2024 laid the groundwork for brand studios. Will it start to pay off in 2025?

Studios aren’t the only way brands are getting more involved in entertainment production either. In December, Sugar23 and production and distribution company Fifth Season kicked-off a three year venture to work with advertisers to co-finance $100 million of productions. That’s another one of the ways entertainment production companies are working with marketers. It all lays the groundwork for marketers to move beyond mostly creating advertising that interrupts programming people want to watch to (potentially) create that very entertainment.

“Brands have spent decades, many decades, renting other people’s stories,” said Paul Furia, head of content and creative packaging at independent agency Media by Mother, adding that interrupting network programming made sense when there were captive audiences who had to tune in to appointment viewing but streaming models have changed the game. “Audiences have all the choice and all the control. Building your own studio flips the script. Why pay to interrupt someone else’s story when you can fund and tell your own story that’s built on your brand’s DNA and engages your target demos in a way that’s right for your brand?” 

Furia expects more major marketers to continue to set up shop with their own brand studios in 2025. Marketers are regularly asking how they can transition from interruption to “more engaging storytelling,” noted Furia. He’s not alone in seeing increased interest in potential studios and ways for brands to be involved in creating entertainment properties. Marketers, ad agency execs and entertainment industry execs say anecdotally that there has been steady interest throughout 2024 that they expect to continue into 2025. How much of that interest turns into brand studio announcements will depend on marketers’ level of interest as well as the success stories of the brands already doing it.

The brand studios are still in the beginning stages of getting that work off the ground. But execs there have said that they will likely start to roll out some original work this year. There are, of course, already the Barbies and Lego Movies of the world for brands to consider but those massive blockbuster movies are the exception rather than the norm of what brand entertainment will be. 

Making a movie or TV show takes much more time than a 30-second ad. And there’s “a lot of collaboration in this ecosystem,” explained Matt Rotondo, head of brands at Sugar23, who added that the major headwind for companies like his when brands consider setting up studios are “bad experiences” of the past as well as “misunderstandings of how things work.” 

“We’re trying to remove as much friction as we can and overcome those perpetual obstacles,” said Rotondo. The appeal for brands to create brand studios and having a bigger hand in TV and movies is simple to Rotondo: “Entertainment is a loyalty program,” he said. “It’s what makes you keep your Netflix subscription, your Paramount+ subscription, because of the originals that you can only get there.” Should brands be able to deliver that kind of entertainment offering to people, the assumption is that it would give brands a deeper connection with their potential consumers and eventually lead to more loyalty. 

One brand studio announced in 2023, meanwhile, is one to watch for this year. In April 2023, French Fashion house Saint Laurent rolled out its own production company, Saint Laurent Productions. If you tuned into the Golden Globes earlier this month and saw Netflix’s Emelia Perez pick up the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy you were also seeing a brand-funded film win big. Saint Laurent was a co-producer of the film directed by Jacques Audiard starring Selena Gomez, Karla Sofia Gascon and Zoe Saldana.

“[Marketers] always want to create more ways to reach people because there’s so many different generations now who consume very differently [than before],” said Jennifer Cowan, vp of entertainment at The Marketing Arm who specializes in product placement and brand integration. 

The question isn’t so much whether marketers will continue to ink deals to create brand studios, but what the reception to their content will be. “If brands can deliver that kind of quality content, I don’t think audiences would care about who it’s from,” said Furia. “They just have to focus on being storytellers, not salespeople.”