Brands Are Devouring Hollywood. Are Studios Ready?

Brian Grazer first realized that advertising and entertainment were colliding after a meeting with General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt a decade ago. Immelt had approached the megaproducer about having Imagine Entertainment create some TV spots for the conglomerate, but Grazer says that he “wasn’t inspired” by the idea.

“He said, ‘I want it to be like the feeling you get watching Apollo 13,’ ” Grazer recalls, referencing the 1996 Oscar-winning drama directed by his Imagine partner Ron Howard. “I said, ‘I understand that’s what you’d like, but it just doesn’t do it.’ ”

Grazer, understandably, was skeptical. Imagine was in the film and TV business, not the ad business.

But the producer says that he always had a fascination with founders, and it sparked an idea. It was an anthology series, inspired by Thomas Edison and the lightbulb. GE loved it. It wasn’t an ad; it was something better, an entertainment program that met Imagine’s bar for quality and had the added benefit of bringing a little shine to GE in the process: the Nat Geo series Breakthrough, which would count the conglomerate as a producing partner alongside Imagine.

While GE had notes, the Imagine team worked through it all to get it over the line. The show would help spark a new and growing business line: Imagine brands, which has worked with companies like Nike (The Day Sports Stood Still), Ford (John Bronco) and Coca-Cola (Christmas Finds a Way), and is hard at work now on as-yet-to-be-revealed projects with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

Grazer isn’t the only one to have seen the light.

Across Hollywood, a new status quo has emerged: Advertising is entertainment, and major companies and brands are thinking hard about how they present themselves to potential customers, learning a thing or two from the major studios in the process. It’s a full-circle moment in many ways. In the early days of television, the line between advertising and entertainment was blurry at best. Just look for clips on YouTube from The Colgate Comedy Hour, Texaco Star Theater and Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. Over the ensuing decades, however, advertising became something anathema to Hollywood.

It paid the bills, sure, but star talent shied away from participating (outside of a handful of money grabs in foreign markets like Japan and Italy). Now, however, the brands are back with a vengeance, and they have buy-in from every part of the industry, though everyone involved, from the brand managers to the actors, need to weigh the trade-offs of participating. “I think brands now know what they know, and know what they don’t know, which is even more important,” says WME head of entertainment marketing Liz Walaszczyk.

Adds George Dewey, co-founder of the studio Maximum Effort alongside Ryan Reynolds, who’s also been at the forefront of brand storytelling: “Brands are in a transition period. Even as recently as four or five years ago, you could spend $20 million on TV and have a brand campaign have tremendous impact. Now, the only place where we’re all watching something live together at the same time and having that collective experience is sports, and it’s getting so expensive — $20 million doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

So brands are responding by launching in-house studios, while many small- and midsize film and TV production companies are leaning into branded entertainment to keep business going — even as Hollywood writ large is in something of a lull. Film and TV production is declining throughout much of the U.S., and Los Angeles has been hit particularly hard. And in a post-Peak TV era, the demand for premium content from TV networks and streaming platforms is simply smaller than it was just a few years ago.

Companies in the motion picture and video production space have shed 49,000 jobs in the past decade, a decline of 21 percent, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. At the peak of Peak TV, the sector employed some 289,000 people. “Recent employment levels have been about 100,000 lower than the industry’s October 2022 high,” the agency says. The industry is producing nearly 50 percent fewer TV shows than it did pre-strikes in 2023, according to data platform Luminate. 

But as studios and streamers pull back, major brands are ramping up, hiring Hollywood and media veterans for their in-house studios to be more ambitious in their storytelling … even if they ultimately have a product they need to sell. 

Earlier this year, Gap brought in former Paramount executive Pam Kaufman as its chief entertainment officer, and other major brands across CPG, food and beverage, automotive and fashion are launching studios — from Procter & Gamble’s P&G Studios and Starbucks Studios (which counts manager/producer Michael Sugar as part of the brain trust) to Kraft Heinz’s The Kitchen and Dick’s Sporting Goods’ Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios to e.l.f. cosmetics, which hired UEG vet Jennifer Sutherlin to lead its entertainment division.

“While [the traditional TV commercial] might be how marketing started, the canvas has changed, and people’s attention spans are in so many places with phones and all the different things and demands and information available at our fingertips,” says Todd Kaplan, chief marketing officer of Kraft Heinz.

