Brand Storytelling: Land Rover’s Epic Adventure

Since 2016, Brand Storytelling has been gathering top brands at Deer Valley Ski Resort in Park City, Utah to celebrate brand-funded filmmaking and content creation.

A sanctioned event of Sundance Film Festival, over 120 feature, short, and episodic brand-funded content and entertainment productions were submitted. This year’s short list of officially selected films will be screened January 18–21, 2023 during four days of networking, presentations, and screenings celebrating elite brand storytellers and their partners, who are innovating new and different ways of telling their stories.

I am hijacking this event as an opportunity to flag some of my own favorite “brand films,” which were sometimes disguised as ad-like objects, other times labeled as “industrial films” and most often were orphans that fit no particular category.

First up on anyone’s list should be advertising agency Fallon’s famous BMW “The Hire” series starring then-unknown actor Clive Owen and directed by luminaries Tony Scott, Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie among others. Eight short films were produced in 2001 and 2002 specifically to be streamed on the Internet (this was before YouTube or Vimeo).