The Pillsbury Doughboy Is Coming for Hollywood

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Studios may be strapped, but big brands are rolling in dough. How companies from Gap to General Mills are luring A-list talent and keeping an ailing industry afloat. 

Brian Grazer first realized that advertising and entertainment were colliding after a meeting with General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt a decade ago. Immelt had approached the megaproducer about having Imagine Entertainment create some TV spots for the conglomerate, but Grazer says that he “wasn’t inspired” by the idea.

“He said, ‘I want it to be like the feeling you get watching Apollo 13,’ ” Grazer recalls, referencing the 1996 Oscar-winning drama directed by his Imagine partner Ron Howard. “I said, ‘I understand that’s what you’d like, but it just doesn’t do it.’ ”

Grazer, understandably, was skeptical. Imagine was in the film and TV business, not the ad business.

But the producer says that he always had a fascination with founders, and it sparked an idea. It was an anthology series, inspired by Thomas Edison and the lightbulb. GE loved it. It wasn’t an ad; it was something better, an entertainment program that met Imagine’s bar for quality and had the added benefit of bringing a little shine to GE in the process: the Nat Geo series Breakthrough, which would count the conglomerate as a producing partner alongside Imagine.

While GE had notes, the Imagine team worked through it all to get it over the line. The show would help spark a new and growing business line: Imagine brands, which has worked with companies like Nike (The Day Sports Stood Still), Ford (John Bronco) and Coca-Cola (Christmas Finds a Way), and is hard at work now on as-yet-to-be-revealed projects with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

Grazer isn’t the only one to have seen the light.

Across Hollywood, a new status quo has emerged: Advertising is entertainment, and major companies and brands are thinking hard about how they present themselves to potential customers, learning a thing or two from the major studios in the process. It’s a full-circle moment in many ways. In the early days of television, the line between advertising and entertainment was blurry at best. Just look for clips on YouTube from The Colgate Comedy Hour, Texaco Star Theater and Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. Over the ensuing decades, however, advertising became something anathema to Hollywood.

It paid the bills, sure, but star talent shied away from participating (outside of a handful of money grabs in foreign markets like Japan and Italy). Now, however, the brands are back with a vengeance, and they have buy-in from every part of the industry, though everyone involved, from the brand managers to the actors, need to weigh the trade-offs of participating. “I think brands now know what they know, and know what they don’t know, which is even more important,” says WME head of entertainment marketing Liz Walaszczyk.

Adds George Dewey, co-founder of the studio Maximum Effort alongside Ryan Reynolds, who’s also been at the forefront of brand storytelling: “Brands are in a transition period. Even as recently as four or five years ago, you could spend $20 million on TV and have a brand campaign have tremendous impact. Now, the only place where we’re all watching something live together at the same time and having that collective experience is sports, and it’s getting so expensive — $20 million doesn’t go as far as it used to.”