Multiple sources say that the budgets for these projects can range from the tens of thousands for a raw digital series to north of $50 million for the most star-studded, ambitious efforts, particularly if they are planning to launch off a major event like the Super Bowl or World Cup. 

“Brands trying to reach mass audiences, Hollywood having mastered it in a way through entertainment, it’s just another, another example of how those forces joining and coming together can lead to bigger, greater, better work,” says Walaszczyk.

Of course, there are real challenges to this new paradigm. The bar for brand content is in many ways higher than for traditional entertainment. People may enjoy trashy TV shows like Love Island, but they find trashy advertising to just be, well, trashy.

“Every one of our clients realizes that, generally speaking, consumers don’t love ads,” says David Anderson, an executive in UTA’s brand advisory group. “They don’t love watching ads. They don’t love being interrupted by ads.”

For many large companies, that means their ambitions are getting bigger too, be they a General Mills (owner of Pillsbury and Betty Crocker) or a Mazda. General Mills, for example, will debut a high-profile campaign starring Shaquille O’Neal focused on its Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Lucky Charms, Reese’s Puffs and Honey Nut Cheerios cereal brands starting September 1, with the NBA star awarding some lucky buyers of the company’s products (including Pillsbury) prizes that include golds bars or a Honey Nut Cheerios hot tub.

In July, the grocery chain Albertson’s partnered with Procter & Gamble on a scripted series called Rico’s Tacos, a lighthearted show about a family building a taco business (using P&G products along the way); Prada turned to Barry Jenkins to direct a short film highlighting the luxury house’s fall/winter 2026 collection; and on July 22, Lavazza launched a digital-short series directed by Francesca Scorsese, starring herself and her dad, Martin, exploring New York City — while drinking espresso, of course. 

“That’s what it’s all about,” says Martin Scorsese, lifting his Lavazza espresso cup in the Family Blend series.

The show was inspired by Francesca Scorsese’s TikTok, where she posts fun videos, often with her father, showing off their family dynamic.

“If you’re in this business, you’ve watched his movies, you’ve appreciated what he’s about, you’ve appreciated his cinematic excellence,” says Drew Buckley, president and COO of Propagate Content, which produced the series. “Now to see this new version of him on TikTok was always interesting, but to see his love for Francesca, that is the No. 1 dynamic you see.” 

Family Blend will live on YouTube and TikTok and is a textbook example of how increasingly brands and their in-house teams are chasing every marketer’s holy grail: authenticity.

And taste. “They want specifically the founder’s taste,” says Grazer of what brands
are looking for. “Because we make movies that inspire people. They are designed to inspire people.”

All of them go beyond the 30-second ad to become bona fide stories in their own right. 

“We have this philosophy that I’ve been bringing over here to Kraft Heinz, and I call it ‘marketing that happens,’ and it’s really understanding how brands live beyond the walls of paid media,” says Kraft Heinz’s Kaplan. “Paid media is great, and you can still buy a great TV spot, or you can still do an ad here or there. But it’s how you can create organic conversations that are really opt-in from consumers and things that people want to share with their friends.”

Star power helps. A-listers from Ben Affleck (Dunkin’) to Timothée Chalamet (Kalshi) are happy to work with brands, too, and eager in many cases to play an active part in the creative process.

Affleck, for example, has directed ads for Dunkin’ and Stella Artois through his company Artists Equity, which has found brand content to be a pivotal part of its business, working with stars like David Beckham and Jennifer Aniston in the process to tell those stories.

“What has shifted is, for the first time, celebrities or talent see that brand advertising or marketing can be brand-accretive, not brand-dilutive,” says Dewey.

Indeed, it wasn’t that long ago that big stars would limit their commercial work to foreign countries like Japan, lest they degrade their reputations stateside.

“Having been on the marketing side and managing traditional creatives, you can see why talent was skeptical of doing advertising, because it used to be a dirty little secret or something you do for money,” says Dewey.

But the ground has shifted significantly in the past few years.

“Sophisticated agents realize that it’s not just about a monetary transaction,” says Anderson. “It’s great to see a celebrity’s face on a billboard promoting their next film or television show; does it really matter if that billboard’s advertising a car?”

Sometimes, it can even be about getting a positive message across.

Matt Damon was having a hard time breaking through. Not exactly a normal state of affairs for the Odyssey actor. Alongside his acting work, Damon in 2009 co-founded the charity
Water.org, which seeks to provide clean drinking water to people in communities throughout the world where it is scarce. But the work of his charity never traveled quite as far in culture as the work he does onscreen.

