Talk to anyone on the entertainment side of the business of brand storytelling and they’ll tell you: there’s a strange disconnect at the center of brand-funded entertainment. Brands want cultural relevance, Hollywood needs new models, and audiences have made it clear that they will choose stories over interruption. On paper, the incentives should line up. But in practice, the industry is still working through old habits, with brands often measuring entertainment like advertising and studios still treating brand involvement as a revenue line rather than a creative partnership.
That is the tension Hal Burg has built BRANDVIEW around. Through the company’s work and his recent musings on LinkedIn, Burg argues for a more disciplined path into entertainment, one that begins with the story a brand has the right to tell, not the format it hopes to make. BRANDVIEW’s framework defines branded entertainment across product placement, storyline integration, promotional partnerships, and long-form brand-funded content, all grounded in the belief that cultural relevance drives business outcomes. In Burg’s view, the opportunity is not for every brand to chase the next Barbie or Lego Movie, but to understand where it belongs in culture, how entertainment actually compounds, and what kind of partnership structure can make the work worth watching.
Brand Storytelling caught up with Burg, Founder and CEO of BRANDVIEW, to discuss why the current system is not clicking, how brands can avoid using blockbuster outliers as false benchmarks, and what it takes to build entertainment partnerships that serve the audience, the brand, and the story at the same time:
There’s more desire than ever from brands to get into entertainment, and Hollywood needs new financing models. On paper that sounds like a perfect match. So why isn’t it clicking the way it should?
Because both sides are trying to preserve a model that no longer works, and neither one wants to be the first to admit it.
Let’s break down this dysfunction. Networks built their entire business on selling audience attention to advertisers. The moment a brand gets too involved in the content itself, the fear is that it will break the system. When brands started capitalizing on integrations that went deep into brand messaging and product differentiation during the reality show boom of the mid-2000s, the networks quickly adapted to turn it into a way to sell more advertising. So when Coke wanted its cups on the judges’ table at American Idol, the price was an eight-figure integration fee plus a substantial media commitment to the network over the following year. That’s just another way to sell the same old product.
For years, I navigated that system by building direct relationships with production companies, finding ways to integrate my clients into projects before the network could price them out. It worked, but it required working around the system rather than with it.
Now the system is breaking. Brands are inundated with places to spend their advertising dollars and getting less cultural relevance out of all of them. The ones that write the checks are asking a harder question: what is this actually buying us? And when they land on entertainment as the answer, they run into three more questions at once: how do we tell the story, which format is right for us, and which types of stories belong in which formats.
The networks are not in a stronger position. Facing a contraction in content budgets and fewer greenlit projects, they are sitting on an underused asset. Brands with compelling stories and the funding to help tell them are not a threat to the advertising model. They are the model’s successor. Neither side has fully accepted that yet.
You’ve been in this space long enough to have seen several cycles. Where are we right now, and why does this particular moment feel different to you than previous windows of opportunity for brand-funded content?
What feels different is that the dysfunction is so apparent to both sides at the same time.
For the last several decades, Hollywood held all the leverage by offering advertising in and around their content, which delivered massive audiences. The result was a structure that made genuine co-creation expensive and hard to do.
But now, Hollywood is on the decline. Execs are greenlighting significantly fewer projects, and they’re being forced to play it safe because if they make a mistake and are fired, there are few jobs left to move to. When you are under that kind of pressure, and a compelling project arrives with brand funding already attached, it’s a gift. It has built-in demand and an eager marketing partner, which makes the economics better from day one.
Hollywood has always believed it’s smarter than its customers. The contraction is evidence of what happens when that attitude meets a market that’s moving on.
The studios and networks that figure this out first gain a real advantage in the next phase of content creation. The ones who keep treating brand money as just another advertising revenue line will keep ceding ground to streamers and platforms willing to be more flexible.
The moment is right.
The Barbie movie and the Lego Movie became the default reference points for what brand-funded content can be. What has that done to the conversation and to expectations on both sides?
