Content Director at PatientPoint | Executive Creative Director | Freelance Strategist | Brand Marketer | Storyteller for Big & Small Screen | Copywriter
Samantha Charlip writes for audiences who can leave at any second. She drops them into a person’s story first and lets the message surface from it.
“Many marketing teams think if you can string a series of events together, you’ve made a story,” says Samantha Charlip. “But that’s not a story, it’s just a series of facts. What defines a story is change.”
The belief she argues against is the one that underscores most branded videos: assemble the facts, state the claim, run the logo. Charlip has spent nearly two decades writing for audiences who can leave whenever they like, in television, film, and brand studios at Novartis, TIME and NBCUniversal.
Samantha Charlip is Content Director, Physician-Facing Programs at PatientPoint, and a screenwriter with an MFA in dramatic writing from Tisch’s Dramatic Writing program at New York University.
Change Is the Test a Brand Film Has to Pass
“Brand creatives state the brand message up front and then spend the rest of the video telling us why we should care,” Charlip says. “Film and TV training does the opposite, you show audiences why they should care by dropping them into a human story that the brand is the enabler or facilitator of and let the brand’s message surface in the audience’s mind as a consequence of that story. That’s the difference between showing and telling.”
One pharma brief reached her as a simple idea: a patient takes a drug to treat his prostate cancer. She sent back a different story, based on the man’s lived experience: A man who had been painfully shy his entire life, so much so that he was voted the shyest kid in his high school graduating class. Then came a cancer diagnosis. Treatment gave him more time, and the time gave him a purpose he had never imagined, standing up in front of other men with the disease and encouraging them to ask for help and stop suffering in silence. From shyest in his class to proud and vocal advocate, all because of the blessing of more time thanks to that cancer drug. Same illness, same drug, very different story.
“Stories are about a character experiencing a challenge and changing in the process of meeting that challenge,” Charlip says. “A character needs to end the story in a different place than where they started. Without this, what you have is a book report.”
The bill for the other version arrives before the brand does. “If audiences sense there is no driving conflict early on – meaning nothing for your character to change in response to – they will disengage before the brand is even mentioned, meaning no one is staying to see you deliver on your value prop,” she says.
The Making of a Diamond, Told in an Athlete’s Voice
The Diamond Producers Association arrived at NBCUniversal with a problem – engaging millennials and cutting through the clutter created by synthetic diamonds – and the 2018 Winter Olympics as the platform. “I knew we couldn’t just promote the benefits of natural diamonds themselves, which are often associated with mining in war zones, and that we had to find a way to personify DPA’s Real is Rare message for millennials, who are routinely noted to value authenticity in advertising above all else,” Charlip says.
So she built the work on a dual metaphor: the pressure and commitment it takes to become an athlete on the rise, and the pressure and commitment it takes for a diamond to form. She conceived the idea and wrote the narratives to read as an athlete’s inner monologue, with the viewer discovering only later that the monologue is actually chronicling the making of a gem. Three films ran, figure skating, hockey and snowboarding, placed against contextually aligned Olympic sport and across NBCU sports and lifestyle social feeds.
A third-party study measured the campaign on a pre and post recruit-to-view basis, with purchase consideration among exposed viewers moving from a 52 percent baseline to 63 percent.
“Viewers loved it, but did express that the players wearing jewelry during a high-contact sport felt staged, so my learning from that is to consider all aspects of authenticity, not just the storyline, when crafting content,” Charlip says.
The method also has to survive the brief. On her first campaign in pharma, the patient was an older woman whose injection schedule had ended the international travel she and her husband had done in their youth, until a medication with a lighter dosing schedule gave it back.
A marketing strategy partner wanted that renewed travel excitement shot as staged re-enactments. “Our patient was an older woman who had trouble even speaking, let alone acting, and I knew the re-enactments would look staged and would tank our credibility as storytellers,” Charlip says. She had let it pass in earlier meetings, aware that the first strategy partner of a brand new department is a relationship worth protecting.
Finally, on a one-to-one call, she argued for stock footage of the destinations instead, and staked the working relationship on it: “all I was asking for was for her to suspend her disbelief and trust me on this one thing, even if she wouldn’t understand it until she saw it for herself.” She told the partner if it failed, they could revert to re-enactments and the strategist could ask never to work with her again. She had to see the finished piece to believe it. And when she did, she became a forever supporter.
What a Marketing Leader Can Steal From a Screenwriter’s Story Test
There is no proprietary system on offer here. What Charlip runs is an order of operations applied to the brief before anyone writes a script, and the order is the whole of it.
