Many technically excellent B2B companies and manufacturers struggle to explain why their work matters to non-technical buyers, investors, employees, and acquisition targets. This week, Bill interviews Peter Murphy Lewis, fractional CMO, CEO, and documentarian, to discuss how documentary-style storytelling can help complex companies create trust, strengthen brand differentiation, and communicate value in a way that traditional slide decks, short-form content, and standard rebrands often cannot.

Peter shares how long-form storytelling can support private equity and M&A outcomes by creating narrative control, building a defensible brand moat, improving recruitment and retention, supporting ABM efforts, and generating earned media. This episode explores why documentary marketing is not just a vanity project, but a practical tool for companies looking to explain complexity, de-risk growth, stand out in crowded markets, and protect enterprise value in an AI-saturated environment.

Peter Murphy Lewis is a creator, director, and host of People Worth Caring About, a nationally distributed documentary series and podcast that brings dignity, empathy, and visibility to the people who care for others every day. Through intimate, on-the-ground storytelling, Peter reshapes how society views caregiving by highlighting resilience, compassion, and the quiet heroes behind the scenes. The series has completed three state-based seasons filmed in Nebraska, Ohio, and New Mexico and continues to expand its national footprint. Alongside his work as a filmmaker, Peter brings more than 20 years of experience as a fractional executive leader and CEO advisor, combining strategic leadership with narrative purpose to build media projects that are both meaningful and scalable.

Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half Podcast where we're discovering what's missing in private equity and branding. Many technically excellent companies struggle to explain why their work matters to non-technical buyers. And PE led firms specifically are facing a widening gap around their technical credibility and financial storytelling. Today's focus is on how documentary style storytelling can bridge that gap and drive trust, differentiation, and stronger exit outcomes. I have a very, very special guest today, someone who's been doing documentaries, who's been executing in this space and really developing it as a new category everyone needs to consider. Peter Murphy Lewis is a fractional CMO. He's a storied professional with experience in SaaS and B2B healthcare. And he's a founder who really knows how to tell a story. Peter Murphy Lewis, thank you for joining us today.

Peter: I'm happy to be here. Thanks, Bill.

Bill: So Peter, you've been exploring this new space and just when we think there isn't anything else to do or uncover, there's innovation in the way we're delivering stories to market. Maybe tell us a little bit about how you found out about this documentary as a value creator and as I guess a differentiator and even a pattern disruptor to help brands communicate.

Peter: Yeah, I’d love to. I can't say that it was planned. I fell into documentaries and storytelling in a roundabout way. I started off as an entrepreneur, created a company 20 years ago and got into marketing. Along the way, I was invited to be on television, have a show similar to Dirty Jobs like Mike Rowe. And I started to discover the power of what a narrative can give to a brand and creating moats around it. And then over time, I sort of put two and two together that I realized that the long form storytelling was also a bigger marketing asset, not just a campaign that's there, rather it can be used everywhere. And you mentioned, it seems like there can't be anything else. It's funny that we're actually going back, right? Like documentaries have been around before there were film. Like it's an oral tradition of passing down stories of the way that we see things. It's not historical, it's the way that we see things. And when I started to realize that importance coming from television, my first opportunity to do my own documentary was in the healthcare space. Probably the most disrespected, underappreciated, misunderstood part of healthcare: nursing homes. And when we turned a nursing home documentary into something that went viral national, I realized it's time for us to take a step back in this world of so much AI and get back to the narrative.

Bill: Well, and Peter, when we think about the real expansion and almost like manic focus on short form that occurred, like I think we're seeing the full evolution of that. We're, we've achieved what we can achieve with short clips. Right. There's only so many shorts and reels we can produce and consume that have meaning. There had to be a an opposite to that, right? There had to be the yin to that yang. And it feels like longer form content, whether we're seeing the way it's being consumed with podcasts, with original shows that brands are putting on, or this documentary format, there is a real desire for complete storytelling, for complete narrative control, and kind of like that origin through the end, as it were, if that can be applied, to the story. How do you see that contrasting that short form content?

Peter: You know, I think if you approach long form storytelling first, you realize that they're very complimentary. And as a marketer, you'll know this and you know your audience who cares about marketing and growth and strategy and true ROI. You'll understand that long form can actually give you the short form and the short form will bring somebody into your funnel using the algorithms of YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. You can't just push a documentary about a nursing home in front of people who think negatively about documentaries. They're not going to turn it on. You have to find a way to intrigue them that something is of interest to them. And then you can explain them, hey, maybe you should start to think about your industry different, fishing, manufacturing, oil, whatever it is. And there they start to work together. The long form and short form. You know, like I think you, you were headed in this direction. But there's a popular book in the last year by Gary Vee. We all know Gary Vee and it's called, Day Trade Attention or Attention Day Trading. Yeah, and it's this world where brands are trying to get everybody's attention. I believe the easiest way to get your ROI on that is start off with your goal, then find out who's going to explain that goal. Then you amplify that goal through your long form storytelling, your documentary.

