Why I am making this
A broker emailed me last year offering to put my own company in a documentary series on an American news site that had long faded into obscurity. A package of films, a hub page, a press release and a paid campaign across tier one publishers.
The email was well written, and it wanted a decision quickly. I did not take it. What bothered me was not the price. It was that the thing being sold would not have been watched by anyone. A ninety-second reel of me walking through an office looking purposeful, on a page nobody scrolls to, forgotten in a fortnight. The founders I know have better stories than that, and they are being sold the wrong product because it is the only product on offer.
So 52 Icons is the version I wanted to buy and could not find. Nine minutes, not ninety seconds. A register borrowed from natural history, because patient observation holds an audience where a sizzle reel does not. Fifty-two films across a year, and thirteen companies per habitat, so each plate is worth something to the person holding it.
The things I will not do are in the same spirit. No audience figures I have not measured. No award badges. Every factual claim in every film is checked against a source before it is spoken, and every claim that belongs to the company is attributed to the company in those words.
Jeremy LevittExecutive Producer, Fifty Two Icons
Take a plate