Find the story that aligns with your claim first. The first pass over a brief looks for the human story already inside it: a value proposition which could be embodied by a documentary participant whose lived experience carries it without stating it, or a claim which can be earned through a fictional arc.
Run the change test before production, not in the edit. If the character ends the piece where they started, the fix is structural, and no amount of craft in post converts it.
Cast the product as the enabler. Its job in the script is to make the change possible rather than to narrate it.
Then audit authenticity in every layer, not the storyline alone. A piece of wardrobe can still tarnish a strong story, as the diamond films risked doing.
“The goal is not to beat them into submission with the message, but to hook them with a human story and let them experience the message themselves,” Charlip says.
How to Build a Content Studio That Survives a Change of Hands
Charlip has helped co-found four content studios, at Vevo, NBCUniversal, TIME and Novartis, and the sequence starts before the first hire. “The biggest challenge is to first define who you are in the marketplace. There are hundreds of branded content teams all fighting for the same business. What makes you special?” she says. Editorial voice, audience segmentation, distribution model, custom partnerships, an event nobody else owns: one of them has to be something no competitor can offer the same way. Team, go-to-market materials and production process follow that answer rather than preceding it.
Then the studio goes to market and the work turns iterative. “Each project should be a masterclass in how to do better. And post-mortems are so important for that reason, though so few studios seem to mandate them,” Charlip says. After a few proofs of concept, everything gets written down: content framework, tone and strategy, editorial and video guidelines, the operating manual, calendars and file templates, so the studio runs no matter who takes the reins.
When it comes to that final stage, one move belongs ahead of all of them, and she learned that by skipping it. In a recent pharma role, her team built an agency and internal studio partnership strategy and learned along the way that cross-functional partners were not totally clear on how to execute because while they had described the process, they’d never truly articulated it with documentation.
“Right away we began to see tension, and suddenly it didn’t feel like what we were selling was going to be possible to deliver on,” she says. The team stepped back, documented the process internally, and recirculated it, dramatically improving both the process and the relationship. “If what you’ve sold is not clear and not what you actually deliver on, you lose that partner’s trust immediately and once lost, it can be one of the hardest things to build back.”
And to the marketing leader convinced their brand has no story worth telling, she makes the same case she made on that fateful phone call with her marketing strategy partner:
“Your message is hardly ever the problem. Nine times out of ten, it’s how you’re communicating it.”
Who Is Samantha Charlip, the Dramatic Writer Inside the Brand Brief?
Samantha Charlip is Content Director, Physician-Facing Programs at PatientPoint, based in New York, and a screenwriter and playwright with an MFA in dramatic writing from New York University. She leads end-to-end content strategy for the company’s physician-facing ecosystem, overseeing editorial and video for physicians, nurse practitioners and office staff at the point of care, and mentoring a team of editors.
Her career in brand storytelling began in digital media at A&E Television, where she was lead creative on more than ten programme minisites including Hoarders, The Glades and Obsessed, work recognized with a Promax Gold award for the Hoarders website and two W3 Silver awards, for copywriting and for entertainment website.
Producing roles at Turner and at Viacom’s Spike TV followed, then branded content at Vevo, then four years at NBCUniversal as Director of Creative Development for the NBCU Content Studio and Creative Director in Creative Partnerships. She spent two years at TIME as creative and brand strategist for Red Border, the studio named Branded Content Studio of the Year at the Digiday Media Awards during her tenure, and two more at Novartis as Creative Director of Editorial Planning in its Content Lab. Across those seats she has helped co-found four content studios, at Vevo, NBCUniversal, TIME and Novartis, and has created content for P&G, Kia, Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Nasdaq, Marriott, Chevy, Toyota, Nordstrom and the Ad Council.
The screenwriting has run alongside all of it. Charlip wrote the Theranos season of Wondery’s American Scandal podcast, was a featured writer on the 2016 Ben 10 reboot for Cartoon Network, and is a two-time finalist at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference. She holds a BFA in writing for publication, performance and media from Pratt Institute.
Two careers, one discipline, and one rule that underscores both of them: find the human inside the story, make sure they end somewhere different from where they started, and hook your audience by adding something genuine to the human experience, so they stick around long enough to care.
Samantha Charlip is Content Director, Physician-Facing Programs at PatientPoint, based in New York, and a screenwriter and playwright with an MFA in dramatic writing from New York University. To connect with Samantha or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile.
