Episode 1: Dior × A24, Venmo’s Microseries and e.l.f.’s Album
About this episode
Episode 1 of Previously On, the monthly show about the business behind branded entertainment. This month: Dior and A24’s two-year partnership, Venmo’s microseries for Venmo Groups, e.l.f.’s second album, who’s hiring to run creator programs, the creator businesses WME, Live Nation and AGC Studios launched in early October, and a breakdown of poppi on Love Island.
Every Tuesday between episodes, The Branded Entertainment Brief covers the deals as they happen. For a closer look at the microseries format Venmo used, see branded microdramas.
Chapters
Transcript
Cold open
Brands are becoming entertainment companies. Here's what's working, what isn't, and why it matters. Here's what's ahead in this episode. First, the month's three brand activations: Dior and A24, Venmo, and e.l.f. Then Commissioning Signals: who's hiring in this space, which turned out to be a more senior list than I expected. Then who's building, because agencies, studios and investors spent the last few weeks launching creator businesses of their own. Then I'll take one activation apart, poppi on Love Island.
The month’s three brand activations
The Activation Index tracks brand activations back to 2024. This month, three activations stood out. Dior partnered with a film studio. Venmo wrote one of its own app features into a microseries. And e.l.f. put out an album. Dior and A24 announced a two-year partnership across film, theater and live events. Dior becomes the premier partner of the historic Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, the Off-Broadway house A24 bought in 2023 and reopened last September. It's the oldest continuously operating Off-Broadway theater in New York, and it seats fewer than 200 people. The partnership opened with a short film. Five actors, Sabrina Carpenter, Camille Cottin, Josh O'Connor, Drew Starkey and Sophie Wilde, are each credited as Jonathan Anderson, Dior's creative director. They're all preparing for the same part, and the part turns out to be the bow Anderson and every designer takes at the end of a runway show. At the end of the film, Anderson walks out and takes the bow himself.
[Clip: A24 meets Dior, the short film]
Here's how Anderson described it. "Putting two creatively driven worlds side by side, you start to see what they pull out of each other that neither could've found alone." Dior isn't just borrowing credibility. It's investing in the infrastructure that creates it. That's a much more interesting strategy than spending on a campaign built around a celebrity endorsement. The next activation was produced by Venmo, which turned the launch of an app feature into a microseries. The Group is a mockumentary microdrama on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. In it, four college students share a house, and episode one, all one minute and twenty-two seconds of it, is an argument over what to name their Venmo Group. Venmo Groups lets up to 30 people track and split shared expenses over time. It isn't exactly new. Venmo shipped it in November 2023 but gave it a more prominent place in the app redesign it started rolling out in May. So this is product education disguised as entertainment, aimed at people whose living situation is the use case, in a format they already watch. The episode ends with an ask. The character Benny tells viewers to post a name in the comments, and the winning name will appear in episode two. That does more than lift engagement. Everyone who comments has actively interacted with Venmo's content, and that's an audience signal Venmo could potentially use for paid or organic follow-up. The product is the premise, and the comment prompt builds an audience Venmo can reach again. The third activation is e.l.f. Cosmetics, which is behaving a lot like a record label. In late September, e.l.f. released Mirror Mix, the second album from e.l.f. Made, which the company calls an entertainment arm for music, entertainment, sports and gaming. Seven independent artists share the tracklist. Michelle Bell of Geo Massive executive produced it, Genius hosted a live Open Mic with the artists on September 30, and one of the seven, Joaquina, is now e.l.f.'s newest ambassador. That's the release plan a small label would run. The trade is easy to follow. e.l.f. says one in three independent artists lack exposure, so it gives seven of them a place on its tracklist and a stage in front of its audience. In return, e.l.f. gets their music, and the attention that comes from people finding songs they like. The first album shows what that attention looks like. Get Ready With Music drew 10 million YouTube views and more than 500,000 Spotify streams in 2024, about 20 views for every stream. Those are e.l.f.'s own figures. Any brand with an engaged customer base can make the same trade with a musician or a creator who has a following of their own. It works when the creator's audience and the brand's customers are a good fit.
Commissioning signals
Segment two is Commissioning Signals. Brands have reached an inflection point: more of them are building creator and content capability in house, instead of renting it from an agency one campaign at a time. I track the job listings behind that shift every week, and I read them as commissioning signals. The level a brand hires at, and what the job owns, shows how committed it is to owning the strategy. Over these four weeks, six brand listings pointed to three signals. The first signal: strategy is moving closer to the CMO. Salesforce is hiring a senior vice president of influencer strategy who reports directly to the CMO, with a base salary of $373,000 to $465,000. Credit Karma wants a principal-level lead to build its influencer program end to end. When a company puts creator strategy one step below the CMO, it has likely decided that's where part of the marketing budget gets set. Creator strategy is becoming a senior leadership responsibility, not a line item inside someone else's campaign. The second signal: content and commerce are converging. MAËLYS, the beauty and body-care brand, wants a director of social commerce who owns the TikTok Shop P&L. Nood, a beauty-tech brand in Austin, wants one person to recruit creators, run its TikTok Shop affiliates, and manage the usage rights behind its Meta ads. In both jobs, the team that makes the content also answers for the sale. Creator programs are becoming operating businesses, not just marketing campaigns. The third signal: credibility and performance are converging. Pendulum, which makes microbiome supplements, wants a director who manages scientists and physicians alongside performance affiliates. SEEQ, a protein brand sold in more than 5,300 stores, wants a manager to build its creator roster and make the social content. Trust, content and customer acquisition are landing in one job instead of three departments. In Issue 18, I summed up one week of this data in a sentence. Brands hire the people who decide, agencies hire the people who execute, and the platform hires the person who sells to both. I'd hold that sentence loosely. The very next week, agencies posted two of the four senior roles, and one of those agencies was WME. Which brings us to who's building.
