About Us

We want to make you Laugh and Cry

Most commercials fail to connect with customers because they treat them as just that: “customers”. The result is messaging that’s stodgy, business-like, and inauthentic.

At D.O.P.E. the customer is a friend, and the way we connect with friends is through emotional language. We laugh and cry with our friends, while feeling safe to share candid truths. So, at D.O.P.E. we tell stories that resonate with customers’ emotions and make an impression they’ll remember.

In short: we move hearts to change minds.

It’s a simple guiding principle, but it’s one that takes courage from you, our client, to practice. So, allow us to show you how it’s done…

How we do it: The Basics

In the above sequence of images, we see a man staring at a bowl of food. When we cut back to him, we can deduce that the man is hungry.

A surefire way to evoke an emotional response from an audience is via one of the earliest cinematic techniques, known as the “Kuleshov Effect”…

The Kuleshov effect is a film editing technique discovered by Russian film-maker Lev Kuleshov at the start of the 20th Century. It is a phenomenon created in the viewer’s mind through context of a sequence of images. It works as follows:

  1. Start with a neutral shot of a person with a neutral expression.

  2. Cut to an object.

  3. Return to the initial shot and hey presto: the audience infers meaning from the sequence and experiences an emotion.

    FOR EXAMPLE:

Next, we see a man staring at a sleeping baby. When we cut back to him, it is clear that he believes that “the baby is so cute that he could just eat him.”

Finally, we see a man staring at a woman in recline. When we cut back to him, what do we conclude?

You guessed it! The man is clearly a dangerous cannibal or zombie who wishes to devour the woman’s flesh and should be promptly imprisoned.

That’s DOPE, right?

That is how the Kuleshov Effect works, and it can be deployed to help sell anything from a juicy burger to a healthy salad. (Additionally, you can cite this technique at parties to impress your cinephile friends.)

Of course, there are many more non-food-based applications of the Kuleshov Effect, and this is just one technique in D.O.P.E.’s emotional toolkit. To find out more about how we can inspire more emotion and feeling in your customers, get in touch with us or subscribe to our blog for more neat tips and tricks.