Bill: Well, isn't that where, I think that's where companies are losing a lot of their narrative control, is where they get so fascinated with these short form clips that get clicks as opposed to really controlling the narrative and ensuring that the clips are an outpouring or a, they're packaging the exhaust of the overall narrative they're trying to communicate. And this kind of goes back, like you said, to the basics. I mean, we're seeing direct mail and trade shows and documentaries coming back in vogue as opposed to whatever else the newest latest thing might be. But whatever you think about marketing polish, a lot of times we look at these type of projects and I think some companies see them purely as vanity projects. But documentaries actually solve problems. What type of problems are you seeing this medium fix for companies like where there's a true gap that we're filling with this application?

Peter: Love the question. I don't think I've been asked that. So I, I, I, I'm going to stumble around this, but the first thing that comes to mind is it's solve complex services or products or complex companies. If you're in a vertical, that's hard to explain. This is a great way to translate it. You can't translate it in the animated video always. You can't translate it in an elevator pitch. If you can get somebody's attention for 45 minutes to 90 minutes, I guarantee you could explain anything, right? Like you could explain US politics to somebody who's never been here at a high level with all of the complexity of bipartisanship and gerrymandering and our primary systems. And how did we elect Trump and how do we almost get Kamala–like you can explain things this way. The second thing that I would say is that companies in the last 20 years, especially the last 10, they put a lot of things on the marketer, right? Like any new technology that you or I hear about in any company, who do they pass the problem to usually? It's the marketer. Hey, go figure out how to pull this tool on our website to de-anonymize the people that are visiting. Hey, go figure out what's wrong with our lead magnets attribution, right? So they put all this pressure on, what does a marketer do with all that pressure? Random acts of marketing noise. And if you go back to a narrative, the narrative creates leverage.

Bill: No, I love that. And if the brand isn't solid, the tactics, the random acts of marketing, which we talk about a lot, unrelated to even this conversation, I think I have two podcast episodes about random acts of marketing. They're less valuable or almost value-less unless they center around a true brand that communicates who you are, what you do, where you do it, why you do it, who you do it for. With empathy. And create some type of emotive response because that's where we're going to get the buy. That's where we're going to get engagement. That's where we're going to attract these folks to really take that next step with the brand. And I think certainly anyone who is listening to the podcast goes, okay, documentary, okay, I get it. Consumer products, that would make sense. John Deere, Chevrolet, Apple Pie, All America. But let's think about the documentary impacting private equity and deals. If you have a private equity firm that's willing to do nine months of due diligence with hundreds and thousands of hours of analysts and lawyers and professionals looking at a company, whenever they take that deal to market and go to sell it, how compelling would a 15, 30, 40 minute documentary that communicates

the brand story in a way that, let's be honest, is actually going to be consumed. And private note here, I'm not accusing anybody who goes to those meetings as have not read the decks before they go. That never happens. I've never been in that meeting where it's been obvious that seven of 10 people sitting there have not read the deck at all. That's never happened to me. But this would be something that could be consumed and you've got sight, you've got sound, you've got emotion, you can get it. That a slide deck is never going to communicate. What are your thoughts on that? Because like, and maybe answer that with the context of the work you did that really, that won the award, that got the viral storytelling, that got the, like that really hit was for nursing homes. But this was for a conglomerate nursing home organization that had multiple facilities across multiple states. This was a very large organization that needed to solve a problem about communicating to the market.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I liked your idea around kind of like the board deck and you're the first person who's ever brought that up to me. I think we chatted about that a month ago and it blew my mind because I shared with you about two or three years ago, I was in the, was part of an executive team with a turnaround project and we exited. The exit was fantastic. The multiple was fantastic and it was specifically because a third bidder came in. And I remember that deck. I think the deck was 120 pages, Bill. And it was beautiful. My boss was a graphic designer. He knew, I mean, he knew how to help us get to that multiple. But a slide deck, a board deck, a power presentation can be replicated rather easy. It's similar to AI. Like AI can replicate format over and over. It cannot replicate a lived experience. If I had the chance to go back and do a five minute, 10 minute, 15 minute video of that 121 page slide deck, I bet your multiple would have been better because there's some things that can't be translated in something static, right? There's just like a pure, this is much lower level than in M&A, but I think that anybody will understand this even if you're not on TikTok or YouTube. Bill. 70% of the people watching our content on Vimeo, on streaming platforms and on YouTube. Nursing home content, that first documentary. Men, men, men. Hold on, now this is even crazier. Watch this. What percentage of people you think are watching it over the age of 34, right? Nursing home, we think about it's a place where 90-year-old women go to die and they're taken care of by 50-year-old women, 50-year-old immigrants, right? That's our stereotype. 60% of them are under the age of 34 that are watching our content. So think about that as an M&A, you're going to exit your company, you're gonna grow your company, you want more eyes on it and you want them to understand it. I can't even explain why men are watching our documentary more than women.

Bill: Yeah, that's wild. That is completely wild. I'm like, I'm sure that you and your organization and the organization you were doing this for explored that and figured out what that why that was important and are working on that. But I think the key there, what you said originally about the third bidder, whenever we're trying to sell a company, you only need two bidders. But man, is it nice when there's three, four or five. And I think this could be what's missing. So the Missing Half, we're always trying to figure out what's missing in someone's strategy. And if we have a company that we think we can sell for 50, 150, 200 million, but we could attract another strategic, another interested party into that process because they actually got it. I was speaking to a private equity CEO the other day and he said, on average, his firm sees 6,000 deals a year. How do you stand out? Right? Like it, and I'm sure they have a distribution of, like you said, beautiful decks to not beautiful decks and great financials to not great financials. Some of the differentiation needs to be more emotive and more holistic than just what's on the paper. And I think, go ahead.

