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The advertising industry is changing fast. Budgets are dropping while more than half of CMOs are responding to consumer movement and increasing spend on social advertising. There, advertisers face less stable pricing and targeting, and audiences have been primed by highly entertaining feeds to hate disruption. To break through, a higher creative standard is being set: Brands are asking how they can create true entertainment value around their product. Advertisers are feeling the pressure.
This summer’s Barbie movie is a standout—with a highly talented director at the helm in Greta Gerwig and star-power headed by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the iconic IP is commanding attention. Similar to 2014’s The Lego Movie, Warner Bros. Pictures is also accomplishing impressive feats of cross-promotion, leveraging HGTV to premiere Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge—a four-part home renovation series hosted by Ashley Graham—right before opening weekend.
Consumer attention now more than ever requires putting dollars toward producing media with strong scripts, characters and stories that carry real entertainment value and work across multiple platforms. Barbie is far from the first to do it, but she represents a new reality for advertisers.
Aim to entertain
We’ve been engaged in a decades-long digital transformation of how we live, how we work and, as a consequence, how we advertise. Brands moved from newspapers to radio spots; now they aren’t even restricted to store shelves, commercial breaks or billboards in Times Square or on Sunset Boulevard. Anywhere people spend their day has commercial appeal, and with rapid advancements including mixed reality and generative AI, there’s no hard limit to what comprises a channel within reach.
People are inundated with calls to action, and they’re savvy to when they’re being targeted. By varying estimates, we’re exposed to anywhere from hundreds to thousands of ads a day. When attention is at a premium, advertisers need to offer more value to hold and captivate that attention. Our ads need to entertain, and that shouldn’t be limited to the branded creative we’re seeing on the big screen. Premium storytelling can be created wherever we can conceive of it—in any format and of any length, from 10 seconds to 10 minutes to 2 hours.
Listen to your audience
The term “content creator” applies to the makeup tutorial on TikTok, the podcaster breaking down Succession’s finale, the producer making shorts of VFX explainers—and also the director of a TV show or feature film. When everything can be a channel, worry less about where you find your audience and more what will genuinely resonate with them on the platforms upon which they consume.
In 2019, a fan of the classic sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air uploaded a short film to YouTube, reimagining what the show might look like modern-day, and racked up significant views—one of which was from Will Smith himself. Smith, alongside the teams at Westbrook and Universal Television, saw an organic opportunity in one arena, YouTube, and from there sought ways to amplify and empower what was already working. Fast forward, and the fan, Morgan Cooper, is an executive producer on and creator of Bel-Air, and the show is being renewed for its third season on Peacock. The series’ success has led to a nostalgia clothing line, Bel-Air Athletics, a reunion of the original cast of Fresh Prince and a collaboration with Airbnb to open up the original Fresh Prince Bel-Air Mansion to visitors.
While The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air already represented highly valuable IP, it had not yet been translated to new generations. That value exploded when the creative team listened first to where their voice already showed up culturally and then built out the opportunities where audiences could engage with the nostalgia Bel-Air offered.
Make it messy
Sometimes the best campaign is no campaign at all. People want messy, candid and authentic storytelling. And the best voices to deliver that resonance are creators given the space to freely create.
On TikTok earlier this year, nearly 4 million viewers watched and over 200,000 engaged with a 10-minute long ad from Hilton—an eternity in scroll time. How did they do it? By giving creative reign to influencers like Chris Olsen, Kelz Wright and Baron Ryan—talented professionals who have amassed huge followings because they already understand what works on the platform. Hilton gave their partners space to lean into their existing voice and engage with the campaign’s core messages in their own creative style. Instead of something that felt scripted, viewers had self-deprecating humor, seasoned cuts and stylized editing optimal for TikTok, and a more believable story about what it means to “stay” with Hilton.
Similarly, AMC Networks recently partnered with the whiskey brand Johnnie Walker to launch You Are Here, a four-part travel series hosted by Colman Domingo. Leaning into the brand’s tagline “Keep Walking,” the branded show takes us to cities of personal importance to Domingo for conversations with other creatives and friends that reside there. When audiences tune in, they’re not being asked to buy Johnnie Walker; the goal is to give a no-strings-attached viewer experience that seeds the association between the product and a moving entertainment experience.
Having spent the early part of my career in advertising, I’ve seen firsthand the budgets and time spent building a traditional TV commercial and subsequent campaign. Today, you can make hours of non-scripted television and create hundreds of campaign assets all at the same time. We did this with Samsung and BBH to launch the new Galaxy phone with the reality competition series Exposure: Not only did we make an eight-episode season, we also shot more than 300 campaign assets during production that were used for the full campaign roll out—efficiencies that led to cost savings.
My sell, which is to not sell
I know CMOs are being asked to “do more with less,” and shrinking budgets and recession forecasts can make big creative concepts feel risky. Is this the right time to take a big swing?
Here’s my pitch: When you invest in building a team and pursuing a concept that genuinely entertains audiences, you’re extending your creative runway tenfold. When the Barbie movie hits theaters, Mattel is not just thinking about ticket sales. The team is looking at the story of their main character and everywhere she can show up in the lives of audiences—from inspo for a home renovation to getting ready for a night out, to imagining new career paths for young girls. Every piece of content around this film—and there will be hundreds (thousands if you include UGC)—is a piece of marketing for the brand. No amount of money in a budget can buy that.
Culturally, Barbie has been reinvented time and time again, across 250 different careers. For some, Barbie started as a doll. But the reason this 64-year-old icon will be introduced to a whole new generation is because she’s still entertaining.
Aim to entertain, build a real relationship with your audience, and you’ll have something much bigger than a one-off transaction. You’ll have a fan for life. Forget that you’re selling at all. Imagine that.
