Content marketing and the art of the long take: What slow cinema can teach your strategy

Focus, patience, and purpose. Why one clear story outperforms scattered campaigns

The big ideas

1. Why compare content marketing to a long take? Both reward patience and precision. Sergio Leone’s 15-minute opener in Once Upon a Time in the West proves that clarity outlasts speed and earns attention that lasts.

2. What happens when teams rush the story? The message fractures. Marketing burns out, sales revert to old tactics, leadership loses faith, and the story disappears. When everything is urgent, nothing lands.

3. How do you ‘keep it simple’ in strategy terms? Choose one core campaign and back it fully. Align sales, marketing, and leadership behind the same story so energy compounds instead of scattering.

4. What does clarity of vision really mean? Knowing why this campaign matters and proving it with data. When everyone understands the logic, patience follows even when results take time.

5. Why does patience matter so much? Because long-term strategy needs space to grow. A team that commits to one story builds trust and endurance.

The scene opens on a hot, windswept day. A station master chalks a blackboard. The sound of a water pump creaks through the heat. Three gunslingers step into doorways. The station master’s brow glistens with sweat. A dog whimpers. Someone cracks their knuckles. A fly circles lazily before being caught in the barrel of a gun. Minutes pass. Nothing happens. And yet everything does. Finally, the train screeches into frame, dust and smoke clouding the air. Out steps Charles Bronson, harmonica in hand. He plays a few notes, and the rest is film history.

Sergio Leone’s opening scene from Once Upon a Time in the West runs close to 15 minutes. No exposition and barely a word spoken. Until the harmonica, no music either, just diegetic sound: wind, breath, footsteps… life.

That’s the art of the long take.

Would a studio make it that way today? No way. A modern version would strip it down: wide shot of station → men enter → train arrives → man exits train→ close up → boom. Sixty seconds, tops, then straight to the ‘wow’ moment.

Now think about the speed of your marketing.

How often does your team feel stretched thin? Juggling multiple campaigns, endless formats, and conflicting messages just to keep pace, but with what? Unless you’re an enterprise business with sprawling teams and sub-brands, that scattergun approach is exhausting. Sales fall back on old tactics. Marketing gets burned out. Leadership grows impatient. And the story gets lost.

The art of the long take, although largely lost in mainstream cinema, presents three virtues, each of which has a place in campaign and content strategy: keep it simple, have clarity of vision, and be patient.

Keep it simple

Devote more energy to one campaign, one narrative, one focus. Not dozens of fragmented messages that dilute impact. One campaign that unites the business, gets tested, refined, and is pushed hard.

The benefit? Everyone aligns. Sales get fluent in the story. Marketing can concentrate effort instead of scattering it. Leadership can see and back a clear strategy. Other campaigns may run in the background, but this is number one.

Clarity of vision

You need to know why this is the campaign to bet on. What data points led you here? Has it been validated by subject-matter experts? Do you have content ready to run, or are you starting from scratch? Can you crawl, walk, and run, or are you sprinting out the blocks? And crucially, do the KPIs make sense to leadership, not just the marketing team?

When you have the answers, you’ve got the foundation for a long-take campaign. Without them, it’s a gamble. Because when results lag, people will lose faith fast.

Be patient

Even the strongest strategy needs time. A CEO may nod at kickoff, but if leads don’t start pouring in, patience wears thin. For the long take to work, the business must be ready to back it beyond one quarter. It should understand the seeding, embedding, growing, refining, and pivoting it takes to land.

This means breaking out of blame culture. Sales can’t point fingers at marketing. Marketing can’t blame execution. It’s one story, one commitment, one belief. If your team is convinced internally, they’ll have the energy to carry it externally.

And yes, it takes content. Content audits, persona mapping, format optimisation, channel strategy, and timing.

Some prefer a montage

The long take isn’t for every business. It requires discipline, alignment, and trust. But get it right, and you will create something that lasts.

A campaign that tells a story can be your next classic, and might just have its very own harmonica moment.