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The advertising industry is changing fast. Budgets are dropping while more than half of CMOs are responding to consumer movement and increasing spend on social advertising. There, advertisers face less stable pricing and targeting, and audiences have been primed by highly entertaining feeds to hate disruption. To break through, a higher creative standard is being set: Brands are asking how they can create true entertainment value around their product. Advertisers are feeling the pressure.
This summer’s Barbie movie is a standout—with a highly talented director at the helm in Greta Gerwig and star-power headed by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the iconic IP is commanding attention. Similar to 2014’s The Lego Movie, Warner Bros. Pictures is also accomplishing impressive feats of cross-promotion, leveraging HGTV to premiere Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge—a four-part home renovation series hosted by Ashley Graham—right before opening weekend.
Consumer attention now more than ever requires putting dollars toward producing media with strong scripts, characters and stories that carry real entertainment value and work across multiple platforms. Barbie is far from the first to do it, but she represents a new reality for advertisers.
Aim to entertain
We’ve been engaged in a decades-long digital transformation of how we live, how we work and, as a consequence, how we advertise. Brands moved from newspapers to radio spots; now they aren’t even restricted to store shelves, commercial breaks or billboards in Times Square or on Sunset Boulevard. Anywhere people spend their day has commercial appeal, and with rapid advancements including mixed reality and generative AI, there’s no hard limit to what comprises a channel within reach.
People are inundated with calls to action, and they’re savvy to when they’re being targeted. By varying estimates, we’re exposed to anywhere from hundreds to thousands of ads a day. When attention is at a premium, advertisers need to offer more value to hold and captivate that attention. Our ads need to entertain, and that shouldn’t be limited to the branded creative we’re seeing on the big screen. Premium storytelling can be created wherever we can conceive of it—in any format and of any length, from 10 seconds to 10 minutes to 2 hours.
