As studios cut spending and strikes paralyze production, Hollywood may take solace: Big brands come to the rescue.
The big brands have invested money in entertainment movies. Barbie, from Mattel, is the latest example of how branded movies can attract large audiences. Apparently, Mattel gave director Greta Gerwig a lot of leeway in telling the Barbie story, and if the movie is successful, it may encourage more brands to pursue similar stories.
Among the major brands involved in entertainment cinema are the ones you might expect, such as Nike, which was behind The day the sport stoppedan HBO documentary on the pandemic lockdown, and REI, which backed Space Oddity, directed by Kyra Sedgwick, to promote environmental issues. There are some surprising companies, like John Deere, which has released two documentaries this year, including Gaining Ground: The Fight for Black Landabout black farmers.
Procter & Gamble, which has brands like Ariel, Pantene and Gillette, launched P&G Studios about five years ago. He now has 15 projects underway, including Rising Phoenix: A New Revolutionabout the Paralympic Games.
“It’s about creating great stories, powerful stories, interesting stories that people want to see — and our brands therefore want to be in and around them — and that can be sold in the marketplace,” he explains to Business Insider Kimberly Doebereiner, P&G group vice president for the future of advertising and head of the study.
Chris Paul, NBA star, on HBO’s ‘The Day Sports Stopped’, which was supported by Nike.
Warner Bros. Discovery
Many brands, such as PepsiCo and REI, rely on their longtime marketers to lead these efforts. Some are turning to people from the entertainment world, like Mattel’s Robbie Brenner, who brings 20 years of Hollywood experience as a producer of the likes of Dallas Buyers Club.
There’s also Jill Lubochinski, who worked at NBCUniversal before becoming Amex’s director of entertainment content in 2022, and WeTransfer’s Holly Fraser, formerly a journalist and producer. The Long Goodbyea short film commissioned by WePresent, WeTransfer’s digital art and editorial platform, won an Oscar in 2022.
Brand money is a good source of income and activity for a weakened Hollywood. Scriptwriters and actors on strike you can continue to advertise (although some will stay away).
And production companies like Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment (producer, along with Nike, of “The Day Sports Stopped”), Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, Michael Sugar’s Sugar23, and Anonymous Content have jumped in.
“In the last year, we’ve received half a dozen calls from brands asking us, ‘What’s our version of Air and how should we approach it?” explains Marc Gilbar, who heads the branding division at Imagine (AirMatt Damon and Ben Affleck’s film about Nike, was not supervised by the athletic company). “Our mission has always been to identify and craft these types of inspiring true stories, so we love these types of challenges,” adds Gilbar.
Brand Storytelling is an organization that has been hosting a festival of branded content in conjunction with the Sundance Film Festival for seven years. According to Rick Parkhill, director and co-founder of Brand Storytelling, branded films have almost tripled in the past three years, to 160 films submitted.
Riz Ahmed in “The Long Goodbye,” a short film commissioned by WePresent, WeTransfer’s digital art and editorial platform, won an Oscar in 2022.
WePresent por WeTransfer, Vicky Grout
“There is money moving in that direction,” says Parkill. “The quality of the content is much higher, and the level of the directors and the talent they bring shows in the work. There are directors looking for this job.” Saint Laurent, for example, has teamed up with Pedro Almodóvar and David Cronenberg to make movies.
Brand-funded entertainment has taken many forms over the years, as marketers attempt to reach consumers outside of annoying advertising.
What is new is that the brands try to get the distribution of the main platforms of streaming to make sure your projects get seen (and, in some cases, share the cost or even make a profit). They are also becoming more systematic in tracking measurements and results.
It’s a subtle paradigm shift for Hollywood, where the attitude that brand-name movies are unclean is softening. Brands want buyers to know that they can also help projects reach a broad audience with their marketing savvy. Some in the branded entertainment space hope that the day will come when the platforms of streaming actively pursue brand-driven studio content like you would any Hollywood production company.
“Film directors need the job,” says Marcus Peterzell, who left ad giant Omnicom to found Passion Point Collective, a branded film studio, in 2019. He has since done some 36 branded film projects. “And who finances independent cinema nowadays? So brands can become a new source of financing.”
But there is still some reluctance on the platforms of streaming and other distributors. And often brands continue to be inclined to make projects too commercial to resonate as pure entertainment with the public, or companies may face internal doubts that such projects are profitable for their business objectives.
It is a puzzle that is further complicated by the fact that the platforms of streaming they don’t share a lot of audience data. Brand Storytelling is working on a system to measure the effectiveness of branded movies through research, performance measures, and the like.
And there are limits to the kinds of stories brands will want to tell. After all, whoever pays the bills will have a say in the type of content that is financed.
“Brands generate the topics they want to talk about, and they’re pretty limited,” Peterzell explains. For example, she adds, “When it comes to politics, brands stay out of it.”
2023-07-23 04:16:55
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