Anthony Freedman: the ad exec betting on the golden age of branded entertainment

Before two comms teams frantically call me with edit requests, this is not a news announcement. It is taken from a feature I wrote 10 years ago on why advertisers were looking beyond the 30-second spot to build their own shows, games and ‘Hollywood-esque’ entertainment properties that were intrinsically linked to their brands.

But a decade later, CMOs are still trying to crack it. A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal declared “Madison Avenue lands a bigger role in Hollywood” as brands try to muscle in on the development of films, TV shows, events and music.

Anthony Freedman has worked at this intersection in various guises throughout his career in the industry. From founding entertainment agencies Cake and Organic in the early 2000s to within the walls of Havas, he’s been resolute in his belief that the most enduring companies will be built through advertising that doesn’t look anything like advertising.

Until now, it’s been an uphill battle. It’s not that marketers haven’t listened to, or even agreed with, Freedman. But the market was simply not ready for it. And if Mondelez and PepsiCo – two of the biggest ad spenders in the world, with infinite budget and influence at their disposal – struggled to create entertainment properties at any kind of scale, what hope did others have?

Freedman chalks up the challenges in the early days to a few things. Traditional broadcasters were the gatekeepers to audiences and there was little appetite for involving brands – and even less for running fully-funded branded shows. And that’s before you get into the complexities of the economic model – Freedman recalls the absurdity of trying to price a 30-minute show using 30-second advertising rates – and achieving ambitious ratings targets simply to maintain an agreed time slot.

Then, there was the rise of social platforms, which gave brands a license to quietly (and cheaply) experiment in creating content that wasn’t necessarily about the hard sell, coupled with the pendulum swinging to performance marketing. “All this came along and somewhat displaced the tension around the idea of branded entertainment,” Freedman says.

“The whole thing was just was too difficult, too risky and too expensive at a point when advertising was still relatively effective,” he says.

But that’s all changed. This interview could be spent discussing Freedman’s thoughts on audience fragmentation, TV decline and the ineffectiveness of traditional paid advertising. But the gist is that he believes all the elements have finally come together for the “golden age of branded entertainment.”

“The more forward-thinking marketing leaders or brand-ambitious CEOs are saying, ‘The way that we used to build brands doesn’t work as well as it did. We’re spending billions, but it’s not delivering any enduring brand health. Simultaneously, there’s a huge reordering and disruption within the entertainment industry, so they must think more laterally around how money can be made. This has created more willingness for the entertainment industry to want, or rather, need to partner with brands,” he says. “There’s an open invitation for brands to get involved at a time when brands need to find new ways to deliver upper funnel awareness and disposition.”

Crucially, audiences today are much more willing to accept brands as part of entertainment. Just take movies such as Apple’s F1, Netflix’s reboot of Happy Gilmore, Barbie and Emilia Pérez, where CMOs have spent millions to get involved on and off screen. And viewers have largely been unfazed by their participation.

“The entertainment industry used to reject it and so audiences rejected it. And maybe because audiences rejected it, the entertainment industry had to. I remember talking to a rock band management team 20 years ago on behalf of a carbonated beverage and the management said, ‘No way will we do this. It will kill our credibility.’ Whereas today, audiences are much more accepting of it. In many respects, brand endorsement deals kind of confer greater status on artists now.”

His newest venture, Common Interest, is primed to take advantage of this shift.

The impetus to launch came during his final years at Havas. He’d joined the holding company in 2017 after selling a stake in his agencies, One Green Bean and Host, and ended up leading its Australia and New Zealand division. During his five years at the helm, he bore witness to the accelerating decline of traditional advertising’s effectiveness and saw that the legacy groups were blinkered to finding a quick fix to replace reach. Today, he says, they’re so distracted with playing defense against the rise of AI that they’ve left the door wide open for him.

“I knew how many opportunities existed around experiential and entertainment. I was overseeing those businesses and constantly looking at potential acquisitions in those spaces. I knew it was an opportunity that was just underleveraged. And holding companies were walking away from a lot of that work.

“I saw the reshaping of the things that had previously been an impediment and, therefore, this new opportunity to revisit a topic that had had a moment a few years before but that probably had never really achieved the full potential that it could have done.”