Peter: I agree. If you think, think about some of the retail brands that you and I live and die by, think of, and then go a level higher, go to our last real estate agent, go to a broker that we would pitch our first thing to. If you go back, there's a before and after moment where you decide that you fell in love with that brand or the company you're going to work with, right? Like I always give the example, there's an AI email tool that I always talk about called Superhuman. Man, I have told thousands of people why I love superhuman and it's the narrative behind it. They solve a problem, but superhuman has 15 competitors that solve a problem. It’s the narrative that's changed it. And they actually changed my belief through the narrative and that the same thing will happen at a higher level.

Bill: I love that. And let's talk about building a moat because you use that word, I use that word. That's a very common word in the private equity field. How can, and you just alluded to it, how can that documentary, that brand narrative create defensibility that competitors cannot copy? Right, now, obviously, if they have a documentary and you have a documentary there, it's going to be more of a level playing field than it just comes down to the story. But let's be honest, if you're someone who is forward thinking and employs this tool for your brand, for your deal, you are going to be unique and different. There is in my mind, nothing else. And I want to get your take on this. What what what could a competitor do, or how could they copy that with AI or with, there isn't anything, is there?

Peter: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I'll answer that in a couple different ways. I often, and anyone who's in the M&A world is probably thinking, you know, my story's too boring. Actually a PowerPoint actually does better with it because that's who we are. We're numbers, this is our growth, this is what we did, this is our ROI, here's where we're going, so forth, this is our scalability. But I would say no, there's no such thing as a boring company nor a boring industry. It’s undocumented and once you start to document that narrative, it becomes interesting. I was doing some research around what are some amazing brands that I would have thought are boring that have done amazing work from a storytelling point of view and they have YouTube channels, they have documentaries–Pierce Manufacturing, 3M, Boeing. Right, I think you already mentioned John Deere. Milwaukee Tool, I challenge you to Google Milwaukee Tool and see how interesting they have started to talk about their story. I'll give two practical examples of something I've worked on. So I did a documentary about three months ago on a community banker, medium-sized community bank, almost a billion dollars in assets. How do you turn somebody who wears a tie every single day, for 50 years, who's worked in the same bank, has grown the company absolutely enormous into a story that's gonna be interesting to you or your neighbor or somebody who's not–? You can, you can, you can do it through long form. And the small switch that we did on it is his ask was that the documentary not be published until he passes. He's such a humble human being that he doesn't want anybody to think that he's doing this for fame about himself. And he doesn't wanna feel that until he's passed away. He did it as lessons for his grandson. He filmed the documentary for a lesson for the next generation. I just turned what you and I think is about cash registers and tellers and growth. I just turned it into intrigue, right?

Bill: Sure. And legacy. Legacy.

Peter: Yeah, yeah. Another one, we did one on a zoo. Could you watch another zoo documentary? I bet you that if I brought in a woman who's 75 years old, who has 350 stuffies of a pygmy hippo, 350 in her house, of a pygmy hippo and we fly her in to meet a pygmy hippo that was just born, I can tell you the story of that zoo in a way that will interest you. 75 years old, 350 stuffies, that's more than my son has.

Bill: I think the other thing that happens, I think, when we build this moat is it also de-risks deals because if we're able to impact retention and recruitment with like a rallying cry, a story around which we can all like rally internally and externally. I think it also helps build brand premium that can impact pricing power. And if you can de-risk a deal on pricing and then people, the recruitment or retention, you're going to impact your exit multiples. You are going to see outsized realization of your target based on something that, but here's something I'm going to run this by you. We see private equity firms spend 250 to 1.5 million on what I would call somewhat vanity branding, rebranding projects. And out of that, we get a nice style kit and some new colors and they change all the signs and all the decals and like new letterhead the whole nine yards. The effect of those rebrands while important in narrowing messaging and really clarifying who the company is. What if we were able to during that process establish a documentary and some other newer types of outputs? And it's not new, documentaries have been around for awhile, but a newer approach that would actually create lift as opposed to just check the box, oh we did branding. I I just think that that, there needs to be more given to the output of that brand in that process and how we package it as opposed to just doing the branding.

Peter: And think about how you're going to stand out. Right? Like, you know, I've been in the television world, documentary world for a little over a decade, and I had never thought about how helpful this would be until you presented it. That means that right now the people listening to this are going to be the next 500 people. And if they act upon it in the next year, no one's going to figure it out for five years. You know, like along kind of along the lines of staffing. I love the de-risking because when I start working with a new client, everyone's thinking about what can I get into new clients? And I bet you and I, when we step in, we always say like, what are you doing with your happy clients, right? Start with your referrals, start with retention, start with referrals. But you know what's even more important than going and finding new clients and then taking care of your current clients is taking care of your staff. Right now there's a staffing crisis in so many different places and that's a huge, huge risk, right? So if we can tell a story where people wanna stay longer, goodness, that's gonna impress your multiple, even if the people who are gonna bid on it don't watch your documentary.

