Brands are producing original series for social. Here’s why

As if streaming wasn’t fragmented enough, audiences now have plenty of social media series to tune into, too.

Short-form, original series like Brooklyn Coffee Shop, which satirizes café customers, and Bistro Huddy, which portrays a fictional restaurant with all characters played by creator Drew Talbert, are growing in popularity online, and brands seem eager to get in on the action.

This year, Bratz wrapped Season 2 of its weekly TikTok series Alwayz Bratz, and jewelry brand Alexis Bittar released Season 4 of its social soap opera The Bittarverse. Meanwhile, beauty brand Tower 28 hired a writer from the HBO series The Sex Lives of College Girls to make a sketch comedy series about blush called The Blush Lives of Sensitive Girls.

Brands have tried to re-create TV magic before. More than a decade ago, Chipotle released a four-part, 30-minute satirical web series called Farmed and Dangerous, and more recently, brands like L’Oréal and Pepsi have attempted to produce their own TV shows (while Zillow is getting front-row treatment in HGTV’s social media-to-TV show Zillow Gone Wild.) But with minutes-long shows geared toward today’s quick scrollers and vertical screens, this seems to be a new era for organic content, where the lines of advertising and entertainment continue to blur.

Bilt, Pretzelized, and Oatly are among the brands experimenting with the format, and we spoke to marketing execs from each one about what they’ve learned from investing in highly produced, sometimes unbranded social content.

Moving in

Whether you know it or not, you may have recently watched content from payments and commerce network Bilt. In June, the brand posted the first episode of its series Roomies, an ultra-short sitcom about young people living in New York that Cyrus Ferguson, senior director of content at Bilt, told us was inspired by Friends and New Girl, as well as Brooklyn Coffee Shop. The show lives on TikTok and Instagram and has since amassed more than 130,000 followers combined.

Ferguson said the series was created to build brand goodwill and awareness as a purely organic social play. “We had this idea bubbling around more serial, narrative-driven, character-driven content, and how that felt like a really cool opportunity that not a lot of brands were doing,” he said.

The series focuses on renting, which ties to Bilt’s company purpose, but Ferguson said it isn’t meant to promote any specific offering. Rather, Roomies is aimed at entertaining viewers while complementing Bilt’s “very robust” paid ad strategy, he said. So far, the only mention of Bilt is in the account bio.

Zoe Oz, CMO of Bilt, told us that putting out largely unbranded, humorous organic content is how Bilt aims to catch the attention of savvy, fast-moving TikTok and Reels viewers, many of whom, like Oz, may be ad-avoidant.

“If I see ads, I scroll as fast as I possibly can, because the UIs of these platforms make it very obvious [that] something’s an ad,” she said, noting that “if you can crack that nut and you can really create content people want to see and will go out of their way to watch, they’ll build a much stronger brand affinity.”

How, though, does a brand build affinity if it’s largely hidden? Ferguson said viewers often mention Bilt in the comments and educate each other on what the platform is. Subtle character mentions of the brand and its rewards program are also not off-limits in scripting, Oz said, so long as it’s not “in your face.”

So far, there are nine episodes of Roomies, and Ferguson said he and his team are coming up with ideas and shooting episodes every week. They’re thinking through what a season finale and second season might look like, he said, and have begun fielding requests from creators and actors hoping to get involved in future episodes.

“It’s fun to now see that there’s enough appetite from the audience to really treat this like a show,” he said.

Friendly debate

This spring, snack brand Pretzelized put out a four-part, vertical-video series, its first digital campaign, called Pretzel or Pita Chip? in which two comedians debate the brand’s chip categorization as part pita and part pretzel. The aim of the series, according to Blair Hirak, Pretzelized’s head of digital and social content development, was to help build brand recall.

“We all really love comedy and Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I was like, ‘Well, why don’t we lean into this sketch-comedy approach?’” Hirak told us.

Hirak said she was inspired to make the content episodic after seeing Tower 28’s The Blush Lives of Sensitive Girls, which was released around the same time. Alex Kalatzis, Tower 28’s director of marketing, told the newsletter Link in Bio that the brand had similarly ventured into scripted comedy as part of a “test and learn” approach.

For Pretzelized, the test paid off. Hirak said the brand, which put about $125,000 in paid behind its series and gained more than 17,000 followers on TikTok, in addition to reaching 9.4 million unique accounts and getting more than 22 million impressions across platforms. Based on the results, she said, the brand is going to continue leaning into comedy, possibly developing a new season of Pretzel or Pita Chip? or even bringing back the comedians featured as brand ambassadors.

The experience ultimately showed Hirak the importance of not taking social too seriously.

“It’s time to go back to the roots and what social used to be when it first started becoming a thing, which is fun and just throwing stuff against the wall,” she said, adding that it’s important to “[make] sure that that’s entertainment first.”

Something to sip on

Dairy-alternative brand Oatly has also recently ventured into the short-series space with Café con el Abuelo, a nine-episode series in which Jeremy Mercado, one of the brand’s employees, brings his grandfather Luis to Chicago coffee shops to try drinks he’s never tasted before, like matcha lattes and espresso tonics, and get his unfiltered reaction.

Kevin Warwick, creative producer of Oatly’s global content studio, told us that including Mercado’s grandfather added a naturally comedic element to the series through his banter and outsider perspective. Oatly serves as a “supporting character” in the series, and the oat milk is occasionally used in the drinks or appears in the background, but Warwick said the series isn’t designed to be seen as a commercial. Instead, the spotlight is on the coffee shops featured in the series.

“We’re always looking to show off our expertise in coffee and establish our reverence for the coffee community,” Warwick said.

While the series was mostly unscripted and filmed horizontally for YouTube, Warwick said his team has vertical cuts for TikTok that it’s begun rolling out. If Oatly sees engagement with the series in the Chicago market, he said the brand might film in other cities and continue to build brand reverence by showcasing Oatly’s own employees.

“Within your own walls, there are some real talented personalities that can be in front of a camera and—this sounds incredibly wack—sparkle,” he said. “Giving that talent its own platform can be awesome…and strengthen the brand in the long run.”