I first met Freedman in 2023 when he initially launched Common Interest with the buyout of hot indie consultancy TwentyFirstCenturyBrand. Then, he was calling it a “new-era holding company” as it quickly added six other businesses – design agency Otherway, cultural intelligence platform Culture Lab, creative startup Baby Teeth and experiential leaders Amplify, Seed and Wonder – to the stable. It has grown from a team of 40 to a projected 600 by next year, operating in Europe, America and Australia.

Today, Freedman bristles at the suggestion that it ever called itself a holding company, though he still seems to be workshopping exactly how it wants to identify.

“We used to use that [holding company] language because it didn’t have quite the same sort of toxicity as I think it does now. We would talk about ourselves more as a group or a collective, which… is a bit buzzwordy. But the reason is that it has been assembled to be connected. We built this to have a complementary set of skills and a like-mindedness and cultural consistency across founders and businesses.”

Legacy networks, he argues, are weighed down by what came before. “Most are managing decline. They’re not growing categories; they’re stealing share. That’s not the game we’re in. I don’t see the holding companies being as interested in the entertainment space.”

For now, there’s not a huge bank of Common Interest work Freedman can point to show me what it can really do for clients. “Our businesses are developing the work at this stage, we haven’t really delivered projects,” he says, although he points to the likes of ‘Night at the Louvre,’ which Amplify created for Airbnb prior to joining the collective, or the Formula One pit side restaurant, ‘Ramsey’s Garage,’ which newly acquired Baby Teeth created for Gordon Ramsey. “It’s just a brilliant project, and I think it’s the sort of thing that we imagine that we’ll be doing,” he says.

Regardless, the group is expanding at breakneck speed and the acquisition spree is far from over. Future additions are likely to be in creator, social and PR.

One clear break with old adland is how Common Interest approaches remuneration. While agencies grapple with how AI is disrupting the FTE model, Freedman is less concerned with chasing billable hours and more concerned with how it structures deals such as entertainment ventures: upfront development fees plus revenue share or joint ventures with brands and artists.

“For a lot of the things we’re doing, we would look to co-own the IP rather than just be paid. I think that we will end up in a structure with our companies where we will be co-owner, part-owner, JV partner, etc, in a variety of different entertainment formats,” he says. “We’re very open-minded about remuneration models.”

Given the economic turbulence, geopolitical turmoil and crisis in consumer (and marketer) confidence over the past two years, you might be surprised to hear Freedman describe business as “relatively smooth sailing.” Even on the subject of how AI is encroaching on the ad world, he’s optimistic – excited, even – about how it will play out for Common Interest’s offering.

In fact, Freedman has a hypothesis on how the rapid migration from traditional search to AI search will cement the case for branded entertainment in the coming years. As our conversation wraps up, he asks me to indulge him for the next 10 minutes as he gives his take on this seismic change keeping him awake at night.

“The research phase of the customer journey is giving way to LLMs doing all of that for you in seconds. And when it rewrites customer journeys, there are going to be winners and losers,” he says. It should go without saying that he wants to be a winner.

“All that performance advertising that used to surround that journey is gone, so ensuring that your brand shows up within AI search with clarity and consistency is an insomnia issue. It should be foremost in CMOs’ minds at the moment.”

In his view, in a world where AI can create machine-generated content in seconds, it’s a race to the bottom. From both a society and LLM perspective, greater value will be attributed to things that can’t be AI. “When you can fake almost anything, doing things that can’t be faked – experiences and real-world actions – form the basis of your content. Creating entertainment formats, partnerships, brand actions and cultural moments will have an authenticity that will afford brands more credibility and value.” In short, everything Common Interest has on offer.

If, 10 years ago, clients were compelled to experiment in branded entertainment to navigate adblocking, he’s betting they’ll soon be forced for a whole new set of reasons.

“If all that real-world action is optimized to become online content, which in turn forms the key elements of a brand’s online narrative, which in turn is then shaping AI search outcomes, then that real-world action is recognized as authentic and, therefore, more trustworthy. And trust becomes an even more valuable pillar of the marketing ecosystem. And all that brand action over brand claims will increasingly become more influential for LLMS than high volume, low value machine-created content.”

And just as he’s been primed for the golden age of entertainment for the past 20 years, Freedman is making sure he’ll be ready to handhold brands through this new era.