Bill: Absolutely. And I can see that there's multiple points where this could be used to increase value. Another thing we talk about with private equity, as soon as you start the deal, as as you start the roll up, you need an ABM plan that if in like year three, four or five, if things aren't going real well, but we start bringing in some major enterprise accounts, they can help us get through some tough board meetings, some tough quarters, because you at least have a feather in your cap. This type of production would absolutely resonate across the entire buying committee of an ABM target that has maybe five, seven, 10 people that are on that committee to purchase your product or service. I mean, this becomes an ABM super tool to communicate the brand. So yeah, and we didn't even talk about that in the pre-show, Peter, we discovered this, what was missing right in the conversation. But yeah, I can just see this being so valuable. Attraction, recruitment, retention on the internal stakeholders. Attraction, recruitment, conversion on clients. And then retention of current clients because harvesting the base and maintaining that base is so critical because in private equity, we buy that business. So we want to keep it. We don't have to replace it all. I think another thing we need to talk about is this is a hedge against AI commoditization. AI slop is everywhere. You can go on to any application, spin up a video, spin up content, spin up whatever. How are you seeing this approach of documentary-style content development and distribution being something that can really help us hedge against AI?

Peter: I think that AI might be able to help you get some views. If you're in e-comm, it might help get some transactions. At enterprise or a larger level, absolutely not. I would go back, there's a blog that I love, which is 1000 True Fans. It's been around for 10 or 15 years. And when you're going to hyper-niche down, you want to think about those 1000 True Fans and then they're going to be your ambassadors. So how is this going to move or how is this going to be different than AI? I would rather emotionally move five people at the enterprise level than get 1000 extra views. And that's what the long form storytelling will do. It will emotionally move you. And I don't mean that it has to make you tear up. Like I think I shared with you that Ken Burns is a huge inspiration for me, the most famous documentarian in the United States. And he says that he started doing documentaries because he had never ever seen his father ever show emotion until he was sitting on the couch and watched a film next to Ken Burns. And he said, I want to be able to replicate that for other people. Kind of goes back to what I was telling you, where 70% of our people are men, right? So even if you can move me to get off my seat and go work out, you can move me off my seat to go move and understand this business or do a deal with you as opposed to this. You're moving. That is the main difference between this and AI. AI is not going to move you. I can guarantee that.

Bill: And are we entering a moment where, this is, might be fleeting, but the market is starting to react negatively to AI content. Like we can all spot it. We all know it when we see it. And authenticity is what is still earning credibility above high frequency, low quality slop.

Peter: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's similar to websites like reviews like Garter and so forth. People are no longer trusting TrustPilot and those sites. People are talking in private communities and Slack channels, Microsoft Teams. They're calling their friends on the golf course. Decisions are happening now, not online like they were five years ago. They're happening offline. So there's a backlash to AI. Just like there's a backlash to cell phones. Like Bill, I don't even have my cell, I don't have a single notification on my cell phone turned on all day long, except for if you call me. I'm going back to analog and trust me, and trust me, I'm 45 years old. I'm a person who you want to be able to capture my attention. You're more likely to do it analog or documentary on Netflix. There's a reason Netflix loves documentaries. 70% of people start a documentary today on Netflix, finish it. 60% who start a TV show finish an episode. 52% of people on Netflix who start a movie finish it. People finish documentaries and Netflix wants to keep you on there.

Bill: That's fascinating. Well and I think whenever you think about what does a documentary bring, it, the storytelling brings, I think, the young people call receipts these days. It brings the receipts. It is very difficult to have a 40 minute documentary that is just marketing claims that are not proven out over the course of the story. And if we think about private equity, M&A, and deals, they spend so much time on diligence on these deals to make sure that there is actual proof in the pudding as opposed to just claims. Is it not hard? So like, let me ask you this question. I'll ask it like in a negative context. If you were hired to produce a false documentary, it would be much harder to hold that story together for 40 minutes with half truths and misinformation than it would be to just represent the facts, right? It becomes more easy to keep that story going because it's true.

Peter: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, we have we have a lot of adages around how reality is stranger than fiction. Reality sometimes impacts us more, you know, from from like from an enterprise point of view, I believe that the missing half, to use the word missing, the missing half of enterprise value, Bill, is not marketing. It's meaning. It's meaning. And the meaning is what protects the multiples.

Bill: Wow, that's profound and I need to wrestle with that. That's amazing. Whenever you say that, and let's just riff on this for a little bit, how does it protect the multiples? I love that. How can that meaning protect the multiples?

Peter: The way that I understand it is the meaning is the compound effect that a narrative has over the numbers. If I'm looking at your P&L or I'm looking at what I think that this company is going to be worth if I acquire another company, I start to think in numbers. When I start to think about the power of the narrative and where the country's going, where the culture's going, where the human needs are going, right? Like there's phones today that no longer have any of those social medias, right? Somebody picked up on what you and I were just talking about. There was a meaning of you and I turning off our notifications, right? And so it's that, it's that moat of meaning around a number that looks like it's on a cash and like on a balance sheet. And that's gonna actually protect the multiple. And the person comes in and says, you know what? I expect the interest rates to go up next year and that's going to impact what I could actually do with your company. Come on man, like look at what's happening and like how many people are talking about us online. Go look at what people are saying about us on AI. Add that into it. Someone's going to be a lot more careful before they start critiquing your multiple.

