Hi! I'm Dana Harris-Bridson and welcome to In Formation, the founder newsletter of Flamingo Media. This is where I'm shaping Flamingo ahead of its launch early next year, and where I dig into what happens when brands start making entertainment: how partnerships come together, who owns what, and what lets a project scale or stops it cold. Comments or questions? Just hit reply.

I'm sending two newsletters this week because I couldn't not update last week's hand-drawn story. Last Thursday's issue, "What Brands Can Make That Hollywood Won't," praised Dior's and Prada's hand-drawn holiday films... and about 10 minutes after I sent it, I found out about the scandal. D'oh!

This week: Dior's "automated interpolation," why it's not really an AI story for brands, and black bean brownies.

If you thought #handdrawngate couldn't get worse for Dior, Dior made it worse.

Meet "automated interpolation." That's what the director of the Dior short, Sylvain Chomet, acknowledges using — not artificial intelligence, which has the same acronym — to produce "Christian Dior's A Night in Color." He said the tool was "only used to help create the in-between frames... It's a way of automating the repetitive, mechanical part of animation, not the creative work." He said generative AI was never used.

He didn't define automated interpolation and I'd never heard of it. Turns out automated interpolation is what "estimates unknown values between known data points using programmed formulas, scripts, or automated software rather than manual calculations." It's used to describe things like high-level Excel functions.

That's a lotta sophistry for an old-fashioned art form, so here's my interpretation: "A Night in Color" was made with an undetermined amount of hand-drawn frames that were fed to "an automated software" to create the in-between frames (traditionally created by junior assistants known as "inbetweeners") that turn drawings into animation.

Critics say it's AI by another name and I'm going to say they're right.

Clearly, AI remains a third rail and it's easy to mistake this uproar for a referendum on AI filmmaking. (It's worth noting that Prada's film is now falling under some AI suspicion as well.) But for brands, this is not really an AI story.

Ads distract. Sometimes a happy distraction, sometimes annoying, but they're the things that shows up when you're doing something else. And a lot of people are over it.

With brand entertainment, the audience makes the choice to engage and connect. Connecting feels good, which makes them feel good about the brand.

Connection also equals trust, which is what all brands want. But this trust is very different from watching a detergent ad remove stains, trying it at home, and confirming it's true. Brand entertainment feels personal, which is the whole point.

That personal connection with an audience that chooses to connect and trust is one reason why I believe brand entertainment contains the potential to become more powerful than traditional advertising.

That power comes with a different kind of responsibility. Here it means Dior undermined that trust with its own press release: "Chomet's meticulous process of hand-drawn animation unfolds over months, mirroring the patience required to create haute couture. In both these creative worlds, hundreds of hours of dedicated and skillful work create the appearance of effortless splendour."

This could be technically true (Variety reports the film took seven months and about 20 people, six of them animators), but the description leaves no room for the possibility of "automated interpolation."

I thought the brands themselves would be a stumbling block to growing brand entertainment — that they'd need to be present but invisible, the way you can sneak black beans into brownies. (Which are delicious, by the way.)

Totally wrong. Look at the YouTube comments on both ads: Everyone knows and no one cares. Users thank the brands by name. The problem comes when the brand makes a promise that isn't kept.

That's the risk for Dior, and now for Prada too. Each sold a holiday film as handmade, and each is facing questions about whether it was.For both films, any AI use would undercut the one thing they're selling: analog, handcrafted work.

Brand entertainment runs on trust. Audiences will accept a brand in the frame. What they won't forgive is being sold handmade and getting something else, and with these films handmade is the whole pitch. Nobody minds black beans in the brownies. They mind finding out after you swore it was all butter.

This was the in-betweener, so I’ll see you later this week.

— Dana, aka The Flamingo