Rec Room, a branded entertainment company that launched in January, has hired a new partner and ECD away from 72andSunny. Jan Livingston is a creative director and writer who spent four years at 72andSunny and headed up the Samsung and Target global accounts, among others.
Livingston joins a team with a strong entertainment background. Her partners are Jonathan Helfgot, a creative and strategic exec from 20th Century Fox, and Mike George, a film director who was most recently creative director at 20th Century Fox Marketing. Livingston is the first of several planned new hires as Rec Room expands its offering.
Livingston said of her new roost, “By bringing together talent from both the entertainment world and the brand marketing world we can solve one of the sticking points in creating branded content right now – agencies struggling to navigate the entertainment world, and the entertainment industry snubbing its nose at the ad world. The consumer doesn’t see any delineation between both worlds, and neither do we. They just want great entertainment.”
In its short existence, Rec Room has been creating everything from original online videos promoting feature films to episodic series for television networks to branded online films. Because Rec Room has strategy, creative and production capabilities all in house, it can also solve another challenge brands have faced: finding budget for content experimentation while still delivering on ROI. The time and cost efficiencies alone help make branded content creation less of a gamble. For instance, Rec Room is currently developing an eight-episode network series for a budget that many brands would often spend on just one :30 commercial.
