Wave of Buzz for Dolphin Lover

Joey Daoud

Joey Daoud is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His past films have appeared on Netflix, The New York Times, and National Geographic. He is also a YouTube creator across multiple channels with videos garnering millions of views. In his free time, he likes to climb mountains, scuba dive, and brew unique coffees.

I’d say it’s been a hell of a week, but the week isn’t over yet. Last Thursday was the second and last screening of Dolphin Lover at Slamdance. Shortly after that we received an honorable mention for short documentary from the jury, which was awesome.

At Slamdance we had created a bit of buzz, mostly from our provocative poster, a great article by Arielle Castillo at Fusion, and an interview with The Miami New Times.

Nothing crazy. We flew back on Friday. When we landed, Kareem and I saw that WTFark had done a 4 minute sketch about the film.

Clearly this thing is getting some traction that a 4 minute parody video would be produced about it. It started snowballing from there. Over the weekend all the major British tabloids picked up the story (because how could they not). Now this wasn’t original reporting – it was just a mesh from the few original sources and interviews, plus oddly some of my videos pulled from Instagram merged into an ‘exclusive’ clip. Sometimes they didn’t even cite sources (*cough* Mirror). Quotes usually stay the same, but it sometimes becomes a game of blogger telephone.

From there things just kept picking up speed. On Monday I woke up to interview requests from the UK, Australia, and some US outlets. Online the game of telephone kept moving rapidly (with some original reporting). Here’s a sampling:

There’s still more press to come. There’s been a lot of lessons learned in viral strategy. We definitely weren’t prepared for this and have been adjusting the website, videos, YouTube channel, and other media as we go. I’m noting it down – will round it up in a future post.

Follow the updates of Dolphin Lover at the website www.dolphinlovermovie.com.

 

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