BRANDS ARE OPENING ENTERTAINMENT STUDIOS

After the success of its Katseye collaboration, Gap Inc. recently listed a job posting for a VP of ‘Entertainment-Driven Storytelling’ (cc: Rachel Karten), doubling down on producing its own entertainment content and effectively launching an in-house studio.

And, they're not the not only ones.

Here’s a list of other brands that are becoming players in content & entertainment:

• Dick’s Sporting Goods: A Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios (2025)

• Chick-Fil-A: Pennycake/Trillith (2024)

• Starbucks Studios (2024)

  • Partnered with production manager Sugar23 + Fifth Season who raised $100M for their branded content play (2024)

• Saint Laurent Productions (2023)

• LVMH: 22 Montaigne Entertainment (2022)

  • Also noteworthy: The CEO of Kering, LVMH’s luxury competitor, bought blockbuster-talent agency CAA (2023)

• Nike: Waffle Iron Entertainment (2021)

• Mail Chimp Presents (2019)

• Redbull Media House (2007)

  • Worth its own paragraph

• P&G Studios (1949 - 2010; relaunched in 2025)

It’s a meaningful shift after brands accepted their role as promoters (vs. owners) of content for the past ~70 years and is a major call back to the early 1950s.

In the fifties, television studios like NBC were not involved in creative decisioning. Advertising agencies came up with programs and wrote them, with brands, such as, P&G owning vertically-integrated production studios and providing financing.

Brands became de facto copyright holders, and it’s how the likes of P&G ended up owning over 20 soap operas, including As the World Turns, which ran from 1956 - 2010.

That also positioned brands as the single, individual sponsors of their shows, soaking up a healthy 1/3rd of national eyeballs as they aired on one of only three TV channels.

It took a short 10 years for TV networks to realize that the the supply of content was limited but the demand from advertisers was high and expanding as radio attention accrued to them.

Pat Weaver at NBC saw the opportunity to replicate the ‘magazine format’ on TV (one piece of content, multiple advertisers), and it meant NBC needed to start producing + financing the shows themselves (making them the owners).

Eventually, other networks/producers caught on and by the 2000s, there were hundreds of cable channels.

Yet, the booming supply of content did not prompt a resurgence in brand entertainment studios. Yes, the audiences were segmenting and fracturing, but they would also show up repeatedly for their programs/entertainment of choice and an advertiser could do the same.

Today, social media has largely broken the stickiness of the viewer-to-content relationship.

Algorithmic feeds have made viewers comfortable with a stream of anonymous faces and ideas, deprioritizing relationships and shifting value to the platform vs. the creator.

This pressure is also consistent for advertisers who pay ever increasing tolls to rent attention to be remembered in a system designed for anonymity.

So, the brands with the checkbooks to do so are aiming to generate their own attention and go direct with audiences.

Here’s some of the stuff they have been working on. Try to guess which brand worked on. (Choose from: Redbull, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Starbucks, Nike, Saint Laurent, Mail Chimp, P&G, Chick Fil A).

• Madwoman’s Game

  • Documentary about the ‘journey of a young Latina chess enthusiast’

• Emilia Perez

  • A movie about a Mexican cartel leader that retains a struggling attorney to help him fake his own death

• The Flight of Bryan

  • A movie about ‘a ragtag group determined to master the skies with a human-powered aircraft in the 1970s.’

• Sue Bird: In the Clutch

  • Documentary about WNBA basketball legend ‘confronts her next challenge -retiring from the only life she's ever known.’

• Second Act

  • A series that ‘follows 5 people who've shifted careers in pursuit of their passions’

• The Turn Around

  • A documentary about Philadelphia Phillies fan that inspires his city to give a struggling shortstop a game-changing standing ovation.

• Ice Lions

  • ‘A scripted series based on the true story of Kenya's national ice hockey team’

• Beyond the Gates

  • A scripted series about ‘the lives of the Dupree Family an affluent, multi-generational African-American family living in a prestigious, gated community in Maryland’