Hi! I'm Dana Harris-Bridson and welcome to In Formation, the founder newsletter of Flamingo Media. This is where I shape Flamingo for its launch early next year and make sense of what happens when brands get into show business. Comments or questions? Just hit reply.
This week: Dior and Prada go hand-drawn, Barbour and Aardman keep the Wallace & Gromit Christmas streak alive, and networks are still rerunning a Rudolph from 1964.
This week, I think the smartest move in brand entertainment is serving the formats Hollywood dropped, and Prada's film has more than 1,000 comments backing me up.
Dior commissioned Oscar-nominated animator Sylvain Chomet for "Christian Dior's Night in Color," voiced by Robert Pattinson and Rihanna. Prada had Disney veteran John Pomeroy assemble a crew of hand-drawn artists for "Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand." Barbour and Aardman released their fourth straight Christmas collaboration.
All are hand-drawn animation, a format that Hollywood essentially killed two decades ago for being too expensive. (Aardman is stop-motion, which is even more labor intensive.) However, in a time of AI slop, handmade animation becomes a luxury status symbol.
Hey Hollywood, you dropped something
As the WSJ recently noted, current ads from e.l.f. and Levi's reflect a demand for advertising that is absolutely, positively not AI. I'd argue that effect is magnified for brand entertainment. In a 30-second spot, handmade is a look; in a seven-minute film with characters and a star cast, it's an event.
For this kind of bespoke work, brands have advantages that studios and streamers don't. The films are short, which serves the economics. Talent comes from their ambassador lists: Pattinson, Rihanna, Josh O'Connor, and Greta Lee for Dior; Sadie Sink and Maya Hawke for Prada. With O&O channels, distribution is free and global.
Where studios release blockbusters in hopes of inspiring appetite for merch, brands start with the product. And they even benefit from a kind of goodwill: Brands read as patrons.
No one says thank you to the box office
Handmade animation is still expensive, which matches the sensibility of luxury brands' holiday campaigns. That said, it also reveals what I think is a potential superpower in developing brand entertainment: Mine the beloved entertainment formats that Hollywood no longer serves, and its fans will thank you by name.
Prada's short debuted October 27; Dior's followed November 4. By November 5, Prada's film had drawn more than 2.2 million views and over 1,000 YouTube comments. In one day, Dior had over 321,000 views and more than 200 comments.
The commenters raved about the shorts’ beauty, emotion, and originality — and most of all, the design houses' roles in making it with 2D animation.
"THANK YOU to Prada and the animation team for this beautiful, nostalgic Christmas gift!!" wrote @AStageForTheKingdom. "These are the kinds of ads I could happily watch all day."
"Sometimes I wish it was possible to like a video several times, this is one of those times!" wrote @amandacalder5100. "Well done Dior, well done!"
“I'm gonna do a marathon of Tom & Jerry and buying myself a Prada bag for the holidays,” wrote @monasleezah.
Rudolph, but make it Dior
These shorts benefit from another gap: the animated holiday special that actually feels special. It’s been a long time since the annual appearances of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" heralded the season.
Rankin/Bass retains its pull: NBC runs "Rudolph” every year, and Heat Miser remains a cultural icon and Halloween costume. They tapped into scarcity and ritual; a brand film that drops once a year, new each season, can bring that back.
A holiday tradition only works if audiences are willing to let a brand in on it, and the comments suggest they already are. Perhaps the most promising signal is that commenters embraced the work and, in the same breath, recognized it as brand entertainment.
That opens another possibility: A brand can win not by how cleverly its presence is disguised, but in its capacity to provide something that can't be found anywhere else.
That's all for today. I'm not a holiday special, so I'll be back next week.
- Dana, aka The Flamingo