The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Hidden in Pieces, a 22 minute black and white concert film shot at the Orpheum on the closing night of their 25th anniversary tour, went up on the Criterion Channel this month. Shot by Barnaby Clay, the director of the Mick Rock Documentary Shot!, produced by Ways & Means, and platformed on The Criterion Channel, Hidden in Pieces feels distinctly art-and-artist forward. And yet, Dropbox, the cloud storage company, is named as a partner on the band’s concert film. So what is it about this film that manages to strike the balance between feeling markedly unbranded while being a piece of branded content? The answer lies in a brand’s ability to fully understand its own audience, its own values, and its product offering in a way that dictates how it shows up in the world non-interruptively.
Dropbox has spent several years now showing up in places a conventional media plan wouldn’t send it. The company’s function is file sharing, so in addition to its traditional ad buys, the brand began aligning itself with the kind of work its product gets used to share. IndieWire Studio Presented by Dropbox has become a fixture at Sundance: a portrait studio built for festival talent that has hosted Charli XCX, Olivia Wilde, Jenna Ortega, and more throughout the years. Dropbox replay was the editing software of choice for roughly 70% of this year’s Sundance slate, which makes Dropbox’s biggest festival presence one that was embedded organically within the filmmakers’ lead-up to arrival at the festival.
Beyond showing up as an official product or experiential sponsor, the brand has found itself inadvertently associated with art and artists as well. For many musicians, it’s the file sharing repository and platform of choice. In April of this year, artist Fred Again handed fans the raw working files from his USB002 tour through a public Dropbox folder. And while most brands might take credit or capitalize on such a popular artist choosing to promote their platform in such a way, Dropbox’s own head of brand marketing declined to take credit for it.
Dropbox has demonstrated a deftness for navigating both advertent and inadvertent inclusion within spaces and by people that value its product. Support of Hidden in Pieces is no exception, and in this instance is helped to be made seamless by partnering with producers at Ways & Means. It’s specialty partners like these that are able to broker and balance relationships between brands, talent, and institutions without any one party drawing too much of the influence, input, and control from the others. As a result, Hidden in Pieces plays like a film by artists for artists, because that’s what the value alignment across all involved dictated.
The biggest tell on that front is Criterion’s involvement. The Criterion Channel is known for its pedigree and selective inclusion of content to platform on its streaming service. For any brand content to be presented there would mean that it has to be entertainment-first, quality-first, and of a piece with the rest of the channel’s offerings.
Hidden in Pieces is a great watch, but in many ways its an even better case study in branded entertainment. Because although there’s a brand presence, it doesn’t feel out of place. Not only that, it feels of a piece with each element represented within. This only gets done with superior strategic alignment, wherein a brand can so clearly recognize and tap into its values, its relevance to its audience, and the ways that those two elements drive how it shows up publicly. Most importantly, when it does show up, it draws no scrutiny for its involvement. Here, achieving brand entertainment alignment means capitalizing on the opportunity to show up where a brand already belongs.
Hidden in Pieces is available to watch today on YouTube and The Criterion Channel.