Welcome to another episode of The Toolkits Show, a podcast making sense of the major themes, trends, and developments shaping the business of content.
Marketers are all about Hollywood these days. Starbucks, AB-InBev, LVMH, and Marriott are among the blue-chip brands that are producing documentaries, original series, and films. Some of this may be Barbie envy. But some of this may also just be a natural reaction to increasing levels of ad avoidance and the realization that they need to do better than simply sell to customers.
Jae Goodman, CEO of Superconnector Studios and perhaps the grandfather of brand entertainment, joined the show to explain what’s happening and what’s different this time. We also talked about what product placement actually looks like in this context, and why Hollywood is equally enamored with marketers.
Consumers don’t want to pay for online news. Or do they? We dove into Reuters’ latest news report, which found that 57% of people who don’t currently pay for news said they are unwilling to pay anything at all for access to it. But the math may not actually be mathing, as this may indicate there is a larger market for news than the headlines suggest – and this could be good news for publishers.