Our Methodology

We take a step back to align your project with overarching marketing objectives, helping you uncover blind spots and refine your creative vision. This intake is designed to pressure test your ideas before we begin to work together, and give us insight into what’s working and what isn’t working. Backed by The Backcountry Marketing Filter™, we examine your campaign for the common pitfalls and red flags that prevent content from working in the wild.

• Business Objectives: Defining goals, challenges, success metrics, impact opportunities, ownership, internal readiness, and constraints.
• Brand Identity: Understanding your brand’s POV, messaging balance, risk tolerance, and audience trust.
• Audience Insights: Analyzing demographics, behaviors, engagement strategies, platform preferences, and real-world activation potential.
• Creative Development: Understanding the big idea, evaluating your brand's trust with its audience, and aligning business objectives with creative.
• Distribution & Amplification: Planning platform strategy, partnerships, audience engagement, PR leverage, and social team needs.

This phase culminates in a comprehensive roadmap. We stand by its value with a satisfaction guarantee, if you’re not satisfied, you can opt out with a refund.

At Port Side, our strategy process is powered by more than just intuition. Through our partnership with RightMetric, we back creative decision-making with powerful insights like:

• Which content formats drive real engagement, not just views, but meaningful interaction
• What emotional tones and storytelling frameworks are working for brands like yours
• The channels and creators your audience already trusts and follows
• Topic clusters and visual trends that are earning traction across your space
• Missed opportunities and narrative gaps your brand could uniquely own
• Spot unexpected ways your competitors are winning right now with your audience

These insights don’t just inform content - they shape the brief itself. We use them to pressure-test ideas, open new directions, and ensure that what we create is based on rich insights and is strategically aligned with how your audience behaves. This isn’t guesswork. It’s creative built on clarity.‍

With a clear understanding of your goals, brand, audience, and channel opportunities, we begin brainstorming and assembling these ideas into creative concepts. These concepts cover feature films, product launch videos, social content and marketing campaigns. This phase includes:

• Creative Briefing
• Concept Ideation and Creative Development
• Scripting and Outlines
• Mood boards and Animatics

With all of the upfront work done, production is the easy part. From the mountains to the ocean, from a backpack to a grip van our team is comfortable in uncomfortable places.

• Pre-Production: Shot lists, storyboarding, logistics, casting, and location scouting.
• Production: 4K+ RAW filming, photography, social content, commercial & documentary formats, and specialty camera work.
• Post-Production: Editing, color grading, sound design, VFX, motion graphics, and final delivery.

Without a clear distribution plan even the best campaigns don’t stand a chance. As part of our strategy, we help map out a distribution plan for your campaign. Whether you need full-service execution or light-touch support for your internal team, we bring platform-specific expertise to ensure your content gets seen.

We offer guidance across key distribution channels, including:

• Owned web and landing pages

• Social media platforms
• Paid digital marketing campaigns
• Theatrical and in-person screenings
• Film festival submissions and runs
• YouTube optimization and strategy
• Integrated 360º brand campaigns