Anthony Freedman: the ad exec betting on the golden age of branded entertainment.

“PepsiCo and Mondelez are moving into branded entertainment. The two advertisers have come to the same radical solution to their marketing problems; that to survive in a world where adblocking is rising while attention spans dwindle, they must now be in the business of creating content that is so good that they can sell it.”

Before two comms teams frantically call me with edit requests, this is not a news announcement. It is taken from a feature I wrote 10 years ago on why advertisers were looking beyond the 30-second spot to build their own shows, games and ‘Hollywood-esque’ entertainment properties that were intrinsically linked to their brands.

But a decade later, CMOs are still trying to crack it. A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal declared “Madison Avenue lands a bigger role in Hollywood” as brands try to muscle in on the development of films, TV shows, events and music.

Anthony Freedman has worked at this intersection in various guises throughout his career in the industry. From founding entertainment agencies One Green Bean and Host in the early 2000s to within the walls of Havas, he’s been resolute in his belief that the most enduring companies will be built through advertising that doesn’t look anything like advertising.

Until now, it’s been an uphill battle. It’s not that marketers haven’t listened to, or even agreed with, Freedman. But the market was simply not ready for it. And if Mondelez and PepsiCo – two of the biggest ad spenders in the world, with infinite budget and influence at their disposal – struggled to create entertainment properties at any kind of scale, what hope did others have?

Freedman chalks up the challenges in the early days to a few things. Traditional broadcasters were the gatekeepers to audiences and there was little appetite for involving brands – and even less for running fully-funded branded shows. And that’s before you get into the complexities of the economic model – Freedman recalls the absurdity of trying to price a 30-minute show using 30-second advertising rates – and achieving ambitious ratings targets simply to maintain an agreed time slot.

Then, there was the rise of social platforms, which gave brands a license to quietly (and cheaply) experiment in creating content that wasn’t necessarily about the hard sell, coupled with the pendulum swinging to performance marketing. “All this came along and somewhat displaced the tension around the idea of branded entertainment,” Freedman says.

“The whole thing was just too difficult, too risky and too expensive at a point when advertising was still relatively effective,” he says.

But that’s all changed. This interview could be spent discussing Freedman’s thoughts on audience fragmentation, TV decline and the ineffectiveness of traditional paid advertising. But the gist is that he believes all the elements have finally come together for the “golden age of branded entertainment.”

“The more forward-thinking marketing leaders or brand-ambitious CEOs are saying, ‘The way that we used to build brands doesn’t work as well as it did. We’re spending billions, but it’s not delivering any enduring brand health. Simultaneously, there’s a huge reordering and disruption within the entertainment industry, so they must think more laterally around how money can be made. This has created more willingness for the entertainment industry to want, or rather, need to partner with brands,” he says. “There’s an open invitation for brands to get involved at a time when brands need to find new ways to deliver upper funnel awareness and disposition.”

Crucially, audiences today are much more willing to accept brands as part of entertainment. Just take movies such as Apple’s F1, Netflix’s reboot of Happy Gilmore, Barbie and Emilia Pérez, where CMOs have spent millions to get involved on and off screen. And viewers have largely been unfazed by their participation.