We’ve had branded entertainment since Proctor and Gamble invented soap operas back in the 1930s. But as media fragmentation has gone into hyperdrive over the past two decades, brands have been forced to diversify the ways in which they gain and hold our attention. It’s no longer viable or effective to overly depend on traditional paid media tools.
Marketers can create content and experiences that attract and engage audiences rather than interrupt and annoy them—and drive results. Some of the best examples of this is what we call “brand entertainment.” Brands of all stripes talk about it, but it is the exceptions that truly invest in making actual entertainment.
Of course, there’s box office hits like Barbie, The Lego Movie, and Super Mario Bros, but there’s also classics like BMW’s The Hire (2002), Red Bull “Stratos” from 2012, and the 2014 Patagonia doc DamNation.
Dick’s Sporting Goods has been funding and producing award-winning content for years. Over the past decade, the retailer has built an impressive catalog of five feature-length films and 10 short-form or episodic documentaries. Its 2014 doc We Could Be King premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, streamed on Netflix, and won the 2015 Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Sports Documentary. It won its second Sports Emmy for a doc called The Turnaround last year.
In August, it premiered its newest documentary, Big Dreams: The Little League World Series 2024, produced in partnership with Imagine Entertainment and MLB Studios. Soon after, it officially announced an in-house studio division called Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios, to formalize its commitment to entertainment as a pillar of its brand.
On this month’s episode of Brand New World, I’m talking to Dick’s chief marketing officer Emily Silver about why now is the perfect time for an in-house studio, how they measure success on projects, and where it all goes from here.
How the new in-house studio will impact how it invests in entertainment: First, you’ll see us take a more aggressive stance in the number of films and pieces of content we put out. Two, it helps us brand the studio so that we start to build more of a name for ourselves in the [entertainment] industry and attract different writers and different projects, which is already happening. And three, it gives us the opportunity to put a little more structure and framework around what content we want to produce and where we want to lean in to help build for the long term. It really just helps formalize the process in a way that we can be a little more choice-ful about what we want to do in the future.
How the brand evaluates potential entertainment projects:
For us, it’s really making sure that the story that we’re going to tell, or whoever we’re partnering with is going to tell, really fits with our values and our point of view on sports, which is the power to change lives and build community. It really has to click those two boxes, and we want to tell transformative stories that highlight grit and raw humanity and heartbreak in the lessons learned behind sports.Advice for marketers curious about entertainment:
There’s a lot of money out there and you can see how this can go very wrong and very commercial very quickly. My advice would be to hold to your creative standards, and find people who think similarly to you about creative excellence. It really is about finding that match of people that you’d want to write with, and want to produce, and direct with. Making sure that your vision, and the mission of the company and the team align. Because there’s endless content out there. As we all know, the trick is getting people to care and to watch it.
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