Every year, the Tribeca Festival in New York brings together legendary entertainers, which in the past have included Martin Scorsese and Taylor Swift, to debut groundbreaking films and discuss the evolution of entertainment.
Last year, it was also the venue where WPP agencies showcased a branded feature-length film for an advertising client, the health insurance company AXA.
Group Therapy, which debuted on Prime Video last month, features seven comedians and actors, including Neil Patrick Harris and Mike Birbiglia, discussing mental health in a support-circle setting. To make the project, WPP’s GroupM and VML partnered with comedian Kevin Hart’s production company Hartbeat.
Despite being backed by a brand, Group Therapy contains only minimal references to AXA. Instead, the agencies built marketing around the film in an effort to drive consumers to AXA’s platform, complementing the strategy with a robust film-fest tour designed to drive awareness of the project itself, Dimitri Guerassimov, chief creative officer at VML France, said.
The less-is-more approach to branded storytelling was very much intentional; the agencies decided early on that they would “probably not do something that looks like a PSA,” Guerassimov told Marketing Brew.
In the spotlight: The agencies’ efforts to create and promote Group Therapy and AXA are over four years in the making and have included a dedicated film-fest tour that saw the film shown at Tribeca, the Palm Springs International Film Festival, and AFI Fest. To capitalize, the agencies built PR strategies around Group Therapy’s film-fest appearances.
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In the film-fest world, though, the quality of the project matters, and the fact that Group Therapy was selected to screen at these festivals helped build its attractiveness to streaming platforms the agencies were pitching the film to, he said.
“The more success we had in festivals, the better conversations we had with the platforms,” he said.
Group Therapy’s accompanying ad campaign didn’t just involve film-fest PR. The agencies worked together to build an ad campaign around the film aimed at driving consumers to AXA’s site, as opposed to prolifically integrating AXA into the film itself. To do it, assets for Group Therapy were placed across Amazon platforms like Fire TV and Twitch to drive viewers to the film on Prime Video, Guerassimov said. Within the film itself, the screen briefly shows the text “presented by AXA” at the beginning, and a screen encourages viewers to visit an AXA website toward the end of the film.
“We worked hard so that people don’t feel like they’re part of an advertising machine, but there is a huge advertising mission behind it,” Guerassimov said
Zoom out: Brands are increasingly making their Hollywood debuts as they look to reach ad-averse consumers and work to cut through the clutter. Household brands Barbie, Nike, and Pop-Tarts have all been the subjects of feature-length movies in recent years, while brands like Chick-fil-A and Starbucks have rolled out in-house content studios designed to produce original entertainment.
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