Between media voices and the trade articles, I feel like I’ve been watching the same announcements cycle through my LinkedIn feed for months.

Brands are either getting into entertainment or they’re setting up entertainment studios.

Dick's launched Cookie Jar & a Dream Studios.
Fanatics announced Fanatics Studios with OBB Media.
AB InBev cut a deal with Netflix in November.
WhatsApp made a Netflix doc about the Mercedes F1 team.

None of this is really that new, but the argument is the same every time. Traditional advertising is broken. Audiences want entertainment. Get in or get left behind.

I want to push on something underneath that pitch.

F1 didn't make Drive to Survive. Box to Box, alongside Netflix, made Drive to Survive. F1's contribution was unreal access. They opened the paddock, the team principals' meetings, the drivers' rooms. That's a documentary partnership, not a brand making entertainment. F1 didn't have to figure out how to be a studio. They had to decide whether to let cameras into places they hadn't been before.

Mattel didn't make Barbie either. Warner Bros and Greta Gerwig made Barbie. Mattel had sixty-five years of cultural IP and made the call to trust an artist with it. The film Greta turned in is not what a brand committee would have approved, and Mattel let her make it anyway. They had enough underneath them to take their hands off the rails.

In both cases, the brand's job wasn't entertainment production. It was either giving access to something that already had narrative gravity (F1), or trusting a creative team to do something interesting with IP that already existed (Mattel). The actual entertainment-making was done by people whose whole profession is making entertainment, and those studios were also taking on the financial risk.

The brands doing brand entertainment well right now are following the same shape. Nike's Waffle Iron sells projects to HBO and Apple. AB InBev's draftLine partners with Netflix. LVMH's 22 Montaigne runs a slate across its maisons. Strategic platform on the brand side, creative collaboration on the production side. Nobody trying to do both jobs at once.

The brands trying to do both jobs at once are taking on something different. They're trying to do the thing that took F1 a hundred years of motorsport history to make possible, or Mattel sixty-five years of cultural saturation to enable, in-house and from a standing start. That can work. It's just a much harder thing than the LinkedIn posts make it sound, and it isn't always the highest-leverage move for the marketing budget.

Here's what I think gets lost.

There are thousands of ways to tell a story that connects with an audience. Making straight entertainment is one of them. It also happens to be expensive, can be slow to compound, and is often dependent on pre-existing cultural authority, which a lot of brands don't have.

And the metric a producer cares about (did it shift culture, did it get recognized) isn't always the metric a brand is being measured on internally.

A brand looking at this honestly might still decide entertainment is the right call. Some brands have the platform or the ambition to give it a swing.

But the question worth sitting with isn't "should we be making entertainment?" It's "what needle are we trying to move, and is entertainment the way to move it?"

As much as I’d love to promise every brand a hit series on a major streamer, the answer is often closer to home than a Netflix series. And it can have a much more measurable impact.

A customer whose life shifted because of something the brand did.
An employee whose work explains the brand better than any campaign could.
A founder who made an impossible call ten years ago and has been living with the consequences.

Patagonia, Square, YETI, John Deere, Huckberry. None of them started by setting up an in-house entertainment studio. They started by finding the stories already in their world and telling them in ways that would resonate with the audience they were building.

Branded entertainment isn't wrong. It's one option among many, sold harder right now than the others.

But I think the powerful move right now is to find the stories that a brand can tell better than anyone else, and tell those in unique and compelling ways. Make smaller investments, take a few more risks, bring a bit of play in, and build a direct audience that you can grow with.

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WHAT WE’RE WATCHING THIS WEEK:

Dear Rich - Salomon

We’re big believers in the idea that values stories are one of the strongest levers that a brand can explore when it comes to storytelling.

We define that as a story where a character lives a life that represents a value that the brand strives to uphold. They can drive a lot of emotions, but the underlying idea is that, by association, the audience will subtly shift their perception of the brand. This film does a spectacular job of telling a great story and keeps the brand to a minimum. Ironically, that can create a stronger overall connection.