Dispatch from Sundance

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Marketecture Podcast: Paige Bilins from Magnite on the 2025 outlook for CTV

Paige Bilins had been in the CTV arena for some time, with stints at FreeWheel and Telaria, before joining Magnite as SVP of Product. She sat down with Ari at CES to talk about the future of CTV, but in an ironic twist the audio didn’t get recorded! So we red-did the interview, and now she’s a podcast guest.

Dispatches from Sundance

Last week was a major change of pace for me. At the generous invite of former colleagues I flew out to Park City, Utah to the Sundance Film Festival. But instead of watching the latest indies and doing the “step and repeat” on the red carpet, I watched a bunch of films made by brands that were featured at the 2025 BrandStorytelling event, that is put on at the same time.

If you haven’t heard of BrandStorytelling, then you and I had something in common as of last week. The mini-conference is on its tenth year, and brings together brands creating long-ish form content with production and agency folks, largely from Hollywood and NYC. I found this trip fascinating, so I thought I’d share a bit of what I learned.

Brands creating content

I kinda knew this was happening, but really had no idea how pervasive and important this movement was. Brands are faced with a hostile environment for grabbing consumer attention. The 30-second slot cannot reliably reach the desired audience, while TikTok-style short-form often doesn’t tell a rich enough story. Counter-intuitively, one approach taken is to produce longer-form, quality content, in the hope of building deep (though low-scale) connections with consumers.

Here’s some of what I saw:

• Dramamine created a genuinely hysterical short documentary called The Last Barf Bag, which was so funny that when I got home I made my family watch. There’s no actual barfing in this film.

• Did you know that Ancestry is behind a number of ancestry-related TV shows? I’m a little unclear on whether they actually produce the shows or just help out in various ways, but the company claims they see a big uptick in actual sales whenever these run. Here’s a YouTube video explaining this.

• L’Oreal celebrates the feminist origins of the tagline “Because I’m worth it” with a (spoiler alert) deathbed interview of the woman who wrote it in The Final Copy of Ilon Spechte. It’s much more entertaining than it sounds.

• The North Face debuted Trango, a film that apparently took two years to create about skiing an insane mountain of the same name. Here’s an article about the effort.

Cool stuff, who’s watching it?

Other than uploading this content to YouTube, how can brands justify the expense of this kind of high-end creative endeavor, and how can they get anyone to watch? There doesn’t seem to be a single answer to this question, but I asked a lot of questions and heard some interesting answers.

Answer 1: That’s not the point

Maybe that’s not what the CFO wants to hear, but there’s certainly some value in creating a touchstone asset that deeply embodies your brand, even if very few actual customers ever see it. Employees, vendors, investors, and enthusiasts may all get a huge boost in affinity and loyalty by viewing a film like the L’Oreal one (above), even if it can’t be tied to direct outcomes.

Answer 2: Put it on TV

Not every company is Ancestry, but if you can create content that’s actually interesting to a swatch of consumers, why wouldn’t you? Streamers and traditional cable companies are always looking for low cost or subsidized content.

Answer 3: Put it on Streaming

This is where the action is. I learned that many of the leading streaming services will put branded content on their systems in exchange for some combination of placement fee and minimum advertising commitments. However — and everyone I spoke to was very clear about this — the content needs to be good to get on the premium channels. In some cases, the content needs to go through a separate creative screen process, outside of the commercial teams, to qualify.

To give one example, Vizio was a sponsor of the conference, and has a special group called the Branded Content Studio to help brands create and distribute this type of material. Amazon and other streamers also have programs for distributing this type of content.

Answer 4: Chop it up for social

Sometimes these longer forms of content can also be repurposed into bite-sized chunks. Sephora produced a short film called “Beauty & Belonging” which runs 36 minutes, but is formatted in such a way that it could be cut into many small bits for usage elsewhere.

Answer 5: Get creative

The Dramamine video about barf bags was leveraged into a in-person pop-up in New York earlier this year and will eventually turn into a museum of some kind.

Answer 6: Paid media

Duh! You can pay money to drive viewers.

Did we learn anything?

This whole thing is way outside of my general wheelhouse. But that’s kind of the point of why I’m dedicated this week’s newsletter to the topic. We all dedicate so much time to the “tech” part of ad tech, and fall in danger of losing sight of the ad part. While it seems unlikely that any regular reader of this newsletter is about to win a Cannes Lion for creative work, let’s all take a minute to go outside, touch grass, and experience the more creative side of our business.

Reading list

• TikTok, you don’t stop (link)

• Big tech at the inauguration. Does it mean anything for antitrust and regulation? Nancy Pelosi buys $500K in Google Calls… (and Amazon and Nvidia… link)

• Nielsen finally gets MRC certification for hybrid ratings (link)

• Netflix raising prices, ad tier from $6.99->7.99 (link) (AdExchanger)

• WPP with 4 days/week RTO causing problems. Times of London article (link)

• Brian Wieser reporting about FTC enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act and the potential implications for retail media (link)