Major Brands Ditch Performance Marketing for Entertainment-First Strategy

Something has shifted in how the world's biggest brands think about advertising. After decades of chasing clicks, some are walking back to an older idea: that the best way to reach people is to entertain them first.

SharkNinja, Gap, Mattel, LVMH, and Arsenal Football Club are all making structured bets on this approach. They are hiring creators as creative directors, launching in-house studios, and in some cases co-producing films. The playbook varies. The underlying problem does not. Standard ads are getting scrolled past, blocked, or simply ignored.

It is, as Digiday notes, a rediscovery more than an invention. Procter and Gamble did this in the 1930s when it funded radio dramas to reach housewives and invented the soap opera. What is old is new again.

Performance Marketing's 33-Year Bill Is Coming Due

The story of how brands got here starts with numbers that most CMOs would rather not discuss.

Advertising consultant Michael Farmer has documented that the real price of creative agency work fell 75% over 33 years, dropping from US$435,000 per unit to US$110,000. Brands squeezed fees. Agencies accepted work disconnected from real outcomes. Some holding companies began giving away creative entirely to protect their media-buying relationships. The commercial result: 40 of the 60 advertisers Farmer tracked grew below GDP for 15 consecutive years.

Underinvestment in storytelling, compounded over time, eventually shows up in the revenue line.

The Attention Gap That Data Cannot Fill

What makes the shift harder is that most marketing leaders know this intellectually but cannot act on it.

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Dentsu's Brand Reset study, which tested 3,600 creatives across 40,000 respondents on 10 platforms, found that voluntary attention outperforms forced attention. Skippable ads that viewers choose to watch are more effective second for second than non-skippable ones. It also found that attention has diminishing returns: after 20 seconds, additional viewing time delivers little extra brand impact.

Quality of attention matters more than duration. But 43% of CMOs still cannot effectively measure video ROI. That measurement gap keeps budgets flowing into performance channels where the metrics are plentiful, even when the long-term outcomes are weak.

"It is irrefutable now and people see the importance of it," said Will Swayne, Global President of Media at Dentsu. "But breaking the behavior inside client organizations by focusing on those short-term returns is the challenge."

Creator Deals Are Repeating the Same Short-Term Mistake

The brands moving into creator partnerships are not automatically escaping short-termism. They are often replicating it.

The Influencer Marketing Factory's 2026 Brand Deals Report, which analyzed 380 million creator profiles, found that 71.8% of brand-creator deals on TikTok end after a single post, averaging 4.9 months total. On Instagram, 68.5% of deals are one-offs. Even on YouTube, where affiliate structures create better incentives for longer partnerships averaging 13.5 months, nearly half of collaborations are still one-time engagements.

The brands getting results from entertainment are the ones committing to it as infrastructure, not experimenting with it as a campaign. Mattel consolidated its TV and film operations into a unified Mattel Studios in June 2025, installing Robbie Brenner as studio head. That is not a marketing test. That is a permanent organizational decision.

The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

Consumer demand is not ambiguous. Sprout Social's 2026 content strategy survey of 2,300 consumers found that 57% want brands to post original content series. Among 1,200 marketers surveyed, episodic series ranked as the top social media priority for the year.

Experiential Marketing Is Replacing Digital Impressions as Loyalty Currency

Global brands are betting on real-world experiences over digital impressions to build loyalty. 84% of marketers plan increased event spending in 2026.

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Yet 54% of buyers plan to increase performance ad spend in 2026. Only 22% plan to increase investment in brand advertising.

Dan Salkey, co-founder of creative company Small World, frames the core problem plainly: "So many agencies and so many businesses are obviously obsessed with how their product works and how their audience thinks about their product. They spend so little time thinking about what their audience is interested in outside of their brand."

Brands that earn attention rather than buy it are reporting two to four times the effectiveness of traditional advertising approaches. The evidence exists. The organizational habit is harder to break.