Directed by Casey Suchan and Tim Cawley
Runtime: 1 hour, 17 minutes
Available digitally March 30

by Stacey Osbeck, Staff Writer

MakeSHIFT, a feature documentary from directors Casey Suchan and Tim Cawley, totes itself as the history of how new technology pushed advertisers to transform in the last 20+ years.  However, a byproduct of that, since marketing permeates our day to day, is that this film tracks the history of us, regular people and how the lives we live have rapidly changed. 

In the 80s, when a TV show took a break all the channels simultaneously had commercials.  If you got up to crank that dial all the way through to 13 to check your 12 options (there was no channel 1) you would only see other commercials.  Of course they were fun and catchy with earworm jingles, but either way advertisers had your time and they had your attention.   

Then came the Internet.  As this World Wide Web fad grew people wanted to get into it.  Many struggled to grasp what it was exactly.  They went to computer stores saying they wanted to ‘buy the Internet’.  Advertisers at first only came up with banner ads, also not sure what to do with it or where it could go.      Tivo arrived with the ability to skip commercials.  Suddenly, new technology had put advertisers on warning.   

Thanksgiving weekend 1989, Americans started tuning in to watch home movies on TV.  It’s hard to imagine, but to submit a video people had to put a VCR tape into an envelope and send it via mail.  Tapes were vetted and once producers made their decisions, we got to see the few that made the cut.  (America, America, this is you!)  We viewed home movies, but only after a curation process whittled it down.  How could we enjoy more variety of this sort without Hollywood inserting itself as middleman? 

For myself personally, I went to film school.  No reputable film fest would take an entry shot on video.  So you shot on film, which was expensive, and submitted to multiple festivals which wasn’t cheap.  Then you’d hope you’d get a screening and if you did, pray to get some traction among the hundreds of other shorts selected.  The question that kept circulating at film school was when all that is said and done and all that money spent, when it comes to a short what do you do with it?   

In 2005, something simple and revolutionary answered both questions.  YouTube was basically you doing you in front of the world.  MakeSHIFT shows the very first video ever uploaded entitled ‘Me at the zoo’.  It wasn’t a scientist or elephant expert talking.  Just a guy at the San Diego Zoo looking at the elephants and sharing his experience with anyone who cared to watch. In 2007, Steve Jobs announced, “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”  And again, a seismic shift occurred with the iPhone prodding marketing teams to meet us, and our attention, where it was.    

 One of the best aspects of makeSHIFT is the specificity.  It doesn’t just trudge along a time line making broad strokes.  It takes some insider, behind the scenes deep dives.  For example, it explored Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,’ which was a far more involved campaign than I realized.  This type of marketing sprouted up from a sort of panic that the days of people being locked into 12 channels and commercials syncing up were over.  Advertisers had to make content we truly wanted to see and share.

Because these major shifts in technology are shared experiences, naturally a great deal of the events I lived through and remember.  But this doc still had plenty of new and enlightening details.  The perspective shift also added another layer of interest.  We are participants if we so choose.  For advertisers, their professional lives depend on our engagement.  Except for anyone who’s lived under a rock for the last 20 years, makeSHIFT is informative, fun and completely worth your attention.