“We thought it was hard 17 years ago — it’s only become harder,” laments Damon, speaking with The Hollywood Reporter in a well-appointed co-working space in New York’s Flatiron District in June. So how does an A-list actor help his charity brand stand out in a cluttered media environment? How about turning to rap? Damon created an alter ego, “The Nomad” (it’s “Damon” spelled backward) and released an original song in a video meant to catch people’s attention, drawing millions of views across platforms.

Water.org is not a Fortune 500 company, but in a world where every brand is in a desperate hunt for fractured consumer attention, even it needs to think about the entertainment value of what it puts out into the world.

“The Nomad thing was just a silly idea that we all agreed was silly enough that it might actually work and might get a little attention,” Damon says. “It’s all about just trying to find these different access points for people to understand that this is a problem.” 

For any company (or even a charity), being relevant in online chatter is actually a critical part of their overall communications strategies. UTA has created what it calls its Culture Index, which is meant to demonstrate the cultural relevance of brands in the marketplace.  The research underscores the extent to which brands have to be constantly thinking about how they can resonate, and that for Gen Z, an overwhelming majority expect brands to be culturally relevant … or risk not being relevant at all.

A former network news producer who now works in marketing for a major company says that their team has been tasked with being more reactive to online chatter to keep their brand fresh, relevant and trending. Just look at all the corporate CEO taste tests that took place after the CEO of McDonald’s starred in a viral video trying out his company’s new burger, a video that suggested a lack of enthusiasm for the product.

Just as a morning show producer may prep the anchors to discuss what’s trending that day, brand studios want to be able to jump on those trends, too. Sometimes, as with Damon (intentionally) or McDonald’s (unintentionally), they can even start those trends.

Consider Astronomer. A year ago, the data and technology company was in a viral social media crisis after its CEO and another senior executive were caught on camera during the “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert. So the company called Reynolds’ Maximum Effort, arguably the foremost expert in “fastvertising.” 

In days, the studio persuaded Gwyneth Paltrow to serve as the “temporary spokesperson” for the brand in a YouTube video that played off of the moment, giving it a much-needed win at a challenging time. “We feel like the ultimate product we create is audience joy, and we’re a little agnostic as to the method of delivery,” says Dewey. “If it’s film or TV, great. If it’s marketing, great.”

But at the heart of this new media world of brand-as-studio is the disintermediation of attention. And there’s a generational shift going on in the workforce, too. As Mark Lukasiewicz, dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, tells it, many of his students are finding that brands are now among the most eager employers, rattling off former students who landed jobs inside marketing departments across industries.

“American companies are desperately in search of storytellers,” he says. “They’re not just writing press releases anymore. They’re producing live events. They’re producing livestreams. They’re creating longform videos or video series or podcast series. So all of those skills of storytelling now populate worlds in finance, in manufacturing, in trade, in public policy, in politics itself. Any congressional leader has a media operation, right? So those skills are coming into play in a way that in some ways gives our students more options than the prior generation had to use the skills they are getting here.”

Third parties aren’t being cut out, of course. Ad agencies and talent firms are still very much in the mix,
but big brands now have in-house teams that can more effectively coordinate their efforts, just as a production executive would work with filmmakers and production companies on a studio project. 

In fact, the growing trend has served as a lifeline for some independent production companies that have been able to expand their slates with brand content even as TV production declines and feature films remain as challenging as ever to get made. 

Kareem Rahma realized his new show was big-time when he heard about the pit crew. The creator is best known for his YouTube series Subway Takes, but for his latest project, he traded the subway for a studio: a talk show called Pit Stop Tonight. The show was conceptualized by Toyota and pitched to Rahma, and it lives on the auto brand’s YouTube and social channels. The pit crew in question builds the set at the start of each episode in seconds, with occasional appearances along the way as Rahma interviews Toyota Racing drivers.

“I just thought that the creative was super dialed-in and buttoned-up,” Rahma says.

And he’s far from alone.

“Entertainment is a growth strategy,” says Colin Rosenblum, a YouTube creator who stars with his co-host Samir Chaudry in a travel adventure series for Lexus called Colin and Samir Start Over.

