ADWEEK’s Social Media Week kicked off with a bang as creator Dhar Mann gave away a $1,000 Old Navy gift certificate to a lucky participant.
He was reviving a hit collaboration he’d worked on with Old Navy parent company Gap, where people had to guess whether a person’s outfit is Old Navy or designer. Guess right, and you get a grand to spend at Old Navy stores.
The tricky part of the brief was that Old Navy had a message it wanted to send—that its clothing was fashionable but accessible—but Mann wanted to deliver without actually saying those words.
He worked with Damon Berger, Gap’s svp of marketing shared services, whom he met at a YouTube party at Cannes. They first activated the collaboration live onstage at the Advertising Week industry conference last October. Berger was slightly concerned because of how little control he’d have.
“I thought I’d get fired,” he joked onstage at Social Media Week.
The partnership has since deepened, and Mann said that they’re now doing short-form activations and exploring deeper brand involvement, including a YouTube video released two months ago.
Mann did not have any brand partners for the first five years of his social media career, he told the Social Media Week audience—something he had some anxiety about, as he saw other creators spin up partnerships. But he told the crowd to be patient. Today, Dhar Mann Studios can afford to be selective about which brands it partners with.
The company has 125,000 square foot studio facility containing 85 different sets and locations, and its content gets one billion views per month, according to its CEO, former MTV president Sean Atkins. Atkins said that brands that want Mann to stand on stage to hawk a product aren’t the sort of partners the studio looks for.
For creators like Mann, who also partners closely with the NFL and Adobe, brand partnerships have become about finding collaborators who respect the creative vision.
