BRANDS SPEND $70 BILLION A YEAR ON SPACE: HOW 5% COULD HELP FINANCE HOLLYWOOD
Advertising is a Cost. Scripted Content is an Asset. Brands that Understand the Difference Will Build Content, Communities and Culture.
There is more money being spent on advertising right now than at any point in human history. Global advertising spend crossed $1 trillion in 2024. Procter and Gamble alone spent $9.2 billion last year. Coca-Cola spent $5 billion. General Motors spent $4.2 billion. American Express spent $1.8 billion. Starbucks spent over $500 million.
Now ask a simple question. What does a brand have at the end of the year to show for it?
Nothing permanent. The spots ran, the impressions were logged, and the budget resets to zero on January 1st. That is the nature of advertising expenditure. It is a cost. The money is spent to drive purchase behavior, to move product, grow market share, keep the brand present in the consumer’s mind. That is the job. But the spend leaves nothing behind. And at some point that becomes a question worth asking out loud.
How We Got Here
When television arrived in homes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the economic model was elegantly simple. You bought a television set. You brought it home. And from that moment forward, television cost you nothing. The programming was free. The distribution was free. The news, the sports, the entertainment - all of it free. Not free because of government subsidy. Free because brands paid for it.
Brands paid for the programming to appear. Texaco sponsored Milton Berle. Kraft sponsored its own television theatre. Colgate, Camel, and General Electric put their names on shows and owned the hour. Brands didn’t own the storytelling - the writers, producers, and talent owned that. What brands owned was the time during which the storytelling took place. A single sponsor attached to a single show reached millions of viewers simultaneously, in their living rooms, with their full attention. There were three commercial channels and one public broadcaster. And you couldn’t skip a commercial.
The consumer understood the deal implicitly. You sat through the sponsor’s message because the sponsor was paying for the show you were about to watch. It was a fair exchange and nobody resented it.
What changed that exchange was not creative philosophy. It was inventory control. Once broadcasting technology allowed networks to insert multiple advertisements into a single hour of programming, the economic logic was irresistible. Why sell an hour to one brand when you could sell thirty or sixty seconds at a time to dozens? The network captured far more revenue per hour of content. The single-sponsor model gave way to the spot model and the spot model has been the dominant paradigm ever since — not because it served the brand better, but because it served the network better.
The consequence for brands was significant even if nobody named it at the time. The brand went from owning the time to renting thirty seconds of it. The emotional association between sponsor and show, the reason Texaco and Milton Berle were linked in the American imagination, dissolved into a rotating pod of messages that audiences learned, over decades, to ignore.
The Cost of the Subscription Era
Cable television arrived and changed the terms of the original deal. Consumers began paying a monthly subscription fee for access to programming that had always been free. The advertising didn’t disappear. It stayed. So consumers were now paying twice - once with their subscription and once with their attention during the breaks. Premium cable layered on top of that. The bill kept growing.
Streaming arrived and briefly felt like a correction. Consumers paid a reasonable monthly fee and got something genuinely new: control. Watch what you want, when you want it. No appointment television. No cable bundle forcing you to pay for 200 channels to get the 12 you actually watch. Streaming gave audiences agency that broadcast and cable never had.
The platforms noted what that agency was worth. By 2024, 78% of streaming services restricted ad-skipping in some form, up from just 32% in 2020, and the average ad load on ad-supported streaming tiers had increased 25% over the same period. Netflix, Disney+, Max, Peacock - every major streaming platform introduced advertising tiers and is actively growing them. The consumer who paid a premium to remove advertising from their viewing experience watched the platforms accept that money, build subscriber bases on that promise, and layer ads back in because advertising revenue is simply more profitable than subscriptions alone.
The audience that brands are buying space to reach is more fragmented, more distracted, and more actively resistant than at any point since Milton Berle was sponsored by Texaco. According to Midia Research, 52% of all consumers stop paying attention when ads come on television, rising to 61% for viewers over 55. A Sharethrough survey found that 66% of viewers say they don’t actively watch TV ads - and among the 34% who say they do, 28% watch on mute, putting the real number of disengaged viewers closer to 76%.
And yet the brands keep spending. Because the alternative has never been clearly articulated.
The 5% Question
Look at the table below. These are the real annual advertising budgets of the largest brand spenders in America and what a 5% reallocation toward scripted entertainment content would produce.
Those numbers deserve a moment. The 22 brands in this table at 5% would produce a combined scripted content budget of roughly $3.5 billion. For context, Netflix spent $17 billion on content in 2024. Amazon Studios and Apple TV+ each spent in the range of $8 to $10 billion. The brands in this table, at a 5% reallocation, would collectively be financing a content operation the size of a major streaming platform, from money that was going to be spent on advertising anyway.
