Before Hailey Gates made her Sundance-winning feature film “Atropia,” the young filmmaker was attempting to make a short film, “Shako Mako,” based on the real-life military training village she ended up depicting in the feature. The fashion brand Miu Miu, as part of its Women’s Tales filmmakers series, helped make it happen. The brand provided clothing, some financing, and other resources, but — above all — was hands-off with the creative.
An Afghanistan War satire might not seem like a particularly relevant brand association for an upscale fashion line, but for Miu Miu, just being in Gates’ orbit makes an impact. Jett Stieger, who produced “Atropia” via banner Ways & Means, said it’s all about brands trying to find authentic ways to engage with consumers: making content their customers would want to watch, dispatching cool female filmmakers to parties, and using those connections to fuel good PR.
Miu Miu didn’t have any official ties to the feature “Atropia,” but having that short in their portfolio proved a valuable sales tool for the producers when it came time to get co-star Callum Turner aboard. For Miu Miu? The brand can boast that Gates is just one more in a growing roster of emerging female filmmakers it has supported, even if most consumers will never make the connection between “Atropia” and the clothing brand.
“I feel like it creates this cultural halo effect such that, by the time it gets to someone at the store putting down their card, they’ve been influenced in a way they’re not even aware of,” Stieger said.
There’s no shortage of brand-sponsored or -backed films premiering at festivals or online that all have eyebrow-raising affiliations. Did you know WeTransfer helped make Riz Ahmed’s Oscar-winning short “The Long Goodbye”? Or that “Emilia Pérez” was bankrolled by Yves Saint Laurent and that the brand has another project with Pedro Almodóvar?
But whereas paid advertorials or blatant product placement have become too transparent to most audiences, more brands are waking up to the idea of investing in narrative feature films and series, whether on major studio projects or smaller indies. Some even go a step farther than Miu Miu or Saint Laurent and want to be creative partners. For some Hollywood creators, they too are willing to welcome their creative input — and especially their dollars.
Rick Parkhill of Brand Storytelling said that, 10 years ago, brands wanted to get the next viral hit, like creating “Uncle Drew” or videos featuring racer Jeff Gordon as an undercover driver to sell Pepsi. Today, they’re looking for a return beyond just marketing. They want to be investors in projects. “All brands are saying, do we have a ‘Barbie‘ moment ourselves? What kind of IP can we leverage?,” Parkhill said.
In some instances, brands are trying to get ahead of the stories that others are telling about them. The “founder” film genre has exploded in recent years with films like “Air,” “Tetris,” “Flamin’ Hot!,” “Unfrosted,” or quite literally “The Founder,” which tell the story of a brand in a dramatic narrative. In those cases, the brand wasn’t involved or in some cases even aware.
But for films like “Barbie,” “The LEGO Movie,” or the just-announced movie about the founder of Hershey’s that was put into development, the brand is involved, and able to be protective of their history and values. Enter Starbucks, Crocs, or Chik-Fil-A, which have all launched their own production banners. And if you’re thinking we’re not far from Seth Rogen’s character in “The Studio” green lighting a “Kool-Aid Man” movie, you’re not alone.
Parkhill says brands today want to be what people seek out, not what interrupts their attention. The best recent example happened by accident, when Mike White filmed the first season of “The White Lotus” at an empty Four Seasons resort during pandemic lockdowns. Now Four Seasons is all over the series, even though the show doesn’t bear any paid branding or take any creative input from the brand itself.
“People are booking trips because they see that. There’s no Four Seasons branding, but where the hell is that? Oh, it’s the Four Seasons Thailand. Let’s go there. That’s not unnoticed in the travel industry,” Parkhill said. He wonders when Viking Cruise Ships might sponsor a remake of “The Love Boat.”
Michael Sugar, longtime manager of Steven Soderbergh, and his company Sugar23 are trying to “manufacture the accident.” He’s seen how “The Queen’s Gambit” increased interest in chess, how “Sideways” tanked sales of Merlot, and how “Drive to Survive” accelerated the popularity of Formula One.
He wonders, why Adidas or Nike can’t have been the one to come up with “Ted Lasso,” even if athletic shoes weren’t necessarily integrated into the content? The hit show was originally based on an NBC Sports sketch, so it’s only a matter of time before another company manages to develop their own IP that becomes a hit.
“LeBron James isn’t screaming ‘Buy Bitcoin’ every time he takes a free throw just because Crypto.com names the arena he plays in,” Sugar said. “The same can be true with content: if you deliver something amazing, and the audience knows it’s from you, the brand, then the brand is going to get a value prop for it.”
