The person who changes is the one it is about

A simple test you can run on any script

Read the piece and ask: who is different at the end? That person is the protagonist, whatever the brief says the film is about.

Run it on the average company film and the answer is the company. It was founded, it grew, it invested, it now serves customers nationwide. The customer appears as evidence of the company’s progress rather than as somebody whose life changed. That is a company history, and company histories are interesting to roughly the number of people who work there.

Cross out the name

A second test, faster and crueller. Delete every instance of the brand name from the script and read what is left. If what remains is a story (somebody had a problem, tried something, ended up different) you have a story that a brand appears in. If what remains is nothing, you had an advertisement with anecdotes decorating it.

This is not an argument for hiding the brand. It is a diagnostic for whether anything is being carried other than the brand.

When the brand should be the protagonist

Sometimes it should, and the blanket advice to “make the customer the hero” is repeated far past its useful range. The brand is the right protagonist when:

• The change being described actually happened to the company and is interesting: a real pivot, a real failure, a decision that cost something.
• The audience is investors, staff or partners, for whom the company’s trajectory is the subject.
• The founder’s own experience is the product, which is true for a great deal of craft and service work.

The failure is not brand-as-protagonist. It is nobody as protagonist: a film in which no one changes, narrated in the passive voice, where achievements accumulate without anyone having done them.

Give the protagonist a want and an obstacle

A protagonist without a want is a subject of a portrait. The want does not need to be grand: to get the order out by Friday, to stop being embarrassed by the shopfront, to understand why the form keeps being filled in wrong. What matters is that it is stated early and that something is in the way, because the gap between want and obstacle is the space the piece occupies.

The commonest scripting error here is a want that is already satisfied. “She wanted a reliable supplier, and she found one” has no gap. “She had a supplier she did not trust and a client meeting on Thursday” has one.

Where the brand goes instead

If the customer is the protagonist, the brand’s structural role is the thing that makes the turn possible. Not the hero, not the narrator, not the moral. In practice this means:

• The brand appears at or just after the turning point, because that is where it is relevant.
• It is shown doing something specific rather than being described. The blade cutting, the van arriving, the person on the phone at 7am.
• It gets less screen time than the client would like, and the case for that is made at the beats stage rather than in the edit, when it becomes a fight.

Two honest complications

Consent. If a real customer is the protagonist, they are a person with a life that continues after your film. They need to know what it will be used for, where it will run and for how long, and they need to be able to say no afterwards. A signed release is normal practice; it is also not a substitute for actually asking. This matters most when the story involves difficulty (somebody’s business nearly failing, an illness, a family situation) because the footage that helps your piece may be the footage they regret most in two years.

One protagonist. A film with four customers has four small stories and no arc. If the brief demands several voices, the honest structure is usually not a story at all but a set of statements, presented as such. Do not glue four testimonials together and call it a narrative; the joins will be “and then”, and the viewer will feel every one.