Last month, agency Arnold Worldwide opened a new unit it is simply referring to as Arnold Worldwide’s entertainment division. Lee Einhorn is the creative director of the office, based in Santa Monica, while Teddy Lynn is the executive producer.
The idea, Einhorn said, is to extend beyond traditional advertising into feature films, television including reality shows and scripted television, documentaries and video games. “We want to make sure that balance is maintained so that the shows that we produce or movies, or whatever it is, are an attraction, not a distraction,” he said. “We want people to come and seek them out and not flip past them like we find is going on now with a lot of sort of grossly product-placement type shows,”
Their approach to branded entertainment will be to work organically from the soul of a brand, Einhorn related. “Our goal is to never shoehorn a brand into an existing piece of entertainment so it’s not going to be The Apprentice model.”
On the contrary, their model will be along the lines of the Hallmark Hall of Fame movies where the greeting card company-sponsored television films appealed to the demographic it wanted to target.
“I think what makes us different than what most agencies are doing is this balance between traditional advertising and traditional entertainment and the fact that — we listen to what each other is doing the whole time so that at no point am I representing something in the world of Hollywood that isn’t fair to our brands and vice versa,” Lynn said of the two-man team. “The key is to have the perfect balance between projects that are truly entertaining and also serve the brands.”
At this point, the two colleagues are not able to discuss any upcoming projects, although they say several are in the works. They have recently visited with creative directors in the Boston office for a brainstorming session. They have also been to the agency’s offices in New York and Washington D.C. and have a trip planned to St. Louis.
BEHIND THE CONCEPT
Einhorn has worked at Arnold before. In Boston, he was an art director and then associate creative director for four years prior to joining Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco. Then, for a little more than a year, Einhorn was group creative director at Hal Riney where he and Lynn met while the latter was acting as a consultant to the agency. They shared a similar vision on branded entertainment and since Lynn (Trial & Error, Pleasantville) has been a producer in Hollywood for some time, their approaches were complementary.
“We came at if from opposite angles. My view was to find new, interesting ways to finance entertainment projects and Lee’s was to find new ways for brands to get their word out and we found we met in the middle,” Lynn said.
On why they decided to take their idea for this division to Arnold, Einhorn cited the numerous clients the agency manages as well as his perception that the agency has taken aggressive steps to do things differently in the past.
Einhorn and Lynn report to Pete Favat, managing partner/executive creative director, and Ron Lawner, chairman and chief creative officer, in Boston. “I worked on the Truth campaign and on Monster.com with Pete and we had talked about things like this even five years ago,” Einhorn shared.
