Hi! I’m Dana Harris-Bridson and welcome to In Formation, the founder newsletter of Flamingo Media. This is where I make sense of what happens when brands get into show business and shape Flamingo for its launch early next year. Comments or questions? Just hit reply.

This week: Wieden+Kennedy makes movies, a tequila brand has some notes on the script, and Channel 4 would like you to come back next week for another 90 seconds.

I spend a lot of time arguing that brands will make entertainment worth watching. I also spend a lot of time wondering why brands don’t get out of their own way. 

This week offered rationale for both reactions. There’s real ambition, but also some revealing decisions about what gets made, whose priorities govern the story, and how much patience we should expect from an audience.

First, W+K, which helped create the Nike culture and would now like a larger role in making the culture itself.

This week began with a major birth announcement: Wieden+Kennedy Entertainment. The new division will work with brand clients to develop film and TV projects in addition to producing work outside brands. WKE’s first film, now in production, is “Porto Rico” starring Bad Bunny and Edward Norton.

W+K’s global head of production Nick Setounski told Ad Age that the idea was driven by his sense that the agency could do more beyond traditional advertising. “A few years ago, there were projects in popular culture that made me mad we weren’t involved in them,” he said. “I thought we should be, given Wieden+Kennedy’s unique background.”

He doesn’t say what made him mad, but W+K directors have included Spike Jonze, the Daniels, David Fincher, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. And if an agency is going to make that argument, it may as well be W+K. Even Nike has its own film and TV studio, Waffle Iron Entertainment. That said: There are many indie films that shaped culture and lost a lot of money.

I’m more bullish on WKE’s potential in the branded space. W+K is coming off 2025 agency-of-the-year honors from both Ad Age and Adweek and has standing to spare. Building an entertainment division suggests it sees a real business beyond the occasional adventurous client brief.

Hollywood’s been trying to stoke this fire for a while. Last December, UTA partnered with Ad Age on a sponsored content piece, “Why brands are Hollywood’s next great producers.” (UTA also reps distribution on “Porto Rico.”) 

While Hollywood has a storied history of seducing and fleecing outsiders, I have reasons to believe — beyond my own optimism — that’s not the story here.

Hollywood and advertising are awash in layoffs, consolidation, and budget cuts as they face existential questions around the nature of its audience. While that doesn’t make these industries’ goals identical (selling tickets is not the same thing as selling product), exploitation wouldn’t serve either side. Both need long-term solutions, like new dealmaking infrastructures that can survive the inevitable disappointments and CMO changes. 

Setounski also noted that “a lot of branded content just sucks. There’s so much bad product placement and work that’s hokey and ineffective for brands.”

In a word, yes.

Consider “It’s Midnight Somewhere,” a vertical drama that Diageo’s Astral Tequila brand made in partnership with Warner Bros.’ “Practical Magic 2.”

To write and direct the five-part series, Astral hired filmmaker and TikTok star Madelaine Turner. She previously brought her droll and distinctive voice to campaigns for HomeGoods, Target, and GoFundMe. And I loved this piece for Adobe.
 

However, that voice goes AWOL with “It’s Midnight Somewhere,” which centers on sister reality stars Brooks and Grace Ann Nader and a blender.

Jennifer Rapp, a brand director at Diageo, may have offered an inadvertent explanation in an interview with Net Influencer. She said multiple concepts were set aside because they didn’t sufficiently center Astral’s Midnight Margarita.

“We made some hard decisions about content that we felt could have been compelling,” she said, “but wasn’t allowing us to focus on the Midnight Margarita as squarely as we knew we wanted to.”

I appreciate the candor. But I also wonder what the compelling version looked like.

Of course Astral wants to sell tequila. But if you’ve gone to the trouble to hire an interesting filmmaker, when does product prominence lead to diminishing returns?

The series generated more than six million YouTube views with a near-absence of comments. YouTube counts are inexact at best; they can include paid advertising views, and we don’t know the split or how long people watched. Most of all, it doesn’t establish if the campaign sold tequila.

Channel 4 just released its first vertical drama, “The Guest List.” Created with skincare brand Sol de Janeiro, the series was even reviewed in The Guardian.

Critic Hannah J. Davies didn’t like it much (“Sort of like watching the adverts before a YouTube video, instead of pressing the skip button”), but even she had to acknowledge it was fun… until she realized that Channel 4 was dropping the 90-second episodes a week apart. 

That schedule makes no damn sense for a format designed to make you devour them like gummy bears, but it does extend a marketing calendar. It reflects a common tension in brand entertainment: Hollywood gets paid to sell a story, but advertisers get paid to sell a campaign.

I’m betting that as the space matures, we’ll see this evolve. When serving business needs undermine the audience’s attention, it’s not clear whose needs are being served.

That’s all for today. I’m not a vertical drama, so I’ll see you next week.

- Dana, aka The Flamingo