I have argued for years, including in my Business of Entertainment class at UCLA Extension, that brands should take 5% of their annual advertising spend and commit it as equity in scripted entertainment content. Not branded social content or series. Not sponsored segments on someone else’s show. Actual scripted content, developed with professional writers, directors, and talent, the kind that gets placed inside the distribution systems that were built to put content in front of audiences and generate revenue from it.
The critical distinction is this: that 5% was going to be spent regardless. It was never expected to return a dollar. The thirty-second spot that ran last Sunday cost exactly what it cost and when it was over, it was over. What scripted content changes is not the nature of the expenditure, it changes what exists when the expenditure is complete.
A scripted show is an asset. It lives inside a system, streaming platforms, syndication, licensing, international distribution, that was specifically designed to monetize content over time. It may not pay back its full cost. It may not pay back any of it. But it enters a world where payback is structurally possible, which is more than any spent media buy ever offered. Advertising pays for other people’s programming right now. YouTube without advertising revenue does not exist. TikTok does not exist. Instagram does not exist. The entire digital content ecosystem runs on brand dollars. The question is whether some of those dollars could be funding content the brand actually owns.
The Brands That Have Already Tried
The conversation about brands and scripted content is not theoretical. The infrastructure has been building for nearly two decades. Some of it is working. Some of it collapsed the moment one executive walked out the door. And the distinction between those two outcomes is the most instructive data point in this entire discussion.
The single most important story in that table is Marriott. They launched in 2014 with genuine ambition - real distribution on AXS TV, a short film trilogy that drove $500,000 in direct hotel bookings, a scripted drama in development with professional Hollywood producers. Then creative director David Beebe left in 2017 and the entire operation collapsed within a year. No infrastructure. No institutional commitment beyond one person. The studio that was going to make Marriott “the largest publisher of lifestyle content in the world” simply ceased to exist.
That is not a cautionary tale about brand content. That is a cautionary tale about confusing a project with a studio. A brand studio built on one person’s creative conviction is not a studio. It is a project with a better title. Every brand in that table that has not institutionalized the creative function beyond any single individual is one departure away from the same outcome.
The counterpoint is Dick’s Sporting Goods, which almost nobody in Hollywood talks about and which is arguably the most credible brand studio operating in America right now. Two Sports Emmys. Netflix distribution through the Obama’s Higher Ground production company. A SXSW premiere. An ESPN documentary. Ten years of consistent output, a formal studio launch in 2025, and a partnership with Imagine Entertainment. They did it quietly, without a Sunset Boulevard office or a press release naming a new content paradigm. They just kept making things.
Three Models. One Question.
Before examining what brands have actually done, it is worth naming the three distinct ways brands engage with scripted content, because the industry has become very good at describing all three and mixing them up.
Model One is equity financing. The brand commits real incremental capital as an owner of the scripted content. They take the creative and financial risk. They own a stake in the asset and participate in whatever it generates through distribution, licensing, and syndication. This is what Mattel did with Barbie. What Saint Laurent did with Emilia Pérez. What Red Bull has done with its entire slate for nearly two decades. Real money. Real ownership. Real upside. This is the 5% argument.
Model Two is development without production financing. The brand creates a studio division and is willing to spend money on development - writers, scripts, concept work - but has no interest in financing production. When a project is ready to produce, that financing becomes someone else’s problem. A streaming platform, a studio, a co-production partner. The brand brings the IP, the access, the name, and potentially some marketing muscle at release. But they do not write the production check. They are a development entity, not a production financier. Most of what has been announced under the brand studio banner in 2024 and 2025 lives here. The press release is real. The equity commitment is not.
Model Three is product placement. This is standard operating procedure in Hollywood and has been for decades - a completely separate business with its own agencies, its own rate cards, and its own negotiation infrastructure. The brand pays a fee to have their product embedded in someone else’s scripted content. The production controls everything. The brand controls nothing except how their specific product is depicted within the story. At the release window, the brand typically activates their existing media buy as co-branded creative, money they were going to spend anyway, now pointing at the content simultaneously. No incremental capital. No ownership. No participation in the upside.
Model Three is not a lesser version of the studio play. It is a conscious, legitimate choice with its own distinct business logic. For brands not yet ready to commit equity and without development capability, product placement offers meaningful participation in the scripted content ecosystem at scale. Done thoughtfully, it is an intelligent testing ground. A brand that places its product in five scripted projects over two years learns which content worlds their brand naturally inhabits, which emotional territories resonate with their audience, and where a more substantial equity commitment might eventually make sense.
What matters is whether the brand is honest with itself and with its creative partners about which model it is actually operating. A development operation that presents itself as an equity financier wastes everyone’s time. A product placement strategy that calls itself a studio misleads the market.
The brands that have built real things in this space were clear from the beginning about what they were committing to and what they were not.
