Name: BE THE FOX
Price range: $

There was a time when advertising could interrupt and still win. A loud logo. A big promise. A media buy large enough to make avoidance impossible.

That time is over. Way way over.

Today, your audience is the most powerful media buyer in the room. They decide what gets skipped, muted, scrolled past, shared, rewatched or quietly saved for later. They make those decisions emotionally, not rationally.

Approach ad creation with an entertainment mindset.

People don’t hate ads. They hate boring ones. It doesn't take much to create dull ads. It’s cheap…that’s all it has going for it.

Let’s get something straight: we don’t think audiences are anti-advertising. It’s just that they’re so much more aware that content can and should be more interesting to watch. They’re anti-time wasting.

People happily watch 90-second TikToks, twenty-minute YouTube essays, hour-long podcasts and entire seasons of TV in one sitting. Attention isn’t scarce. Interest is. Or rather, the ability to win and keep it by creators, advertisers, brands and organisations.

Interest is earned through entertainment.

Not entertainment as in “make it funny” (though humour can help in the right place), but entertainment as in make me feel something. Anything. Joy, tension, nostalgia, empathy, anger, relief. Even discomfort. Especially discomfort, when it’s earned or creates a need.

At the risk of sounding like a bargain bucket Yoda, feeling leads to remembering, remembering leads to action.

Entertainment is emotional engineering and smart agency teams can harness this and pair it with authenticity.

The most effective advertising has always borrowed from entertainment. Before we had dashboards and attribution models, we had stories. Stories with stakes. Characters with flaws. Atmosphere. Rhythm. A point of view. A way of capturing those who belong to the story.

Entertainment is simply the disciplined craft of emotional intent. It’s deciding, deliberately, how you want someone to feel, and then using every creative tool available to make that feeling land.

That might mean:

Comedy that disarms scepticism
Sadness that builds trust
Tension that keeps someone watching past the skip button
Beauty that stops the scroll
Anger that galvanises action
Aesthetic world-building that signals “this brand gets me”

Entertainment isn’t a genre. It’s a strategy.

Entertainment lives and dies in the details. Performance. Casting. Pacing. Sound design. Colour. Texture. Editing. Tone. Restraint.

This is where advertising often cuts corners and where ROI quietly leaks out of the campaign.

Craft is what turns a concept into something watchable, and watchable is what makes media spend efficient. When craft and creative come together to build content in unison then its much easier to make something that is entertaining. It's why we're a creative AND production agency. The vision in our work is holds firm from ideation to delivery with all involved in on the play.

There’s a myth that entertainment is expensive.

Marketing, communications and brand teams can hear ‘entertainment’ and start having fever dreams about the costs of huge sets, the most expensive kit, Emmy award winning Directors and Jim Camerons VFX team. But we know, for a fact, that entertaining creative is all in the story and emotion, the craft and the resourcefulness, the art that comes from restriction and passion.

We have all those in bucket loads at Be The Fox. Any creative and production agency should. It’s why we so things the way we do. The creative and the craft needs to work hard together to keep budgets manageable and the watchability high.

But there is no escaping that entertainment makes media budgets work harder. Invest in entertaining content (which does not have to = ££) and the work will make those media budgets sing. Boring is expensive.

Dull, generic, forgettable work needs:

More spend to force reach
More frequency to drive recall
More justification when results underperform

Entertaining work does the opposite. It earns attention. It gets watched past the first five seconds. It gets talked about in group chats, Slack channels and comment sections. The possibilities of the message spreading organically through shares is so much higher.

Entertainment performs better economically.

Entertainment creates action. Not just awareness

The outdated fear is that entertainment “distracts from the message”. In reality, we know from experience it’s what makes the message land.

Time for my discount Yoda again…

People act when they care…

…care when they feel…

…feel when something is made for them.

The most effective brand actions today don’t look like persuasion. They look like participation. Entertainment creates the emotional permission to act and join. It’s an invitation. You can read more about how this tactic can create a brand fandom.

As platforms fragment, formats multiply and audiences gain more control, the brands that win will be the ones that understand a simple truth.

You are not competing with other ads. You're competing with everything else people could be watching instead. And everything else is getting very, very good. (Have you SEEN Pluribus?!)

Entertainment requires confidence. Taste. Trust in craft. An understanding that emotion is strategy and doing the creative heavy lifting to invest in work and teams to create ads that people want to watch, enjoy and share. Something we specialise in as it happens...

Entertainment isn’t the future of advertising because it’s flashy, large scale, epic or expensive. It’s the future, the now really, because it’s intrinsically linked to our humanity.