alliance — comprised of NBTC Holland Marketing, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Schiphol Airport, and Amsterdam Marketing — which recently hired Brooklyn-based creative agency Mustache to produce an original short film about Holland. The result is no commercial, but a hilarious and heartfelt mini-movie titled “The Tale of Kat and Dog: A Holland Cool Movie,” a story about a young woman’s trip to Amsterdam taken in honor of her late brother. As more and more companies embrace video content as a means of engaging with consumers, the number of opportunities for short films is only increasing.
“Brands are getting more and more devoted to the art of filmmaking,” Rosina Shiliwala, Director, North America, Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions, told IndieWire in an interview. “We all want to consume great and interesting content, so it’s wonderful that brands and marketers are taking responsibility for that and thinking more deeply about how they can inspire and delight people and get them interested in topics they might not have ever had an interest in.”
During a three-year period, Shiliwala worked with Mustache to produce 17 short videos and webisodes about various aspects of Dutch culture. One of the videos Mustache helped produce attracted more than one million views in its first two weeks, press coverage in more than 100 media outlets and won the advertising and marketing industry’s Adrian Award.
“We intended it for the U.S. market, but people were tweeting us from Poland, South Africa and Brazil saying they wanted to go to Holland after watching this video,” Shiliwala said. “That’s how we decided for the subsequent years to create more video content exploring different places all through the country.”
For their final collaboration with Mustache, the Holland Marketing Alliance decided to produce “The Tale of Kat and Dog,” as the fans of their previous videos were expecting something new, exciting and different. “This short film is such a great depiction of what Holland is all about, not just as a pure travel destination but really in terms of Dutch culture,” Shiliwala said. “For us as a tourism board, storytelling is core to what we do, because our job is to inspire people about our destination.”
If “The Tale of Kat and Dog” is any indication, more and more original short films are going create an opportunity for both filmmakers and brands that want to use quality storytelling to help get messages across. “At the end of the day,” said Schiliwala, “we really want to serve our audience of consumers and deliver value, not just a commercial.”
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