The Case for Brand-Funded Content

What This Chapter Covers

Why two blockbusters, Barbie and The Lego Movie, set the bar too high for brands, what keeps brands on the sidelines, the record of brands that funded their own films, series, and documentaries and kept going, and where vertical video fits.

The Benchmark Trap: How Barbie and The Lego Movie Set the Bar for Branded Entertainment

Barbie grossed $1,447,685,476 worldwide on a $145 million budget. The Lego Movie made $467,229,007 on $60 million nine years earlier. For a brand marketer weighing whether to fund a film or series, those two examples became the gold standards, but they're outliers.

 

 

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Chapter 4 showed how partnerships earn attention by aligning a brand with culture. Brand-funded content lets a brand build into pop culture by telling stories people choose to watch, which no media buy can do.

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Mattel and Lego sell the characters on screen, so the movie is the product. A brand that sells sneakers or sandwiches plays a different game and needs a different scorecard.

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Even the toy box couldn't repeat the result. In July 2023, The New Yorker reported that Mattel had thirteen films announced and forty-five in development. Three years later, two have been released, and neither came close to Barbie.

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We call this the benchmark trap. When the example of brand-led entertainment everyone remembers is a billion-dollar hit, every other option looks like failure before it starts. Brands conclude that the choice is Barbie or nothing, and the middle of the market, the series, low-mid-budget films, documentaries, shorts, and vertical videos that brands can fund and own, goes unbuilt.

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If we are going to credit Barbie and The Lego Movie, Lego Masters deserves more credit than either. The building competition started on Channel 4 in the UK in 2017, and The Lego Group co-owns the format. It now has local versions in about 20 countries, including Fox's U.S. series since 2020. A film opens once. Every week, the show reminds people how much fun it is to build with Lego, then gives them a reason to buy more that weekend. It's still a toy company showcasing its own product, an easier path than any CPG brand has, but within that category, it's the better model.​

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Why Box Office Is the Wrong Scorecard for Brand-Funded Content

The 60-second spot became the 30. The 30 became the 15. The 15 became a five-second window before a skip button. Storytelling got reduced to interruption.

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Meanwhile, audiences binge whole seasons and prefer to pay subscription fees to avoid commercials while doing it. They follow creators whose work they seek out. The appetite for longer-form storytelling grew while the ad unit shrank. Even Instagram, built on short Reels, began testing 90-minute videos in October 2026.

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Box office measures a film as a business. A brand needs to measure more than that: whether people know it, like it, prefer it, and keep choosing it. BMW's most influential film work never sold a ticket, although it was so good that it could have. It didn't need to because BMW was selling cars, not tickets. 

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In our view, the right question for a brand is narrower and more useful: does this story give us a place in culture that advertising can't buy, and does it keep paying back after the media flight would have ended?

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Why Brands Don't Invest in Brand-Funded Content

The benchmark is one reason. How consumer brands are structured is the bigger reason.

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The money sits in the wrong column. Brand-funded content is usually paid for from the media budget and evaluated like a media buy on a quarterly cycle against cost per impression. A series takes a year or more to develop and produce, and its value accrues over years. We believe that mismatch kills more projects than any creative or financial risk.

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Nobody publishes the scorecard. Brands that fund entertainment rarely release results. The Hollywood Reporter's August 2026 feature on brands moving into Hollywood reported budgets ranging, per multiple unnamed sources, from the tens of thousands of dollars to north of $50 million. It reported no outcomes. Without public proof from other brands, Barbie's box office remains the number everyone cites.

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A failed show has a title, while a failed media flight disappears. A media buy that underperforms leaves no trace. A brand-funded series that underperforms has a name and a release date, and people remember it. In our view, the real risk is often lower than it looks, but the person signing off feels it more.

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One bad brand film ends the conversation. Many brands tried branded content once, usually a three-minute brand film few people watched, and decided content doesn't work. What they actually made was an ad, only longer. Brand-funded content starts with a story an audience would choose to watch, then finds the brand's place in it.

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There's also the question of how it gets done. Maximum Effort co-founder George Dewey told THR that Hollywood runs on talent, IP, deals and story, a language Madison Avenue is still learning. That language gap keeps brands from funding the stories they could own. It's a challenge, and it's solvable. Chapter 6 takes it on directly.

