How Blue Chalk Media turned deep credibility into a repeatable outbound motion

Challenges

Blue Chalk Media has spent thirteen years making documentary film for clients who could hire anyone. Its work has run in The New York Times and TIME, and it has produced for Nike, Morgan Stanley and Travel Oregon.

Credibility was never the problem. Reach was.

New business at Blue Chalk arrived the way it arrives at most respected creative studios — through reputation, relationships, and a phone that rang because someone had seen the work. That held until the market moved. Consolidation across television meant the networks were commissioning far less than they used to.

The studio’s answer was a pivot into what Chief Revenue Officer Pam Huling calls corporate entertainment: brands funding the television and video programming Blue Chalk produces, placed through the network relationships it already had. The strategy worked. It just only reached the brands already in Blue Chalk’s orbit, and run on relationships alone it moved at the pace of who happened to call. Huling described the shift toward corporate work as “so slow” and “a little bit frustrating.”

“We have big projects, big clients, and then there’s big gaps in between, because they’re very slow-moving. I want to try and get some more interim clients that are probably smaller in size and lower margin than we have — but more of them, higher volume. What I’m looking for is recurring revenue opportunities, where we’re going to find clients who need something on a regular basis.”

Pam had recently moved into the CRO seat, she had been the studio’s COO for years, after Blue Chalk was acquired by Auspicious Group. She was direct about what she was missing: “I just don’t know how you reach organizations to say we do recurring storytelling.”

Solutions

Huling knew who she thought should be buying Blue Chalk’s work. She had sectors in mind, formats that had already landed, and a sense of the titles worth reaching. What she didn’t have was a way to find out whether she was right.

Aurium answered that. Testing a separate vertical per campaign getting clear signal about what was working and not from the market itself.

“We were on the initial version and learned a lot, and had five different campaigns where it helped us figure out markets that were good for us,” Huling said.

The biggest return came from the Pharmaceutical Industry, where teams had a definitive need to tell human stories, but not necessarily the studio backing. One of those pharma conversations was with a clinical-trials company. They wanted a series: at least twelve episodes of narrative video podcast, telling the stories of people whose lives were changed by clinical testing. Episodic. Ongoing. Commissioned in advance.

Which is precisely what Huling had said was missing.

She had gone looking for clients who need something on a regular basis, and the first one arrived through a connection request, from a company Blue Chalk had never sold to, in a format the studio had only recently started offering.

“It’s the perfect scenario, where it developed it and we had a call and then reeled them in.”

Not only was there a repeatable motion that could get folks to engage with Blue Chalk’s offerings, but there was also a sharpening in how Blue Chalk positioned themselves. By the time the studio upgraded, Huling had a specific position to sell and three sectors to run it into. Three things about how that program works make it repeatable.

1) Segment by Vertical

Rather than one broad campaign, Blue Chalk’s outreach is split into distinct verticals — pharma, financial services, and corporate-entertainment travel — each with its own list and its own framing. The pharma campaign that surfaced that client targeted audience directors, communications directors and CMOs at pharmaceutical companies with 10,000 or more employees.

2) A/B Testing to Success

Aurium runs competing versions of the first touch in every campaign and reads the results weekly. The finding that mattered was that there is no universally best opener - it is entirely audience-specific. In travel, a short, low-pitch introduction outperformed the credential-heavy version by roughly two to one. In financial services the reverse held: the direct approach, carrying the social proof up front, pulled close to twice the response of the conversational one. One travel prospect, a director of corporate brand partnerships at a luxury rental company, responded three minutes after the first message landed.

3) Low Lift

The weekly call is the product. Aurium arrives at it having already read the week’s numbers, formed a view and chosen the change worth making. Huling’s job is to say yes, no, or try this instead — and whatever she decides ships inside the same working week.

She isn’t running an outbound program. She’s reviewing one.

“Can I say that I really love this white glove weekly call? It really keeps us focused on this. It’s really a big difference over — we used to be kind of free-floating, and it wasn’t top priority. But this really focuses us.”

The division of labor is the point. “We’re happy that Aurium is doing all of the numbers game stuff of just mining the possibilities and bringing it to us when it looks like it has potential,” Huling said. “Which is ideal.”

Results

The series is worth roughly $900,000 and one of the first that recurs rather than ending on delivery. It is not the only thing in flight. Between the pharma work and a financial-services opportunity now in pitch, Huling puts the total value of work in play from Aurium-sourced leads at up to $2 million.

The access is as notable as the revenue. Aurium’s outreach has opened conversations at chief marketing officer level inside national brands, including the financial-services CMO who took the meeting and whom Blue Chalk is now pitching on a large campaign. And the 760 connections keep working after the outreach stops, because Blue Chalk publishes to them.

“They’re connected to me, and then they start seeing our posts about branded content, and that’s already influencing them,” Huling said. “Just getting connected is the biggest priority.”

Huling went looking for clients who need something on a regular basis. She found the first one in a market Blue Chalk hadn’t previously sold into, in a format the studio had only just started offering, through a channel nobody there had been using.

“Aurium is looking great for us.”