Entertainment Marketing: Leveraging Pop Culture For Brand Success: Key Panel Takeaways

How can you leverage pop culture to elevate your brand’s success? That’s the very question WeArisma’s Insight Lead Paolo D’ Allesandro asked our three industry-leading panelists. 

During this enlightening discussion, we uncovered a mix of needle-shifting concepts around immersive influencer-driven storytelling, cutting through attention barriers, and measuring success beyond vanity metrics. Let’s explore.

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Meet the panelists

Paige Smith, Sky

Paige is Sky’s official Influencer Lead. She joined Sky five years ago when influencer marketing was in its infancy, during which time the team has grown from three to 15 people. As a forward-thinking creative, Paige is passionate about scaling and evolving influencer marketing. As such, she works extensively across the brand’s entire portfolio, including product, content, offers, and trade channel placement.

Emilie Bruyere, Dusc Studio

Emilie is the Creative strategist and Co-Founder of Dusc Studio. She began her career in the editorial space at Dazed, where she developed the brand’s content strategy, before moving on to launch ILIA Beauty. She’s particularly passionate about building a community around brands and 360-degree storytelling.

Hannah Scales, Purple PR

Hannah is Purple PR’s Business Development Manager. After nearly two successful years at Purple PR, she has recently moved to the US.  She focuses on backing up “big grand blue sky ideas” with solid insights and emphasizes that creativity alone isn’t enough – data must support your proposals. Hannah first connected with WeArisma after seeing gaps in Purple’s reporting standards.

The Evolution of Entertainment Marketing

There’s been a significant shift away from micro-optimization and towards attention-grabbing campaigns that strike a personal chord with the audience.

In tomorrow’s creator economy, bold, immersive brand storytelling that taps into your audience’s genuine interests or motivations will win over content designed to please social algorithms. We’ve reached a bold new age in creator marketing – and it’s driven by fearless creativity.

Paige Smith’s influential take on current entertainment trends

Paige believes that the key evolution in entertainment marketing is influencers evolving from simple content creators to integrated entertainment participants. Here are some of the key approaches Paige adopts when developing influencer partnerships for entertainment marketing success:

• Cameo roles: Placing influencers directly into TV shows to blur the lines between fiction and reality.
• Journalist treatment: Giving influencers backstage, behind-the-scenes access to immerse them in the action.
• Early integration: Bringing influencers into the journey much earlier in the process to strengthen partnerships and push creative boundaries further.

From her experience, Paige also shares the benefits of adopting these approaches when developing influencer partnerships:

• Your influencers will get exclusive content opportunities beyond standard launch access.
• Your content becomes more tailored to your specific communities and their interests or motivation.
• Your audiences receive more interesting, differentiated content that commands attention, builds authority, and cements trust.
• You’ll gain a deeper connection between series and talent to create unique talking points.

When creativity meets culture: a lesson in digital integration

During the session, Dusc Studio’s Emily Bruyere gave us an insight into her effective approach to digital integration. Here are the key points of her core strategy:

• Lead with a clear message and understanding of your target audience.
• Make your digital experiences feel more tactile.
• Create physical spaces built for social sharing.
• Balance high-resolution, glossy campaigns with real storytelling elements.
• Provide “peak behind the curtain” access for influencers.

When working with these principles, Emily explains the questions you should ask yourself to ensure it not only works, but delivers maximum impact. These include:

☑️ How will this live as a campaign?

☑️ How will it translate physically?

☑️ How will it be shared organically?

☑️ Can I always maintain awareness across all touchpoints?

Strategic cultural moments and brand integration

Did you know? WeArisma research shows that the Met Gala generated $1.3 billion in earned media value (EMV), a 30% year-over-year increase. This success was primarily driven by challenger brands rather than traditional ones.

From this insight alone, it’s clear that major cultural moments are fast becoming critical brand activation points. Tapping into meaningful cultural moments in a way that’s relevant and authentic will likely accelerate your reach and drive deeper audience connections in tomorrow’s creator economy.

Speaking on the subject, Hannah Scales shared her strategic framework for leveraging cultural moments. The main question she asks herself and her clients is: “How do you want to show up?” Answering this question will help you lead with consistency and authenticity.

Here are Hannah’s core pearls of wisdom for navigating cultural moments:

• Brands don’t need to participate in every cultural moment. Pick your moments wisely.
• Many events have become “influencer playgrounds”, losing their credibility in the process.
• You must have a clear reason for participating in a specific trend or cultural moment.

Hannah also shares practical advice around her differentiation strategy, offering ways of showing up in a way that matters:

• Recognize saturated market conditions to decide whether it’s worth participating in a specific cultural moment.
• Move beyond basic talent dressing and deliverables. Focus on aesthetics and messaging that digs beneath the surface.
• Take an extended approach. Work with stylists, makeup artists, and costume designers with talents to share and stories to tell.
• Create a content series that digs behind-the-scenes breakdown barriers, mysteries or preconceptions.Use VIP talent as an anchor while creating unique off-red-carpet content that cuts through the walls of noise during big events or major cultural moments.

Entertainment marketing in the digital age: Key takeaways

Here’s a roundup of the most valuable takeaways from the session.

✔️ Influencer evolution: From content creators to entertainment integration participants with cameo roles and behind-the-scenes access.

✔️ Cultural moment strategy: Selective participation with clear purpose, moving beyond basic talent partnerships to include supporting creatives

✔️ Niche community power: Targeting passionate, specialized communities often outperforms broad reach strategies

✔️ Authentic measurement: Focus on genuine connection and community feedback over pure engagement metrics

✔️ Creative collaboration: Treat audiences as collaborators, provide open briefs, and trust community creativity

✔️ Platform integration: Ensure campaigns work across digital and physical touchpoints with social sharing in mind

✔️ Long-term authenticity: Build sustained relationships rather than chasing viral moments

We hope these insights will help you make a significant impact by leveraging the power of entertainment marketing. If you’d like to connect with all of the tips, insights, and ideas from this panel session, access the full video here.