J. Walter Thomp-son New York has created ©JWT, a New York-headquartered division that is an alliance with Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Basic Entertainment. ©JWT will develop entertainment built around brands, and will bring corporate clients closer to projects in development. Basic Entertainment, a feature film and television production company topped by chairman Brad Grey, is the parent company of management agency Brillstein-Grey Management (BGM), also in Beverly Hills.
Basic has produced television shows such as The Sopranos, Just Shoot Me and Politically Incorrect. BGM represents clients including Adam Sandler, Brad Pitt, Nicolas Cage, and Sylvester Stallone. Beverly Hills-based Brad Grey Pictures, another Basic division, is developing several features.
Marina Hahn, JWT’s executive VP of strategy and entertainment since May ’99, will head up ©JWT. Her experience includes working as director of advertising for Pepsi-Cola and as VP of marketing and advertising for Sony Electronics. Before joining JWT, Hahn worked at the William Morris Agency, bicoastal/international with offices in Nashville, as the leader of its East Coast Corporate Advisory Group. That division advised companies on how to use entertainment as a strategic marketing tool.
Hahn and Basic vice-chairman Jon Liebman had spoken for many years about creating a link between the advertising and entertainment worlds. Hahn believes that the combined talents of JWT and Basic will enable clients to market their brands more effectively: "If you have this wealth or stable of global marketers at your disposal and you can marry the clout of corporate America with the creativity of Hollywood in a very seamless manner, the result is going to be a much better connection between the consumer and your brand," she said.
Hahn contended that ©JWT would create a new kind of advertising. "This is not about another sponsorship, or creating another Web site, or putting another celebrity in another ad," she said. "It’s truly about integrating a corporate positioning and a brand strategy into the entertainment industry, so at the end of the day you build the brand loyalty, and create that much more seamless connection with the consumer."
Liebman emphasized that Basic’s relationship with JWT would not compromise the creative integrity of project development. "This is not about placing advertisers in the writing room," he said. "The mandate is to find opportunities where it’s natural for the advertising community and the entertainment community to be in a dialogue—not to bend the creative projects for the benefit of the advertisers."
Liebman explained that these benefits could "take the form of information about projects that the advertisers may want to focus on for their campaigns, and opportunities for them to be sponsoring or participating in things that they would not otherwise know about."
Hahn added: "It’s not a question of giving clients overtly commercial solutions; it’s simply putting them in the thick of the converged world so that they can have the ability to manage their brands more like [pop] stars. … Gone are the days where the brand can just sit on the sidelines and sort of interrupt what’s going on in pop culture."
While acknowledging that ©JWT’s slate was still a work in progress, Hahn said that it may include TV programs, feature films, a literary imprint and broadband applications. Though she was not at liberty to publicly discuss specifics, Hahn said that ©JWT has 10 current clients and a few more in the works.
Hahn and Liebman said that JWT and Basic would determine the financial structure of ©JWT projects as they were developed. But Hahn noted that ©JWT projects could potentially provide future revenue streams to clients. "The thirty-second spot is not going to go away and it shouldn’t go away; frankly, that’s where our core competency lies as an agency," said Hahn. "But there’s no afterlife to that thirty-second spot. The idea is to give our clients content that can result in ancillaries and in whole new revenue streams for them."
Hahn said that New York-based Digital@JWT, the agency’s high-tech arm, would play a major role since "everything [©JWT] does will have an online component."
Liebman said that ©JWT would not affect the relationships that Basic’s Brillstein-Grey Television has with other companies in the spot industry, including an alliance with bicoastal/international Hungry Man to create and develop original television programming (SHOOT, 10/8/99, p. 4).