Who’s building
In the first week of October, three companies from older parts of entertainment, a talent agency, a live events company and a film studio, launched creator businesses of their own. Today, every screen is a TV and anyone can become a content creator, and the companies that used to package broadcast talent are working out how to own a piece of the channel. So the question underneath this segment is who gets paid to build the creator business. In early October, the answer got longer. On October 2, WME launched Creator Labs, co-led by Jad Dayeh and Ben Davis, with 11 hires across Creator Labs and Creator Sales. Instead of taking a commission on deals its clients sign, Creator Labs builds and runs clients' channels and sells the brand sponsorships inside them. WME launched Erling Haaland's YouTube channel, which now has 4.5 million subscribers, it plans to do that again. A day earlier, Live Nation announced Creator Nation, led by Alexis and Scott Fisher. It offers creators live events, management and brand partnerships, and a creator can book any of those on its own. Live Nation funds it, and it comes with access to Live Nation's venues, so a creator who wants to tour is dealing with the company that operates the stage. And AGC Studios launched AGC Digital, run by Jared Jacobs, who came from Warner Bros. Unscripted Television. AGC will put its financing, production and international distribution behind IP that creators originate, with the creators as partners. That covers unscripted shows, kids and family, and micro drama. The biggest number in this segment came a few weeks earlier. On September 14, Steven.com and Authentic launched OBSN, a joint venture with up to $400 million to put into media companies and consumer brands built around creators. Authentic owns more than 50 brands, including Reebok and Champion, and works with about 1,700 licensees in 150 countries. Pointing that licensing business at creators prices a creator's audience the way you'd price a trademark. The first investments haven't been announced yet. The studios are buying as well as building. Disney signed a content and development deal with Like Nastya on September 18, its fourth creator deal of 2026, after Dhar Mann Studios, Lenny Pearce and Gracie's Corner. MoffettNathanson puts YouTube's 2025 revenue at $62 billion, against $60.9 billion for Disney's media business, and that arithmetic explains a lot of the buying. Each of these deals moves a company from booking creators by the campaign toward owning part of what the creator builds: the channel, the tour, the IP or the brand.
The breakdown
This month's brand activation breakdown is poppi on Love Island. poppi is the prebiotic soda brand aimed at young women that PepsiCo bought for nearly $2 billion in 2025. The format: in May, ahead of the U.S. season, poppi launched a limited Love Island flavor called Punch Pop. By June, Studio 55, ITV's brand partnership studio, had signed poppi across both the U.S. and U.K. shows. The audience is partnered. poppi didn't build Love Island's viewers. It paid to be in front of them. The distribution ran through placement in the villa, retail displays, social, and a creator-led finale in London. And the outcome, according to poppi, is one Love Island post that drew more than 250,000 likes. Ninety percent of that post's reach came from people who don't follow poppi. That's poppi's own figure, reported by Marketing Dive. Non-follower reach is audience data. The more interesting thing is how poppi decides what to make. Sophia Sesto, its head of culture, told Marketing Dive that data and KPIs are "normally backward-looking, not part of the brief." The call goes to a culture team made up mostly of recent college graduates. In her words, "We like to say we know our consumer because we are them." And the bar is simple: if it's not an F yes, it's an F no. Reach beyond your followers is a good sign, but it isn't the same as new buyers, and new buyers are the number I'd want to see next.
Close
Two things I'm watching in October. TikTok now lets shoppers buy from a brand's own store without leaving the app. Direct checkout was announced on October 5, it's rolling out in the U.S., and it runs through Shopify, Salesforce, Shoplazza and Stripe, separately from the TikTok Shop. And later this year, YouTube is extending Watch With, which lets a creator react live alongside any eligible long-form video. The reacting creator keeps the live ad revenue, and the original creator gets attribution and view credit. YouTube hasn't said whether that view credit earns any ad revenue, and any brand with long-form shows of its own will want that answer. If you have a question about anything in this episode, or an activation you'd like me to take apart next time, leave it in the comments. The best ones open the next episode, so tune in for that in a few weeks. And every Tuesday in between, the Brief is at brandedentertainmentbrief.com, so I hope you'll please subscribe. One more thing. I'm here to help. If you're looking for help building the content and technology infrastructure for a brand, get in touch. Thanks for watching.