“The future of digital marketing is all about telling a great story.” by Nathaniel Pincus-Roth of CAA. How to put brands into popular culture and popular culture into brands? Nathaniel illustrated with several examples.

Back a decade ago, CAA helped Hasbro rebrand its toy line called “Transformers” by lining up big film producers for creating a series of films. As a result, Hasbro got free commercials worth US$200m but returned with billions of sales revenue. The second example was American Idol could only be bought by Fox channel after CAA secured Coca Cola as a sponsor for the show. After the success of the branded content, CAA innovated digital marketing further by putting short films in new platforms that never used before, e.g. Hulu, Netflix, Oscars, Grammy and Sundance.

The Nike campaign for Olympic Game in Beijing was a good example for innovation. It launched the campaigns the day before so that each campaign could keep updating the stories about the game. Marketers should “think like a marketer and act like a producer”. The stories should be deeply rooted with the core values of the product or company. Nathaniel explained how to help brands tell their stories by the following case studies:

1. Chipotle - Film “The Scarecrow” for the campaign “Cultivate a better world” - Chipotle was a popular Mexican fast food restaurant but the customer did not know Chipotle was one of the leader in sustainability. So Chipotle initiated a campaign called “Cultivate a better world” with a short film “The Scarecrow”, a game and a festival. The campaign received a huge coverage on both social and traditional media with surge on revenue. The film even won top awards for branded content in Cannes Lions and PR Grand Prix.
2. Coca Cola - Micro film for “Polar Bear” - Coca Cola reused the Polar Bear characters produced in the previous TV commercials and created a new series of short films for its new commercial.
3. QVC - "Joan Rivers vs. Missy Piggy" campaign - QVC would like to acquire more young audience and they decided to revive the character
   
   “Missy Piggy” with Joan Rivers. The campaign was successful by acquiring huge young fans and generating extra businesses and revenue.
4. Old Navy - “Backbone” of Back-to-school campaign - In order to lessen brand’s reliance on TV, Old Navy CMO, being inspired by Frozen, created an online music video called featuring a young teenager girls going back to school with fear and hope. The music video was well received by young artists.

Nathaniel suggests marketers not to tell stories for digital. Instead, they should tell stories and take advantages of digital.