Inside Dentsu’s plan to make entertainment a part of every brand’s budget

Cathy Boxall brokers plenty of those deals as the global head of entertainment at Dentsu, and wants brands to hand over bigger ones. “I really think they should be doing more of that,” said Boxall. 

Her week at Mipcom, the TV industry’s annual market in Cannes that wraps up Oct. 15, puts some legwork behind the wish. She turned up with “some quite specific briefs” from clients and a list of partners to track down. Roughly half her time goes to meetings about those projects, from licensing execs to producers, and from creators to creatives. The rest goes on panels, where she can see where the industry thinks it’s headed. 

Some of the signposts are already up. Dentsu is a producer and financier on the upcoming Angry Birds Three film as well as its lead marketer, and has found room in the film for two clients (she declined to name them). Most of its entertainment deals run smaller, albeit on the same idea of tucking the ad inside something people want to watch, be it a film, a microdrama or something else entirely. 

“It’s like a flywheel in the way we operate with IP owners,” said Boxall. “Because we’re an investor, we’re very very close to the production. And therefore we’re able to bring opportunities to Dentsu clients first to market at a really deep level, whether that be through integrations or partnership opportunities, often exclusive that they’ve got access to before anybody else.”

Dentsu has had that flywheel built for a while. Boxall joined 11 years ago as global production and development director, and for most of that stretch the unit spun slower than it was designed to since brands weren’t spending enough to push it. That money is turning up now. Entertainment used to be “something you would do with your innovation budget,” Boxall said, and it was “held quite separately within the business” from the rest of the brand strategy. Now, “forward-thinking brands are thinking about these things as one holistic opportunity and not in those silos,” she added. 

Cheaper formats mean more of them can afford to. Creators did the heavy lifting, and in doing so kicked up a whole wave behind them, from microdramas and social publishers to video podcasts and YouTube-native series — with brands footing a growing share of the bill for all of it.

Dentsu’s slate shows it. Last December, it teamed up with P&G Studios on the Golden Pear Affair, a soap opera built for phones around P&G’s personal care brand Native and billed as the first feature-length “microsoap” co-produced by a U.S. brand. Microdrama studio Pixe USA made it and all 55 episodes were live by the end of February. That same month, Dentsu signed a global partnership with Iconic Arts to help brands build their own franchises with anime high on the list. A multi-year deal with L.A. creator studio Made by Us followed in June, aimed at turning online talent into shows and films that brands can buy into from the start. 

“It’s a lot easier conversation [with brands] when you’re talking about these lower barriers to entry around social-first short form than perhaps it would’ve been historically if you were just talking about a five part documentary series that was going to run on a broadcaster,” said Boxall. 

The point came up frequently during Advertising Week New York. There at the event, creators, creatives, marketers and agency execs debated how brands should be thinking about the opportunity ahead of them, given the importance of taste and panache for making something like this work. 

Dentsu sees plenty of money in this for an ad holding company and it has company. Rival holdcos and talent agencies are chasing the same brand budgets with creator shops and even the movie studios elbowing in alongside them. 

“The big difference for Dentsu is we’re completely independent,” said Boxall. “When we are taking our brands’ opportunities when we’re working on culture strategies or entertainment strategies for clients, we don’t have any particular direction that we need to push those clients in.”