For brands, it also is about the changing nature of advertising, which was once dominated by audience demographics but is now ruled by hard data. According to multiple brand and advertising sources, the push in recent years for more “performance” marketing — where specific outcomes (like a product purchase) are being measured — has led some brands to produce more content in more places. A video on Instagram or YouTube can simply deliver more measurable results than a TV ad, even as streamers and networks race to launch their own performance-driven measurement products to try and catch up.

“It’s really about impact and penetration and reach,” says Grazer. “Shortform can often have much wider reach and quicker, faster penetration instead of doing a long movie.”

That’s a big reason brands are releasing their original programming on platforms like YouTube, Instagram or TikTok. Major streaming services like Prime Video, Hulu and HBO Max also are getting into the game, picking up brand-funded content like the Imagine-produced and Ford-backed mockumentary John Bronco, which streamed on Hulu, or Dying to Know, a Google Pixel-backed travel series that lived on HBO Max alongside season three of The White Lotus, exploring the sights and sounds of Thailand.

“You’re starting to see more and more brands add value, and what we’re starting to hear from the distribution side is there’s more of a willingness to not have that just be this background social content,” says Anderson.

Consider the recently ordered comedy DINKS at Prime Video, a show about conspicuous
consumption featuring households without kids (Double Income, No Kids) that is being partly financed by Publicis, presumably with plans for plenty of brand integrations for its clients.

Brands, Walaszczyk says, are developing slates, and that slate “is going to include your digital footprint, your creator footprint, your social footprint, your product placement, your narrative integrations, whether that’s going to be in non-scripted, scripted, digital, and so on.

“They have more of an opportunity now to be more targeted in terms of the audiences that they’re trying to reach, because you can be specific when you’re doing it digitally, and you can be obviously more broad when you’re doing it theatrically, or when you’re doing it in scripted TV or streaming,” she adds.

In some cases, brands are making a splash by releasing it everywhere, all at once.

In June, Nike gathered influencers, fashion journalists and invited guests to its midtown Manhattan office. On a regulation basketball court that had been repurposed as a screening space, the apparel brand unveiled new fashion collaborations and debuted its ambitious World Cup brand campaign, one that included cameos from the likes of LeBron James, Travis Scott, Kim Kardashian, Channing Tatum, Young Miko, Lisa and Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso, as well as soccer stars Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland.

While a version of the Hollywood-themed campaign ran on TV, it also spawned hundreds of mini pieces of content that continue the story across social platforms.

“Storytelling has helped build Nike for the last 50-something years, and this isn’t a moment where we’re going to say we’re not making ads anymore, or we’re not telling stories, even though maybe consumer consumption of stories has changed,” says Helena Thornton, vp global brand marketing at Nike. “We just have to find new, innovative ways to meet consumers where they are. There will always still be a place in the world for us to have a really epic point of view in a moment in sport that feels like it’s once in a lifetime, but we also have to be willing to find new pathways in.”

Even if a campaign starts its life on TV, it inevitably will live everywhere.

That said, Hollywood and Madison Avenue are still not in the same business. Brand managers could write dense pitch decks about the personality traits of a new cookie, and any content that comes out of it needs to abide by those brand rules.

“They still fundamentally speak two different languages. Hollywood is talent-driven, IP-driven, deal-driven and story-driven,” says Dewey. “Madison Avenue is getting better, but not great at speaking that language.”

Ultimately, creatives and CMOs seem to agree that the genie is out of the bottle: Brands need to be more ambitious in their content, forging direct relationships with consumers and partnering with creative people in the process. 

Just as the internet scrambled the economics of media writ large, it is changing how everyone — be they brands, celebrities, creators or Hollywood studios — commands people’s attention. And so much of popular culture now lives online anyway, it is simply a more natural place for brands to be.

“The pace that culture is evolving right now and changing is rapid, especially on the internet and driven by the internet, and creators know how to respond to the moment at pace with culture, and so it makes total sense for brands to turn to people like us who have had years worth of making and telling stories in a very short amount of time that responds to what’s happening in culture,” Rosenblum says.

Of course, even then, expectations need to be tempered. Whether it’s a sponsored White Lotus miniseries on HBO Max, a brand-funded series on Prime or an original concept on YouTube, the truth is, entertainment is hard.

“It’s hard for the best creators in the world to make a great TV show,” says Anderson. “That’s the simple reality, and so the idea that someone on Madison Avenue is just going to suddenly create the next big hit is just not super likely.”

But they may sell some inventory trying. 

This story appeared in the Aug. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.