Big brands are becoming an active new class of entertainment financiers boosting Hollywood.
Beyond Mattel, marketers like REI and Nike have been funding films and TV to reach ad-avoidant consumers.
But brands are still learning the ways of Hollywood, which continues to see brand-backed work as impure.
As studios cut spending and strikes shut down production, Hollywood can take some solace — brands are coming to the rescue.
Blue-chip brands have been pouring money into filmed entertainment. Mattel’s “Barbie” is just the latest example showing how movies that come from brands can draw big audiences. Mattel reportedly gave director Greta Gerwig a lot of latitude in telling Barbie’s story, and if the film succeeds, it may encourage more brands to pursue similar storytelling.
The key brand players in filmed entertainment include ones you’d expect, like Nike, which was behind “The Day Sports Stood Still,” an HBO documentary about the pandemic shutdown; and REI, which backed Kyra Sedgwick-directed “Space Oddity” to promote environmental issues. There are some surprising ones, like John Deere, which has two docs out this year including “Gaining Ground: The Fight for Black Land” about Black farmers.
Procter & Gamble, which houses brands from Tide to Gillette, launched P&G Studios around five years ago. It now has up to 15 filmed projects in the works, including “Rising Phoenix: A New Revolution,” about the Paralympics.
“It is about creating great stories, powerful stories, interesting stories that people want to see — and our brands want to therefore be in and around — and that can sell to the marketplace,” Kimberly Doebereiner, P&G’s group VP of the future of advertising and the studio’s head, told Insider.
NBA star Chris Paul in HBO’s “The Day Sports Stood Still,” which was backed by Nike. Warner Bros. Discovery
Many brands, like PepsiCo and REI, are leaning on their longtime marketers to lead these efforts. A few are tapping people from the entertainment world like Mattel’s Robbie Brenner, who brought 20 years of Hollywood experience as the producer of films including “Dallas Buyers Club.”
There’s also Jill Lubochinski, who worked in unscripted at NBCUniversal before becoming director of entertainment content at Amex in 2022, and WeTransfer’s Holly Fraser, who previously was a journalist and producer. “The Long Goodbye,” a short film commissioned WePresent, WeTransfer’s digital arts and editorial platform, won an Academy Award in 2022.
The brand dollars are a welcome source of revenue and activity for a hobbled Hollywood. Striking writers and actors can still do commercial work (though some might steer clear anyway).
And production companies like Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment (a producer alongside Nike of “The Day Sports Stood Still”), Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, Michael Sugar’s Sugar23, and Anonymous Content are actively stepping up to collect.
“In the past year, we’ve had a half a dozen incoming calls from brands asking, ‘What is our version of “Air” and how should we be thinking about it?'” said Marc Gilbar, who runs the brand division at Imagine (“Air,” the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck movie about Nike was not overseen by the athletic company). “Our mission has always been to identify and craft these types of inspiring true stories, so we love this kind of challenge,” Gilbar added.
Brand Storytelling is an organization that’s held a festival for brand content alongside the Sundance Film Festival for the past seven years. Brand film submissions have almost tripled to 160 in the past three years, according to Rick Parkhill, director and co-founder of Brand Storytelling.
Riz Ahmed in “The Long Goodbye,” a short film commissioned by WePresent, WeTransfer’s digital arts and editorial platform, won a 2022 Oscar. WePresent by WeTransfer, Vicky Grout
“There’s money moving that way,” Parkill said. “The quality of the content is far greater, and the level of directors, talent they’re bringing — you can just see it in the work. You have directors seeking this work.” Saint Laurent, for example, has paired with Pedro Almodóvar and David Cronenberg to make films.
Brand-funded entertainment has taken a lot of forms over the years as marketers try to reach consumers outside of interruptive advertising.
What’s new is that brands are trying to get distribution by major streamers to make sure their projects get seen (and in some cases, share the cost or even make a profit). They’re also becoming more systematic about tracking measurement and results.
It’s a subtle paradigm shift for Hollywood, where the attitude that films made by brands are impure is easing. Brands want buyers to know they can also help projects reach a wide audience with their marketing know-how. Some in the brand entertainment space see a day when the streamers actively seek out content from brand-driven studios as they would any Hollywood production company.
“Film directors need the work,” said Marcus Peterzell, who left ad giant Omnicom to found Passion Point Collective, a brand film studio, in 2019. He’s since made some 36 film projects for brands. “And who’s funding independent film these days? So brands can become a new source.”
But some reluctance at streamers and other distributors remains. And brands are often still inclined to make such projects too commercial to resonate as pure entertainment for audiences — or companies may face internal doubts that such projects will pay off for their business goals.
It’s a puzzle made more difficult by the fact that streamers don’t share much viewership data. Brand Storytelling is working on a system to measure the effectiveness of brand films through research, performance measures, and the like.
And there are limits to the type of stories that brands will want to tell. At the end of the day, whoever is paying the bills will have a say in what sort of content gets funded.
“The brands generate the topics they want to talk about, and it’s pretty narrow,” Peterzell said. For example, he added, “If it comes to politics, brands stay away.”