‘Storytelling hierarchy is starting to flatten’: Tribeca Enterprise CEO on why brands are making the festival a must-stop

“The hesitation to work with brands has changed as filmmakers see that brands are really investing in storytelling,” said Tribeca Enterprises CEO Rebecca Glashow. “They’re letting them tell their stories and be filmmakers who can be supported by a brand versus being heavy-handed and trying to stick a product in the middle of their show.”

The official numbers back that up. Brand sponsorships for TribecaX are up 13% year-on-year, with new entrants including Amazon’s AWS, Lavazza, McDonald’s, Microsoft and TikTok. Sponsorship revenue has risen 23% over the same period. TribecaX submissions grew 17%, driving a nearly 10% increase in submission revenue.

“You’re seeing brands that are struggling to cut through and have an emotional connection realise they need to do something different,” said Glashow. “We’ve created this environment where we’re showcasing incredible content, we’re making introductions, we’re having everyone in the same room in the heart of a massive festival.”

The marketers there tend to fall into two camps. The first already have deep relationships with Tribeca, are playing a long game with entertainment and have the corporate infrastructure to back it — in-house studios, dedicated entertainment execs and a mandate from the top. The second share the same instinct but are earlier in the journey, using the festival as an on-ramp into an industry they haven’t yet fully committed to.

“We worked very early on with Dick’s Sporting Goods, for example, and made a bunch of films with them, and became incredibly close, and ultimately they’ve determined that this is really working for them, and eventually did build an in-house studio,” said Glashow. 

Getting there wasn’t straightforward. For a long time, the entertainment industry kept CMOs at arm’s length, and not entirely without reason. When brand involvement meant little more than a logo shoehorned into a scene or a product awkwardly written into dialogue, creative types had a point. But the market has a way of softening old positions. As financing dried up and brands got more sophisticated about what they actually wanted from storytelling, the mutual suspicion started to give way to something more useful. Neither side got everything they wanted. Both got enough.

“What I’m seeing is marketers who really embrace and lean into storytelling organically — whether it be their background or whether they see the impact it has in community and culture — and they just feel confident and brave enough in their roles to lean into that,” said Glashow.

The growth of the creator economy has helped. It’s given marketers a lower-risk entry point into entertainment. Where a first-time filmmaker is an unknown quantity, a creator arrives with a proven audience, an established voice and a track record of delivery. Making the deal, therefore, becomes considerably simpler. Moreover, top creators are now operating diversified media businesses with multiple revenue streams, spanning content products, licensing, events and equity deals. In other words, marketers aren’t just buying a mention in a video so much as they’re partnering with something closer to a media company.

“I think the storytelling hierarchy is starting to flatten from where we were a few years ago,” said Glashow. “It’s creating more opportunities for brands to find the right way into their audiences.”

There is a caveat to all this. Whether it’s creators, a filmmaker, a script or a documentary, none of it means anything if it doesn’t reach an audience. It’s an ongoing distribution challenge the industry is still trying to figure out collectively. The same goes for measurement. The ROI on this sort of marketing is softer than a CPM or CPC — one that’s rooted in cultural influence, filmmaker relationships and long-term brand resonance. 

“We’re at the end of an era where brands could buy their way into culture. CPMs on Meta are up 222% in the last decade,” said Dan Salkey, co-founder and strategy partner at creative company Small World. “Audiences have never had more agency to choose what they actually want to watch. The brands that are really winning today are the ones who understand that.”