Bill: Well and I think it's true that whenever you look at deals, if you strip away the narrative, financials are just financials, right? There's compounded annual growth, or there isn't. It's a hockey stick, or it isn't. Those are just mathematical truths. It's the story that sells. Because no one is gonna buy something for what it's worth today. It's because they think they can make it worth more or achieve more with what they invest in it. So I can see how that works. I'm going to, I think there's a lot to what you just said and I need to unpack it and think about that statement because I think there's so much truth to it and I want to wrestle with that.

Peter: Can I put it in really simple layman's terms? I'm stealing this from a marketer, Bill, but I should remember who it is. So I apologize if you hear this. I heard a talk about a year ago and it was explaining the power of story and it translated to this and I use this when I'm doing keynotes. If I sell you a Zippo lighter today that's brand new in the package, you're gonna offer me $5, about $3 less than what you can buy for it at Walmart. If I take that Zippo, an older Zippo lighter and I bought it at a flea market and it has your grandfather's initials on it and the high school that he went to, I bet you'll offer me 100 to $200. Same Zippo, same functionality. You'll probably offer me $500 if I really try to stick you with it. If that Zippo lighter was used by Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was wrapping up World War II and I could certify it, that's probably worth $10,000. They serve the same purpose. It's meaning around something.

Bill: No, I love that. That brings it into sharper focus and… Well and, let's explore. So I'm going to pivot a little bit here. Whenever I initially hear the idea of documentary, I think, wow, hard, long, expensive, difficult. Like we don't have time for that. We're under deadlines. Maybe, maybe Peter, walk us through a very broad brushed approach at how this is not a five year process. This is not multiple millions of dollars. That in the mid market, we can deliver this result, this documentary approach, whether it's to increase an exit multiple, to propose some more bidders, whether it's a longer form, maybe to communicate to the market, maybe it's an attraction retention, maybe it's an anniversary celebration. I've seen some of this work being done for companies who turn 100 years old or 50 years old. How much can we simplify this process so that it is like a beginning, middle, end timeline. And we don't have to get into budget numbers, but I feel like what you're doing is really bringing this to the middle market, which this has only been available to the Fortune 500 brands and really large tech companies in the past.

Peter: Yeah, it's a good question because it's probably the elephant in the room because I, I often get the question like, you know, what's this cost? So a documentary done in Hollywood, you know, is going to cost you three to probably $15 million on the low end of things. It's probably going to take a year to two years. And I would bet nine out of 10, nine out of 10 directors or executive producers you're going to work with are going to be more creative types. They're going to lack how you can translate this into an ROI for the investor. How is this narrative going to help me? And what I would tell you is that it can be done so much more affordable. If you start off by thinking, who is somebody inside of my company, customer, client, employee, executive, owner, who loves what we do. If you start with that, I guarantee that we can find a story really, really fast from beginning to end every single document that I've filmed or that I'm filming. So I have 10 in the last year and a half that I've been working on. From designing from beginning to end production, submitting it to Netflix, do it every single one in less than eight months. The price range is anywhere from $50,000 to half a million dollars, depending on how long it takes to film. The community banking documentary, I filmed it in two days with a team of four people, and we wanted to get in and get in and get out.

Bill: That's amazing. That's amazing, Peter. And I think that that helps to frame it because when you and I first started talking, I was like, Oh, this is going to be way too expensive. Take way too long. This isn't right for our market for B2B, manufacturing, for PE, M&A, that type of thing. But when you think about this, let's use a private equity example. If they have an exit that they're planning in the next 18 to 24 months, there's more than enough time. And the amount of money I've seen thrown at prep that is the same prep that everybody else does. That one hundred and twenty five page deck, that rebranding exercise that gives them a new style kit and maybe a couple of new tag lines and maybe a sizzle video that's three minutes long that is not good. I mean, it's just it's a video that check the box but doesn't move the needle, those numbers to me seem very doable. And the fact that you could do them on the low end really fast with a small team to much more extensive if you have a much larger narrative and a much larger project. That to me seems like something that we all need to have in our available toolbox as a tool we can pull out and utilize.

Peter: Well, you know, I'm glad you brought that up because I'll give an example that I think everyone will understand and I'll give you a timeline that's surprising. So the example is this. You have a channel on YouTube and you have a podcast. You know that audio is more important than anything else. There are amazing videos on YouTube, amazing podcasts on YouTube that have millions and millions of views or a large percentage of your ICP watching it if their audio is good and the message is on point and the video can be bad. I guarantee it and everyone who's in sound and video. And the exact same thing as the opposite can be happening. We have the most beautiful visuals. You and I could be models with six packs. We have bad audio. No one is going to listen to it and YouTube is not going to push it out. So it all goes down to the kernel of truth. What is the truth that, that is going to make this successful, right? It's not how many cameras, it's not how long we spend designing it. Let's find your one thing that is your missing meaning that we're gonna put around that multiple and drive that in. And we can do that in two days, we can do that in 20 days. There's an example that I did in February, 2025. We signed the contract January, we were filming on February 15th, we finished filming on March 1st, two months in. Post-production was done on May 5th. They showed it at a huge convention with 2,000 people, and we submitted it to Netflix two months later. So that was a six-month turnaround submitting it to Netflix.

