Brand Storytelling At Sundance: Championing Excellence And Filmmakers With Purpose

One of the best events I’ve had the pleasure of attending recently was the Brand Storytelling, a sanctioned event of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah - an annual gathering of brands and creators pioneering new approaches to making longer-form content like documentaries and TV shows, that help drive brand affinity and growth.

With the slowdown in subscriber growth, streamers are looking for new ways to fund and promote content - and have opened up ad tiers in many of their platforms. And brands have long wanted to find ways to get out of just advertising and tell stories to audiences in newer and fresher ways. This provides a perfect moment for Brand Storytelling to help nurture and foster these new and innovative approaches to make high quality content - many of them with themes of Purpose and impact.

A warm and inclusive community celebrated some fantastic projects this year and I was privileged to attend and learn more about this growing movement. I caught up with Jordan P. Kelley, Content Director, Brand Storytelling to find out more about their philosophy and approach.

The origins of the conference began with a group of digital marketers that had been regularly attending Sundance Film Festival for several years, who came to Brand Storytelling’s co-founder and Director Rick Parkhill looking for a place to gather and discuss their collective business. The first event in 2016 (then called Digital Storytelling), brought into focus a shared experience – a trend made clear after having gathered hours of interviews from various guests over the course of the event: brands were trending toward telling more non-interruptive, informative, and entertaining stories than ever before. The interviews were turned into a six-part docuseries that launched an event and a community that has grown every year since. Due to the global pandemic, Brand Storytelling went virtual in 2021 and 2022, but was proud to return to Park City this January to host 350+ brand storytellers and their partners in person.

I asked Kelley what made him proud of this year’s event. “It was that we were able to realize the event in the fashion we’d sought out to since 2021,” he said. The emphasis on celebrating brand-funded films has become more central to their goal for the event each year, due in large part to the fact that over the last 7 years the number and quality of films have both increased. “This was our second year showcasing films selected by an expert committee in the Brand Storytelling Theater and our first in-person. While I’m extremely proud of the quality and variety of storytelling exhibited by the great filmmakers and films selected to be a part of the theater, I’m most proud of the launch of several new special projects onsite at Brand Storytelling 2023, most notably the Brand Storytelling Diversity Imperative.”

What struck me the most was how many of the films celebrated Purpose and impact in rich and interesting ways. Standouts for me includeded P&G’s ‘Fair Play’ documentary with Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, which brought to life Eve Rodsky’s terrific book about the inequity and invisible work that women have to deal with domestically; ‘Big Water Summer’ from GoDaddy about Navajo Nation entrepreneur, Cherilyn Yazzie which actually had me in tears; the moving, funny and honest ‘Lesbian Bar Project’ from Jagermeister which celebrated the heroic bar owners keeping the few lesbian bars in the country alive and championing community.

Other highlights for me included ‘Generation Impact’ from HP which colorfully and vibrantly shone a light on young scientists; and my favorite, ‘A Voice for the Wild’ from the non-profit Friends of the Boundary Waters which beautifully and poetically highlighted explorer Emily Ford's winter journey across the Boundary Waters, to highlight the need to protect our natural lands.

Some of the other featured films this year were: ‘A Fire Inside’ by NRMA Insurance, ‘We Are As Gods’ – Stripe Press, ‘High Road’ – Outride, ‘The Cuban Way’ – Corona Studios. ‘A Thousand Casts’ – YETI, ‘Luck is Alive’ – Mami Wata, ‘If You Have’ – UNICEF, ‘Out North’ – Fiverr, ‘Duct Tape and Dreams’ – SFMOMA, ‘Future of Farming’ – The Climate Pledge (Amazon)

When asked what his favorite film was, Kelley paused and said, “If I had to pick one highlight, I was thrilled to hear John Henry Hinkel, director of Morning Joy, say that he was inspired to seek out brand funding from music company Kawai to realize the completion of his film by The Park Bench from Aflac, an animated film we’d screened as part of Brand Storytelling 2022. It’s great to know that championing this kind of work begets more of it.”

I have to agree with him. There’s something special about the conversations born out of mixed inspiration that take place at a Brand Storytelling event. The audience is taking in films discussed by their directors, presentations from experts in production and distribution, juxtaposed by dialogues on the future of VR and discussions about standardizing definitions of success in brand-funded entertainment. I asked Kelley what some of the highlights were for him. “There are small moments of epiphany happening all the time all around you, in rooms full of people who are in positions to act on and implement those epiphanies in pursuit of the betterment of their art, craft, project, business, brand, what have you. It’s special,” he said.

The conference showcased the many opportunities for brands to collaborate with streamers given their shift to having advertising funded models. One example from Brand Storytelling 2023 is The Lesbian Bar Project, produced in partnership with Jägermeister, and distributed on Roku. A project that started as a PSA and fundraiser became a short film that became the blueprint for a fascinating and cinematic series presented by a brand. Kelley said, “People want to watch them, too – like Dear Santa, the film about the USPS that’s been adapted into a series for Hulu.” Visit Roku’s advertising page online and you’ll find brand-integrated storytelling being advertised front-and-center. And with digital video viewing projected to make up for more than half of daily viewing habits in 2023, the opportunity is there for brands to collaborate with streamers.

Brand Storytelling’s long-term goal is to have a measurable impact on shaping the state of this corner of the advertising industry. They’re working to achieve that with the launch of their online community for brands, agencies and storytellers, BrandStorytelling+, which offers access to professional certifications, brand storytelling case studies, and over 100+ hours of industry and academic resources. They’re also putting together specialized groups with industry experts to address a number of issues, including working to define unified standards for best practices, measurement, and ROI in the brand storytelling space, as well as the previously mentioned diversity imperative, which will offer participants access to certification courses, RFP’s, job fairs, and recruiting workshops in the brand storytelling space. Finally, I asked Kelley what were his aspirations for the future. “Of course, we always aspire to make each event a little better than our last, and will take that energy with us on to Elevate, a Brand Storytelling Summer Retreat.”