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The timing favors brands. The entertainment industry is contracting, and less content is being made: Luminate reports the industry is producing roughly a third fewer TV shows than before the 2023 strikes. For many small and midsize production companies, brand-funded work has become a lifeline. Platforms are taking that work: Hulu released Farmed and Dangerous, Prime Video released We Are Ayenda, and Netflix released The Seat and The Turnaround. Networks are also making room for brand-owned formats. On Nov. 23, CBS and Paramount+ will air the Pillsbury Bake-Off Classic, hosted by Drew Barrymore, bringing General Mills' 77-year-old baking contest back to primetime for the first time in more than 20 years.

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Brand-Funded Content Examples That Work

Brands have funded their own entertainment for more than 90 years. These examples show how it works across eras and categories, from 1930s radio to Netflix.

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P&G and the Soap Opera

Procter & Gamble began funding radio serials in 1933 with Ma Perkins. Guiding Light ran 72 years across radio and television. As the World Turns ran 54. The genre took its name from the soap companies that paid for it. P&G funded the show and put its products inside the story.

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​P&G never stopped. When its last network soap ended in 2010, it funded family films with Walmart for broadcast TV. In 2025 it went back to daytime with Beyond the Gates, a CBS Studios and NAACP venture produced in partnership with P&G Studios and now renewed through the 2027–28 season. In 2026, it rebuilt the soap opera for phones, covered later in this chapter.

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BMW Films and The Hire

In 2001, BMW had a problem. "We never had money to run a brand campaign," Jim McDowell of BMW North America later recalled. So BMW and its agency, Fallon, commissioned The Hire: eight short films starring Clive Owen as The Driver, directed by John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai, Guy Ritchie, Alejandro González Iñárritu, John Woo, Joe Carnahan and Tony Scott. Owen drove for, and away from, a cast that included Madonna, James Brown, Gary Oldman, Mickey Rourke, Forest Whitaker and Don Cheadle. BMW's Patrick McKenna described the approach as "a great Western movie where BMW was simply the horse."

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The films drew 11 million views in four months and more than 100 million by the end of their online run in 2005, according to BMW. BMW's U.S. sales rose from 189,423 vehicles in 2000 to 213,127 in 2001, the first year above 200,000, and to 232,032 in 2002. In its paper for the 2004 IPA Effectiveness Awards, where the campaign won Bronze, Fallon credited the films with more than doubling BMW's growth. The paper found the films delivered brand exposure at 56 percent of the cost of BMW's traditional advertising and earned about $26 million in free publicity. By 2001, BMW's cost per vehicle sold had fallen to 65 percent of its 1998 level. The Hire won the 2002 Cannes Cyber Lion Grand Prix and the first Titanium Lion in 2003, a category Contagious says the work inspired. The Museum of Modern Art added it to its permanent collection. It became a DVD distributed with Vanity Fair, a Dark Horse comic series, and a 2016 sequel, The Escape, with Owen back behind the wheel. In 2023, BMW Films returned with The Calm, starring Uma Thurman and Pom Klementieff, directed by Sam Hargrave and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

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Chipotle's Brand-Funded Films: Farmed and Dangerous and Beyond

In 2014, Chipotle funded Farmed and Dangerous, four 30-minute episodes of satirical comedy about industrial agriculture, produced by Piro and released on Hulu. "It's marketing," Chipotle's then-CMO Mark Crumpacker told Fortune. "But it's marketing based on our values."

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Piro cites it as Hulu's most successful series premiere at the time, and 89% of viewers reported more favorable feelings toward Chipotle. Piro reported that same-store sales grew 13% during the promotional period while industry peers declined. Then the show was sold internationally. "Meaning a network paid Chipotle to distribute their advertising, as opposed to the other way around," says Piro co-founder Tim Piper.

Farmed and Dangerous was one chapter in a longer run. Chipotle's animated short films, each set to a cover of a popular song, came before and after it: 2011's Back to the Start, and 2013's The Scarecrow, which expanded into a video game, then 2016's A Love Story and 2021's A Future Begins. While the series never found a partner for a second season, Chipotle kept funding its own stories.

The films delivered. Back to the Start won Cannes Lions Grand Prix awards in both Film and Branded Content in 2012. According to WARC, The Scarecrow drew 13.3 million views and 614 million PR impressions, and its companion game was downloaded more than 650,000 times; 64% of the 60,052 buy-one-get-one offers it issued were redeemed. According to its creative agency, A Future Begins surpassed 50 million social views and became Chipotle's most socially engaged and cost-effective piece of branded content, outperforming its Super Bowl ad.

