We have a love for Westerns, this was an internal passion project where we wanted to experiment with integrating a brand into a story narrative making it the ever-present hero.
The initial brainstorming was done with the fact that consumers are pushing towards a non-disruptive ad experience. This is especially evident when the most subscribed to streaming services are ad-free platforms.
We wanted to create experiences where the audience would be able to get excited about a character and when that character was able to survive because of a brand’s product, even better.
A man can survive the west, so long as he has his boots.
"gonna need your boots."
The Process
We selected a potential brand that we thought would be a good fit for our idea. This helped us to develop a creative that could stand as an example when talking about brand integration in the future.
After heavily researching the backstory and origins of our “brand” we created a fictional story and wrote a script.
We wanted to make the brand the hero of the story so it was the anchor to every scene in the entire story universe we created. In this particular case, the hero was “boots.”
We edited together an easily digestible story that could serve as an example of a series that could be sponsored by a brand and integrated into their marketing strategy.
The location, props, and wardrobe was provided by our go-to vendor. We then spent the day shooting our concept with professional actors that were selected through a vigorous casting process.
While this was an internal experiment we still developed a complete 3 season episodic series that feature the product (or “boots”) as the hero in every sticky situation. If this were to be a big boot brand it could show the durability of the boots, the style, and the functionality without ever blatantly selling the product to their customers. It could build fandom around the brand and recognition in the fact that it is blazing the trail for where the industry of advertising is heading.