While companies think they can’t have their own “Barbie” moment because they sell shoes instead of dolls, Sugar is trying to get them to realize brands themselves are IP. The problem is Hollywood and the corporate marketing world have long been disconnected, and when brands are approached to be sponsors or financiers, they’re generally the last one to the table and don’t necessarily see these opportunities aligning with their values.
They want to, through entertainment, evoke a feeling about how a customer responds to their brand.
“Brands don’t want to be treated as banks, they want to be treated as advertisers who are partners in the creative process,” Sugar said. “We’re hearing from brands that, we get a lot of projects from Hollywood, the problem is they’re not right [for them]. The reason they’re not right is most producers in Hollywood don’t have the institutional knowledge we have been working hard to acquire on what would solve for a brand. It’s really, how we can tweak something creatively to make something more right for a brand without making it less right for the creative team? That’s the sweet spot that we try to live in.”
Along with Jae Goodman’s Super Conductor company, Sugar23 is one of the major juggernauts trying to bridge the gap between the ad world and Hollywood. They’re connecting them to directing and writing talent the creative market agencies don’t normally have access to, and they’re pitching them on the idea that brands have enough of their own history and values to develop something from the beginning.
Not only are they finding that brands are willing to participate if they’re involved in the vision, if a studio executive is presented with something they would buy anyway, it matters less that a brand is involved.
Sugar recently hosted what he dubbed The Way Upfronts; instead of the Upfronts, where studios present their TV slate to advertisers, producers and creators pitched their early ideas to advertisers with money to invest, aiming to build a marketplace where brands can match with creators that share their values. Of importance: Sugar told them not to bring the “broken toys” that have been shopped around and couldn’t find other buyers, but fresh ideas that will have a lot of interest.
People like Scarlett Johansson, John Legend, Tom Brady, and Elizabeth Banks all showed up, “a lot of money was moved,” and Sugar23, which wants to position itself as a creative marketplace between brands and Hollywood, intends to host another round soon.
Brian Newman, the former Tribeca head who now runs brand consultant Sub-Genre, said brands have always wanted to be involved early in the creative process, but it’s only because of projects like “Barbie” that others are increasingly getting involved on bigger-budgeted, bigger-risk Hollywood-style development.
Some of the early adopters to this space who count among his clients were outdoor brands like Patagonia, The North Face, and REI. REI in particular backed the Kyra Sedgwick film “Space Oddity” and the Netflix drama “Frybread Face & Me” about two Indigenous boys. Neither film’s story is explicit in its branding, but they evoked themes of climate change and land rights issues that are important to REI’s values.
The films even created some more tangible returns on REI’s investment. Newman said, while those partnerships can lead to more in-store or online sales, there are other returns: it boosts awareness of the brand without needing to air an annoying 30-second spot, and it even helps with employee retention, especially for Gen-Z employees who want to know that the company they work for shares their own personal values. Some are thinking even farther ahead than that.
“Smart brands are thinking a step ahead of the other ones,” Newman said. “REI knows if they don’t get people outdoors and off their butts, they’re not going to have customers in 10 years. Being associated in your customers’ mind with certain values and aesthetics, it will feel better shopping for it if you know they’ve done these things.”
One studio executive working with brands told IndieWire that, while there are a handful of scripted studio features in the works, the reality is it’s still too risky for most brands to undertake a major feature. But it’s those .5 percent of brands willing to experiment and take the risks who will win.
What’s more, an agent working in the brand space said that, historically, brands were willing to spend millions on such projects, but the distribution pipeline wasn’t yet there. Ever since streamers like Netflix started introducing advertising, those walls have been coming down, and streamers are looking for new ways to monetize content on their platform.
As for what’s coming next, the agent said he’s spoken with a number of food brands with character mascots, kicking around ideas with companies like M&Ms and Lucky Charms, to name just a couple.
For anyone who doesn’t want branding anywhere near their art, that’s completely understandable. But Parkhill spins it this way: if you took just 10 percent of the trillions of dollars spent on billboards, 30-second TV spots, and internet marketing and instead put it toward bankrolling the creativity of people like Almodóvar, “we’re going to live in a better world full of better media to consume.”
“We’re going to give them something that they’re going to really enjoy, and that’s going to boost our brand more than than buying billboards, radio ads, and television commercials. That’s where things are headed,” Parkhill said. “Plus, Hollywood needs the money.”