Bill: And they extracted value from that even prior to the Netflix when they showed it at their corporate meeting or event. So there were other things that were extracted from that as far as value.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, and they have a philanthropic arm to this entity and they use it at their fundraiser. And I just got a quote from the CEO. This is the largest fundraising event they've ever had because they had something tangible to show what they're doing to educate the industry around this area.

Bill: No, that's amazing. When I think about the negative impression or maybe perception we have of documentary filmmaking and those processes, I think it's probably rooted in the fact that when you hear about these things from a Hollywood perspective, because I've been on some shoot sets where they have three people running one camera, just the camera, not the sound. I mean, there's 25, 30 people on a set. Plus, plus, plus, yeah, that gets very, very expensive. And that's why the folks in Hollywood and the movie production industry wastes or spends $200 million, or, whatever. For us, we have to be understanding of the market and where it's at and be more agile. And certainly with technology and the right skill technicians, you can accomplish amazing outputs with a very, very small team, as long as you have a good plan and you've scouted it, right? Like we're not just gonna show up and shoot and then narrate the story. It has to be well planned. How much, how has the success of your documentary projects been rooted in that planning and discovery process and writing process? What have you learned from that?

Peter: There's two things to that research and prep work is probably 70% of the success. Similar to, despite the guests that you had on today, you did a lot of preparation. You and I spent two hours, you have somebody on your team who did tons of research. So you did and you asked for all the clips, you watched all of this. So the 30% of what's failing on this podcast is me, the 70% of the success is Bill and that's the prep work. It's the exact same thing in a documentary. So my director meets with every single person who's going to be a protagonist on it, two to three times, 30 minutes to an hour beforehand, it starts to tease out that story. I'm not involved in that because oftentimes I'm involved, I'm in the documentary as telling the story. So they want it to be fresh and surprising to me. I don't know that. So that's 70% of the prep. 30% of it is communication when we're on set. And that's one of the reasons we're able to do it affordable. And one of reasons we're able to do it efficiently is because the people that I film with is the same director, the same camera crew, the same sound person, the same post-production that I filmed my television with since 2017. So when I am walking around and I'm going to this community bank and I'm paying attention over here, I have somebody who's whistling at me, hey, Peter, look at this person over here. They want to talk about why they've spent 50, 55 years working for this community banker. 55 years? And if it were me, because I'm trying to live in the moment, right? I need to pay attention to the person I'm interviewing. The camera guy picked up on the person who wants to come over and said, I spent my entire professional life for this gentleman and I want to tell you why.

Bill: That's amazing. Well and one of the things I want to be very clear about, we generally, and I want to make sure that our audience understands when we do the podcast, we don't pitch during the podcast. And I'm not asking Peter to pitch. I think it is so very important that we, our audience understands how low cost and low resource you could have something that is so unique. How quickly you could have something that is so unique that we're not pitching this in the traditional sense. I feel like, well you said it, Peter the elephant in the room is yes I see the value. People listen to the first half of podcast they get the value of this but then they're like yeah there's no way we can afford this I don't want to deal with it. Oh wait this could be done relatively quickly and expensively and have an incredible impact. That's why we've gone down this path in the second half of the conversation because I didn't want to tee everybody up with, oh this is amazing, but I'm never going to be able to do it. And since we've been involved together in talking about this, I've actually pitched this to a couple of people. And whenever I was able, of course they're like, yeah, that'll be amazing. And they're like, yeah but, I'm like, no, no, no. Let's talk about price. They're like, wait a second. That's not, that's actually quite reasonable. That could. And then when you start going into the value conversation of the points we talked about earlier, recruitment, retention of the internals, attraction of customers, deal value and helping to spin that up. All of a sudden, the ROI calculators start spinning and worrying. And it really looks like a good value. So because it is. So Peter, I wanted to just clarify that because we don't necessarily pitch and you're not, you're just explaining this process which is super important for everyone who's listening.

Peter: Yeah, I am thrilled that you brought that up because you can actually do this on your own. You can have a call with me for an hour. I'll give this to you for free. I am in love with people explaining their complex story in a passionate manner. I spoke to a university about two months ago and they said, you know, like upper education is struggling. There's all this back and forth between right wing and left wing and funding and woke and they're like, well, how do we do it? And I said, well, this is how you do it. They’re like, we can't afford it. We've got all of our funding. I said, you can do it. You have a hundred business students coming in this freshman year right now, turn this into a curriculum. Your first semester is they're going to build out the story. The second semester, they're going to film the story. You can hire a local cameraman or woman who can come in for five days for less than $3,000 and you can offshore the post-production for less than $7,000. And you can do it without me and without Bill if you want to do it on your own.

Bill: Absolutely. And I think that's a great point that what we're proposing and talking about at the level that you participate in is going to cost a little bit of money. And it isn't going to be the Blair Witch Project, right? Which is kind of what you just described, which is fine. But no, think we're also going to see the younger generations are going to self-produce this type of thing because they see the value. I've seen it. My son is in university and his group is doing a much better job of storytelling than my generation did. And now they have tools that we never had. They have technology that we never had. But this can be done at a grassroots level. And certainly the universities, every university should be self producing these things. They have people and kids going to school for film, for digital media. So they should be able to 100% insource this, but whether or not they will, who knows, but. Peter, one of the things I want to ask you, kind of shift gears here a little bit, is there something that you think kind of in closing about something that has changed in your approach or your belief around storytelling over time? And these are hard questions, so if you need to take a second. This is the lightning round of like super hard stuff.