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WhatsApp Documentaries on Prime Video and Netflix

WhatsApp released a new film every year from 2022 to 2025: Naija Odyssey (2022), on Giannis Antetokounmpo's Nigerian roots; We Are Ayenda (2023); UGO: A Homecoming Story (2024), Antetokounmpo's return to Nigeria; Push, Push (2024), a short on Lewis Hamilton; and The Seat (2025). We Are Ayenda, about the Afghan Youth Women's National Football Team using WhatsApp to coordinate their escape from the Taliban, launched on Prime Video during the 2023 Women's World Cup. WARC reports viewership beat expectations by nearly 40%, and the film won the 2024 Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Entertainment.

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WhatsApp became the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team's Official Messaging Partner in late 2023. In 2025, it funded The Seat, a documentary on the team's decision to replace Lewis Hamilton, a debate that played out largely over WhatsApp. Netflix acquired the brand-funded film. "It's a totally different model," Brooke Stites, CEO of WhatsApp's content partner Modern Arts, told Fast Company. "It's not cheap, but it's what you're going to spend on a 60-second spot that you then have to spend 10 times more to buy places that force people to watch it. Everyone who watches F1 content on Netflix is going to get served our film." The Mercedes team reports it reached the Top 10 in 27 countries in its first week.

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DICK'S Sporting Goods and Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios

DICK'S has made sports films for more than a decade. The documentary We Could Be King, released in 2014, won a Sports Emmy. In August 2025, DICK'S officially announced the name of the production company behind the work, Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios, named for the $300 that 18-year-old Dick Stack borrowed from his grandmother's cookie-jar savings in 1948 to open his first shop. The studio is built on the company's belief that "sports have the power to change lives and build community." "There are so many incredible and inspiring human stories that deserve to be told," says Mark Rooks, who runs the studio.

The brief is to find the next generation of great sports stories, which means diverse stories from different filmmakers, made for different platforms. Since the summer of 2025, seven projects have been released across six of them. On Netflix, The Turnaround follows fans rallying behind a struggling Trea Turner. Produced with the Obamas' Higher Ground, it earned the company its second Sports Emmy, for Outstanding Short Documentary. On ESPN, Big Dreams: Little League World Series 2024, produced by Imagine Entertainment, builds on DICK'S Little League partnership, and Life in the W follows three WNBA stars through a landmark season.

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​Adaptive, on Peacock, follows Paralympic athletes on and off the field. On Nickelodeon, Play It Forward: Game On gives youth sports teams in need undercover makeovers. Summer of '94, on FOX, tells the story of the U.S. Men's National Team's road to the 1994 World Cup. Speed Goes Pro, in which IShowSpeed trains with and competes against GOATs like Tom Brady and Kevin Durant, has passed 34 million views on YouTube. More are on the way. DICK'S is a BRANDVIEW client, and helping find these stories has been a privilege.

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Every brand listed came back for more. P&G has funded stories for more than 90 years and keeps finding new formats for them. BMW followed its landmark series, The Hire, with The Escape in 2016 and The Calm in 2023. Chipotle kept making films before and after Farmed and Dangerous. WhatsApp released a new film every year from 2022 to 2025. DICK'S built a studio. These are the brands that kept going. Plenty of brand-funded projects never get past development, and the brands that stay in keep each commitment small enough to walk away from.

 

Vertical Video and Microdramas: An Early Format for Brand-Funded Content

Not every brand-funded story needs a streamer or a series budget. Media executive Hernan Lopez describes vertical video as its own audiovisual language, with its own business model and its own talent. In his view, microdramas are its first native genre, and they are to vertical video what soap operas were to TV.

Vertical video covers any story shot in 9:16 for a phone, released on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts or a dedicated app. Microdramas are one form of it: serialized episodes of one to three minutes, each ending on a cliffhanger, on apps like ReelShort and DramaBox. Sensor Tower estimates short-drama apps took in about $750 million in global in-app revenue in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

Quibi tried premium short-form first. Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman raised $1.75 billion and launched in April 2020, built for viewers on the go (the name came from "quick bites") just as the pandemic kept everyone home. They announced the shutdown six months later. The audience wasn't there yet. Now it is, and brands are showing up.

The soap opera organized early television, and one of the original funders was there at the start of the new format. In February 2026, P&G's Native brand released The Golden Pear Affair, billed as the first brand co-produced, feature-length "microsoap" in the U.S. It runs 55 episodes, just under 80 minutes in total, made with P&G Studios, dentsu Entertainment and Pixie USA. The first five episodes are free on Native's social channels. The rest unlock for $9.99, or through Native promotions.

