The distance between a Super Bowl commercial and a feature film has always been shorter than either industry likes to admit — both, after all, are in the business of making you feel something in exchange for someone else's money.
Now Wieden + Kennedy, the Portland-based agency whose founders once declared that advertising should be as good as the programming it interrupts, is making that subtext explicit. The shop has formed W+K Entertainment, a division that will develop original film and television projects while also helping the agency's clients navigate their own Hollywood ambitions.
The venture's first project is a film featuring Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican musician whose cultural footprint has grown large enough to require its own production apparatus. (The agency did not specify whether the film would feature Mr. Bunny acting, scoring, or simply being present in a way that makes everything around him more interesting.)
For Wieden + Kennedy, which has spent four decades building a reputation for commercials that function as compressed short films, the move represents less a pivot than an extension. The agency has long attracted directors who shuttle between thirty-second spots and ninety-minute features, and its creative culture has always nursed cinematic aspirations that the constraints of client work could not fully accommodate.
The entertainment division also positions the agency to help marketers who have grown weary of buying media and begun dreaming of owning it — a shift that has accelerated as traditional advertising inventory fragments and branded content becomes, for better or worse, simply content.
Whether W+K Entertainment will produce work that transcends its origins in an advertising agency remains to be seen. The history of agencies in Hollywood is littered with projects that felt like very long commercials for nothing in particular.
But then, some commercials have always been better than the shows they interrupted. Perhaps a few of them were just waiting for more running time.
Original story published in adage.com: "New York Times CMO Amy Weisenbach is joining Coursera - Ad Age"