Peter: Well, as an art, would say storytelling hasn't changed over time. it's probably the same thing all the way back to the Torah, to the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran. What has changed a little bit is the audience and the difficulty of capturing our attention. So you need to speed up your story a little bit at the beginning to get the hook. It's not any different than when you have a YouTube Short. You know, in the first five seconds, you have to capture them. But after, in a documentary, if I capture your attention for the first two minutes and it's good, I'm gonna, I bet you I'm gonna hold you. You're gonna be one of that 70% who's gonna watch the documentary to the end. So that would be the first change. I would say there's a second change, which is very positive, which is now we have tools who actually will do the distribution for you for free, right? So. I haven't, no, that's not true. I've only produced one documentary that I paid and took all of the risk on my own. But 10 years ago, would be unheard of that you could find easy people as a first time documentarian to go do it on your own and someone's going to give you money, right? That's not the case. In my very first case, the person paid for me upfront to do it sight unseen, not knowing if I was going to be able to pull it off. And on second, we got our very first documentary submitted and we got it on the streaming platforms on Apple and Amazon and so forth. So we have that and we have TikTok and YouTube and Instagram that are all doing the distribution. 10 years ago, Bill, you and I would have had to hire some media team from LA that we don't really know if they're going to do a good job for quite some time. They would have had all this buildup and all of these trailers. We have no idea if anyone's watching it. Has anyone seen the billboard? Today you and I can in 10 minutes get an intern to translate those things into ChatGPT and we know what our earned media is from it.

Bill: Well, that's something we didn't talk about today was earned media. One of the things when we did the pre show and we did some of the research and you showed me some of the outputs of what your documentary did for the assisted living communities was the unbelievable amount of dollars that were achieved in earned media. Maybe talk about how the documentaries can not only achieve the things we talked about earlier in this episode, but put dollars in that earned media bank account.

Peter: Yeah, it's a domino effect because when you tell a story different in the way that everyone else is doing the traditional pitching, right? Decision, press releases that these that these large companies put out, you know, with a traditional copywriter, it's very different when you're pitching it to a journalist. First of all, they're going to pick up on them in AI. My last two people have booked me for documentaries, discovered it through AI. And I didn't do most of that work. Some of it they picked up on some podcasts. But from from a earned media point of view, the media just started to pick up on it. And then we get backlinks, you get traffic, and then it includes your reputation. We were able to create a Wikipedia page yesterday. We just are now starting to get more than 100 reviews on IMDB, which is gonna then, they're gonna distribute it and give us a higher commission on the royalties. So it just starts to go. And I would say the secret to what, around the earned media, because I'm newish to that, right? Like I wouldn't say that two years ago I knew that we were gonna be able to have this success. I think where the angle that makes it so successful from an earned media point of view is when you're a little bit combative. And I would say combative in the sense that you challenge what does the general thought around it. So most people have a negative perception of nursing homes. What if I show you nursing homes through the people who work there and take care of our grandparents? Whoa, I have to slow down. And that is what the press looked up on. Community banker, what's interesting about that? How about instead of presenting them as being profitable, rather, I present them as a professor who wants to leave something humble for his grandson. So it's the angle and finding some type of contradiction that is interesting to the journalists that makes the earned media, you know, like have a 10 year half life. This is evergreen. This isn't a six months project and you're done.

Bill: So Peter, I think that's very important. And the other thing we're learning with AEO optimization is that the AI, whenever it searches, is not going to landing pages like traditional SEO. It's looking at multimodal sources of information. And having those third party sources for social proof, for authentication, for authority is so important to moving you up the ladder. So having a documentary that has a Wikipedia page that has these other PR, this PR coverage could have an outsized impact on the way your brand is interacting with AI whenever it's searching for these specific topics. So I think that could be incredible. And certainly, we have some relationships with some companies that have spent significant dollars on PR in the millions. And they are being interviewed on major cable shows, and not everybody understands that that's pay to play, but most of it is. And this would be a way to earn that indirectly. And also I think people understand whenever you see this earned media from these various sources, there is more credibility to it because it's less forced. It's less contrived as some of those interviews and some of those other events are and how they exist.

Peter: To put it into layman's terms, you know, cause probably a good percentage of your audience says, I have no idea how to get earned media from an AI point of view. I'll explain it how I learned from a big player. So about a month ago, I paid for one of those traditional PR pieces for a documentary for one of my clients. And the, the, the big PR company said, Hey, if you pay me an extra thousand dollars, I'll make sure that ranks inside of AI. As a marketer, said, okay, but tell me how. And they, what they do is they took my PR and then they translated it into a verbal and oral format onto a podcast. And that podcast picks up an AI faster than any blog. So I would much rather be on here talking with Bill and Missing Half about these documentaries than me paying a blog, doing it somebody else's way that the way old SEO worked 10 years ago. You know, like, there's nobody in the, there's not a person in US who doesn't know that Joe Rogan's interviews with JD Vance and Trump had an impact. The Democrats talk about the exact same thing from a PR point of view for podcasts and for AI.