It did two very different things. It helped tremendously, but made an already difficult conversation even harder.
Both films were extraordinary successes. No one disputes that. But they succeeded in a way that most brands cannot replicate.
Barbie and Lego are not just brands. They are cultural icons that carry decades of emotional memory, cross-generational fandom, and a nostalgic relationship with consumers that most brands will never have. When your favorite toy from when you were five years old becomes a film, the built-in audience is enormous before a single frame is shot.
What those two films did to the conversation is raise the floor to a level that excludes almost everyone. A CMO watches Barbie gross over a billion dollars worldwide and decides that is the benchmark. It is not. It is an outlier built on pre-existing cultural equity that took decades to build. Treating it as the standard shuts the door on every other form of brand-funded content that could actually work for a given category and budget.
The right question coming out of Barbie and Lego is not: how do we make the next blockbuster? It is: what is the most compelling story our brand has the right to tell, and what is the best format to tell it in?
The answer rarely starts with a nine-figure theatrical release. It might start as a documentary, or a limited series on a streamer, or a longer-form story told in short increments. The format follows the story. The story follows the brand’s purpose.
When we work with a brand to find that purpose, we start with a consistent set of questions: Who are you trying to reach? How are you currently talking to them, and what is working? What stories does your brand have the unique right to tell? What does success look like for you, and how are we measuring it? Because if it’s measured like a traditional ad campaign, it will fall short from the start. The answers to those questions determine everything else, including the format.
There seems to be an assumption that if a brand is going to get into content, it has to go big. You push back on that. What’s the argument for starting smaller and scaling, and what does that actually look like in practice?
That’s the Barbie and Lego movies’ fault, and that framing is why so many brands either never start or spend too much too fast and walk away disappointed.
We built the BRANDVIEW Playbook specifically for brands that want a more structured starting point. It walks through the four pillars of branded entertainment: product placement, storyline integration, promotional partnerships, and brand-funded content. Each offers a distinct way to show up in entertainment and reaches consumers differently. All of them are grounded in the same principle we operate from: cultural relevance drives business outcomes. The Playbook lives at thebrandview.com/playbook.
Those four pillars are not just a menu. They’re a progression. Product placement teaches you what your consumer responds to in an entertainment context. Storyline integration teaches you how to work with creative partners and how much narrative control you actually need to move the needle for your brand. Co-promotional partnerships teach you how distribution and audience alignment work. Brand-funded content is where you put all of that learning to work.
Brands that skip to the end and fund a series before they’ve learned any of that are essentially paying for their education in the most expensive classroom possible. We counsel brands to think in seasons, not campaigns. Start by getting into the room and learning how it works. Then build a real creative relationship with the right partners. Now you know what’s possible, and the investment makes sense.
You’ve talked about the importance of not leading with format – that the conversation about what a brand should make often starts in the wrong place. Where should it start instead?
It starts with the story the brand has the right to tell.
Almost every brand that comes to us has already decided what they want to make. A doc. A series. A short film. I push back on that immediately, because format is a distribution decision. You can’t make that decision until you know what you’re distributing.
Before format enters the conversation, a brand needs to answer three questions: What human truth connects to what your brand enables? Who needs to hear it? And why is your brand the right one to tell it?
The brands that lead with format are thinking like advertisers. An advertiser picks a channel and figures out the message to fill it. A storyteller picks the story and then finds the best way to carry it.
We use a structured brief to get brands to the story before anyone talks about format. That brief is also what producers can actually work with. When you walk into a room with a story, a territory, and a clear sense of who the audience is, you are having a completely different conversation than a brand that walks in and says they want to make a show.
There’s a version of brand involvement in content that functions essentially as a subsidy, wherein brands foot the bill and absorb all the risk. You’re advocating for something fundamentally different. What does a genuine co-production partnership look like, and what has to change on both sides for it to work?