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In June 2026, P&G and Albertsons followed with Rico's Tacos, a scripted series about a family taco business, shot in Albertsons stores. It runs in short weekly episodes on the grocer's YouTube and social channels and on screens in its stores, the first title from the Albertsons Media Collective's branded entertainment offering.

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Crocs moved just as fast. Charmed to Meet You, a five-part microdrama made with CAA and ReelShort, drew nearly 10 million views, per Crocs. Four months later, Crocs released a seven-episode follow-up, Déjà Shoe, shoppable on TikTok Shop and produced in under four weeks.

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Another early brand entry is JCPenney's five-episode shoppable microdrama, made with TelevisaUnivision for Univision's TikTok and Instagram, where it drew more than 16 million impressions and 5.6 million views, according to Variety.

More recently, studios have started backing the format instead of building it. In October 2026, Fox Entertainment and Kevin Hart's Hartbeat announced 25 microdramas for My Drama, the vertical app from Fox-backed Holywater. Fox Entertainment Studios holds first-look rights, and the partners will track audience engagement to find the stories worth expanding into TV or film. In effect, Fox is using microdramas as a quicker, cheaper version of a TV pilot.

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Reformatting a 30-second TV spot for a phone doesn't make it vertical content. The format rewards stories built for the phone from the first frame. Microdramas are one form of it, and in our view, much of what fills the microdrama apps today is low quality. Two-thirds of vertical drama releases outside China in the third quarter of 2026 were AI-generated, according to consulting firm Owl & Co. That leaves room for brands willing to fund better stories. Vertical video is still early, and production cycles are short enough to test and learn: Crocs made Déjà Shoe in under four weeks.

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Measuring Brand-Funded Content: What Published Results Show

The brands in this chapter made smaller bets than Barbie or The Lego Movie, then put their own marketing behind them so the stories kept reaching people after the premiere.

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Several published results, and the case studies above include those numbers. None of these results separate the film from everything else the brand was doing at the time. For The Seat, the Mercedes team reports $20 million in advertising value equivalency. The brands also kept their stories working after release. BMW put a DVD in Vanity Fair and partnered with TiVo. Piro surrounded Farmed and Dangerous with more than 30 short videos and an editorial section on HuffPost.

DICK'S hasn't published sales figures because the goal is to tell the next generation of great sports stories and keep people interested in playing. If the work does its job, that interest follows through to the register. Walmart reported that its 2026 series Backyard Escapes coincided with a 50 percent year-over-year increase in digital sales in the featured category, and a 37 percent sales lift for participating brands, without publishing its method.

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Beyond these, published results are hard to find. In our experience, brands treat outcomes as competitive information. The independent research is limited too. A 2020 Channel 4 study with BVA found branded entertainment lifted spontaneous brand awareness by 46 percent. A 2025 study across 45 campaigns by ITV's BE Studio found a 14-point gain in trust. Both were commissioned by UK broadcasters that sell branded entertainment.

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We believe that silence is the real culprit behind the benchmark trap. When so few brands publish results, box office becomes the number everyone knows, and every brand gets measured against Barbie. The fix is to define what success looks like before the first dollar is spent, and to hold the project to it. Chapter 6 shows how.

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Brand-Funded Content as a Long-Term Asset

A media buy stops working when the flight ends. A story can keep working after the budget is spent, as long as people can still find it.

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Every case in this chapter outlived its launch. In 2012, Intel and Toshiba funded The Beauty Inside, a social film series that won a Daytime Emmy and a Cannes Grand Prix. It was later adapted into a Korean feature film in 2015 and a JTBC television series in 2018, and Deadline reported a Fox 2000 deal for an American version in 2017. A campaign became intellectual property that others paid to use.

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We believe brands should fund these stories the way a studio funds a franchise, expecting a return measured in years rather than weeks.

 

The Takeaway

Barbie proved what a toy company can do with its own characters. It says little about what your brand can do with its own story. The brands in this chapter, from P&G in 1933 to DICK'S and WhatsApp today, never tried to make Barbie. They funded stories only they could tell, and they kept going.

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Few brands are funding the series, documentaries and shorts in the middle of the market. The ones that do need a story people want to watch, the right production partners, a path to distribution, a budget that fits the goal and a clear definition of success before production starts. Chapter 6 covers each, along with the costs at each stage and where a brand can stop along the way.

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Who This Chapter Is For

• Brand leaders weighing whether to fund their own film or series

• CMOs who keep hearing that brand-funded content only works if it’s Barbie

• Marketing teams that tried a branded film once and wrote off the idea

• Brands without a P&G budget looking for a smaller way in, including vertical video