Bill: Yeah, when you think about the outsized impact that podcasting had on the last political election cycle. And it's my understanding that those were not paid for. And I think that's been well documented. At least most of them were not paid placement. They were actually just journalistic intrigue and interviews. That's earned media. And I don't know what you I mean, I'm sure, I don't operate in the political space, but I'm sure you could calculate what it would have cost to have that many viewers sit there and listen to a political candidate speak to a Joe Rogan or some of these other folks for three hours and have hundreds of millions of people watch it. I mean, was it a billion dollars? I don't know. It was a lot. There was a lot of value to those conversations. Let's talk about, so I think earned media is a part that could be missing from someone's strategy when they think about the ROI on this type of investment. Whenever you're approaching these projects, what do you think is a mistake that many companies could be making consistently when they approach this? I mean, you've been doing this for several years now. This is early in the evolution of this application, but what are some mistakes you could offer some advice for people to avoid as they approach this type of project?

Peter: Oh, I love this. I don't often get this. I usually have to do the opposite, which is talk somebody into like, hey, this is the mistake that you're walking into. So the first one is people talking about their accolades and their success. People are much more interested in the journey that accompanies the success. And the exact same thing would be if you're building a moat around a company that you're going to exit. The journey shows that there's barriers of entry that someone can't come in and copy and replicate it very easily because you went through a struggle, you got over it, and now you're bigger. The second thing that comes to mind around mistakes would be trying to get too much in. The simpler the idea, the more powerful the story, right? The story of the community banker, it's very simple. What do I want to teach my grandson when I'm away, right? What comes out, what people are gonna remember, they're gonna remember the name of the bank, they're gonna remember the name of the CEO, but what they're going to feel in their body that's gonna help them remember it is the powerful story of how I wish my dad would have done that for my grandson or how I wanna do that for my grandson. And that's what you're gonna remember. So don't fit too much in.

Bill: I love that. This is not an exercise for features and benefits. This is an exercise to communicate the hero's journey and make the outcome the hero. Don't start with the outcome. Hey, we achieved X, Y, Z. No, here was our journey. Here's where we started. And here are the steps. Here are the different chapters in this story that took us along to the ending. I love that. And I think that makes, that makes a ton, a ton of sense. Last question, whenever you think about leaders making decisions about a project like this, what do you think there, is there, like is there one thing that they should remember when they're communicating really really complex work? Because in some cases it is about, and maybe it's make it simple. I don't know. But like what should, what should the preconceived notion or how should we temper expectations so that a leader who's thinking about this project needs to understand when they're trying to communicate complex work?

Peter: I would start with a very simple framework. All filmmakers, all storytellers might get frustrated by how simple this is because it shows that you don't need me and you don't need them. It's as you think of a moment that has changed you or your employee or your client forever. And then you start to define who was I or who were you before that moment. You explain what that moment is because people can live it, they can feel it, it's visceral. And then you talk about who I am or who you are afterwards. For the story of the community banker, it's the woman who dedicated more than 50 years of her life to him to grow his business into a billion dollar business, right? It's why he decided that he was going to not sell out to a big bank and why he was going to be, and where's the moment that he decided and it was his father, right? If it's a complex solution, let's say that it's manufacturing, you could do it with your employee or you can say what the world was before you existed and what it was afterwards. If we're going to talk about your journey, who were you before you did this? What was the struggle that you went through and what is your company now today?

Bill: I love that. That's powerful and it is simple. But it's almost completely opposite of marketing that we're forced to execute for clients on a daily basis, which is, can you fit 10 more things in that one print ad, in that one thing, right?

Peter: It's just identify the before and the after. And then I throw on the last part, which is amplify. And that's where TikTok, YouTube and Netflix come in. Before and after. And then I'll take care of the amplification.

Bill: Love it. So Peter, this has been an excellent conversation. I feel like we're going to have to run this back. Possibly in like 12 months time, we need to stay caught up on your progression in developing an old, something old that has become new again and how it's impacting the middle market. I do want to give you the opportunity as always for shameless plugs about you, your agency and what you're doing. And all of this information will be in the show notes everywhere we post this, you'll be able to find Peter Murphy Lewis online. But Peter, please give us your elevator pitch and where folks can find you.

Peter: Well, the first thing I want to do is I want to give something away to Bill and to your audience because I really appreciate it. So the first person who's listening to this that Bill believes in that telling your story would help you with your exit. I'm going to do all of my services for free. The only thing I'll charge you is my costs from the production team. So if Bill believes in you, we want to do something that's going to that we have a case study and we're going to make it different. For connections, I've used LinkedIn every single day. Peter Murphy Lewis, I believe I'm still the only Peter Murphy Lewis on LinkedIn. And you can go check out my website, strategicpete.com as well to see what we're doing over there in the story world.

Bill: I love this and Peter Murphy Lewis, thank you so much for joining us. I have been in this industry since I graduated from college in, we won't talk about it, but for a little over a thousand years ago. And there are very few things that shock me anymore. There are very few things that I see that I'm like, wow, that could be amazing. This is one of those things. I really believe this could be an absolute game changer. And whether you're a 50 year old manufacturer or business service company that needs to break out and really communicate better, your private equity play that is struggling in the boardroom or struggling to or thinks you may be to get an outside exit. I think there's so many applications of this approach that we're just on the cusp of this taking taking off. So Peter, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it.

Peter: Thank you, Bill.

Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half Podcast where we're discovering what's missing in documentaries. Like, share, subscribe. Have a great day.