5 movies for marketers and brand managers

If you work in advertising or marketing, you know filmmakers usually get our industry painfully wrong.

There’s little to be learned from advertising-themed movies that we can apply to our work. So, after being asked to share five must-see movies for marketers, I decided to focus on movies that have nothing to do with marketing.

Instead, I looked at movies that contain kernels of truth about human behavior, our relationship with changing technology, and the creative process, because understanding these things is vital to marketers.

Here are the big five:

“Her” (2013)

Science fiction films and their visions of the future are usually accompanied by preposterous action plots.

This movie’s vision seems completely plausible. It takes the way we interact with technology today, imagines advances in that technology and looks at how human behavior will adjust.

People walk around talking to themselves in public (or technically, talking to their computer operating systems) devoid of self-consciousness. A man falling in love with his artificial intelligence operating system—the premise of “Her”—strikes me as a behavior we could find ourselves dealing with in our lifetimes, and sooner than we might think.