Content that earns its audience will always outperform content that only has to satisfy a CMO. When a production company, a brand, and a distribution platform all agree that a project is worth making, it produces something more likely to find an audience than anything built to spec from a brand brief alone.
Here’s how we structure it. We come to the table with a brand that has a compelling story to tell and the funding to help tell it. That story is developed with a production partner who believes it has the potential to reach a wide audience beyond the brand’s existing consumer base. That combination, a brand with resources and a story, plus a producer with credibility and creative instincts, goes to a distribution platform looking for that kind of project. Everyone makes compromises. The brand accepts less narrative control than a traditional campaign. The producer accepts a defined set of brand requirements. The platform accepts brand involvement in exchange for better economics.
Changes need to happen on both sides. Brands need to stop thinking of this as an expansion of a commercial campaign and start thinking about it as an opportunity to build an asset, the way an entertainment company would. Hollywood needs to stop treating brand money as only a revenue source and start treating it as a potential creative partnership. Do that, and both sides win.
You draw a real distinction between a brand telling its own story and a brand participating in a story that belongs to the culture. How does a brand figure out which territory is actually theirs, and where do storytellers fit into that process?
The test I use is this: if you removed the brand’s name from the content, would it still be a story worth telling? If yes, you are working in the brand’s territory. If not, you likely have a longer commercial.
Every brand has a founding story. Most brands stop there when they think about content. But a brand’s territory is defined by what it enables, not just what it sells. DICK’s Sporting Goods doesn’t just sell equipment. It enables athletic achievement and the personal transformation that comes with it. That purpose gives us creative license to help them tell the next generation of great sports stories about how sports change lives. Those stories are not about the brand. The brand is what makes them possible.
WhatsApp tells stories about the importance of human connection, not about its messaging features. The brand is the enabler, not the subject, and that’s the key.
Once a brand finds its territory, the role of storytellers is essential. Writers, directors, and producers take a brand brief and find the human truth inside it. The brand brings resources, territory, and must-haves. The storytellers bring the craft that turns that into content people actually seek out.
For a CMO who’s convinced but doesn’t know where to begin, what’s the most realistic and strategically sound first move into entertainment, and how do you counsel them on building from there?
The realistic first move for most CMOs is not a feature film. It is usually some form of integration into existing content, either a storyline integration or a co-promotional partnership, to learn how entertainment actually works from the inside before trying to drive it. That learning has real value. You start to understand what producers need, how networks and platforms think about brand involvement, and what your consumer responds to in an entertainment context. That intelligence informs everything that comes after.
When a brand is ready to move into brand-funded content, the brief becomes the foundation. We identify the stories the brand is uniquely qualified to tell, the audience they need to reach, and what success looks like measured against business outcomes, not media metrics.
One last thing to any CMO starting this journey: be deliberate about who you partner with. Hollywood has no shortage of players willing to take your money while protecting their own interests. Talent agencies represent their clients. Production companies protect their projects. You need someone whose only job is to solve for what your consumer wants to see and what you need to build with them, then manage everyone else to execute it. That is what BRANDVIEW is built for.
About Hal Burg:
Hal Burg is the Founder and CEO of BRANDVIEW, a Los Angeles entertainment marketing agency built on a single premise: brands that become part of culture outperform brands that interrupt it.
For 20+ years, he has helped brands navigate every layer of branded entertainment, from product placement and storyline integration to promotional partnerships and premium long-form brand-funded content. He has executed more than 1,000 integrations and developed programs generating $200M+ in media value and reaching nearly one billion people.
Before founding BRANDVIEW in 2018, he built the branded entertainment division at Platinum Rye, where he led entertainment marketing for Mercedes-Benz, overseeing the brand’s full Hollywood strategy, and developed programs for Best Buy, HP, Microsoft, P&G, and Pepsi.
BRANDVIEW represents brands exclusively. Never studios, never IP owners. That distinction shapes every conversation Hal has about where a brand belongs in culture and how it gets there.