Here’s what happened when three Hollywood showrunners on strike tried writing for a major brand

One morning in early September, three Hollywood showrunners met in a hotel conference room in Los Angeles with several senior-level marketing executives at a Fortune 500 company. The mission: to brainstorm ideas for an advertising campaign.

The WGA strike was entering its fourth month, and these A-list television writers —Jeff Astrof, his sister Liz Astrof, and David Nickoll—were eager to put their skills to use in a new way after such a long stretch of joblessness.  

The brand, which for competitive reasons did not wish to be named in this article, saw in these out-of-work creatives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset their image in a way that was more infused with Hollywood storytelling than the type of advertising typically created by a traditional agency. Indeed, the idea was to come up with a storyline and characters for a digital series that wouldn’t feel anything like branded entertainment. Ideally, it would resemble the kind of original streaming series you’d find on Netflix or Hulu. 

“The idea is to create great characters and story and get paid for it,” admits Jeff Astrof, a former Friends writer who is currently the showrunner on the Courtney Cox series, Shining Vale, on STARZ. “Personally, I jumped at the opportunity, because it’s to do what we do—storytelling—just not for a network or a studio. I guess it’s advertising, but it’s more of a backdoor into it.”  

The notion of inviting Hollywood writers into the corporate-branding world was dreamed up by Daniel Rosenberg, a former Revolution Studios production executive and Inside Man executive producer who went on to cofound the creative agency Piro in 2010. He and cofounder Tim Piper, an Ogilvy & Mather alum who was behind Dove’s acclaimed Evolution campaign, positioned Piro to sit firmly at the intersection of entertainment and advertising. In 2014, the company partnered with Chipotle on the Hulu web series Farmed & Dangerous, a four-episode miniseries that never mentioned Chipotle; it was a comedic spoof on agribusiness. The series was considered a pioneering piece of advertising that went viral and sparked angry pushback—i.e., great PR—from some farmers and agricultural groups.

Nearly a decade later, Piro is taking this kind of work a step further. As it started to become clear that a Hollywood writers’ strike was on the horizon, Rosenberg saw an opportunity to give writers work that is not covered by the WGA while simultaneously helping brands. And so, earlier this year, Piro launched Piromaniacs, a division that takes the template of creating out-of-the-box advertising campaigns but adds one, new, and critical element: Hollywood talent. 

Rosenberg says that Piromaniacs is attempting to solve two problems: how to help Hollywood writers diversify their portfolios and revenue streams, and how to help brands create content that feels like stand-alone entertainment at a time when viewers are Tivo-ing through ads or simply avoiding them altogether on Netflix’s or Hulu’s premier streaming tiers.  “The idea was, how do you start to work with Hollywood storytellers and offer their brains to advertisers?” he says. “We’re trying to create entertainment that is strategic but doesn’t feel like advertising at all. And then surround that entertainment with harder-hitting advertising that will actually move the marketing needle.” (With Farmed & Dangerous, for example, Chipotle ads ran between episodes of the series.)

A few years ago, this kind of gig might have been scoffed at by successful TV writers, who were flush with work in an industry that was in expansion mode—remember all those hefty Netflix TV deals? But four months into a work stoppage that came as Hollywood was already in massive belt-tightening mode, with cutbacks and layoffs at major studios such as Disney and Warner/Discovery, the three writers were eager to spend two days coming up with jokes in a room with other funny, talented people as opposed to acing their kids’ car lines at school. Getting paid was also a big draw. The job was for two days, for which the writers were paid an upfront fee. If the brand liked their ideas, they would potentially be brought back on to write a script.  

“I’m kind of like a German Shepard in that I need a job or else I’m just biting everyone,” says Liz Astrof. “I was a stay-at-home mom this summer, and my kids were both home because we couldn’t spend money on camp. So, it was like exposure therapy. Now I appreciate all those TV jobs I had before, where I was counting the days until hiatus. I would do anything to go back to that. I wouldn’t even mind working until six in the morning again—once in a while.” 

Adds Nickoll, “I’m a Pollyanna by nature, so I thought COVID was going to end on May 15, 2020. I was convinced that the Tuesday after Labor Day, we would all be back working. It’s frustrating. I want to go back to work.”  

In many ways, the task set before the writers was not all that different from what their typical jobs entailed, only instead of an open writing assignment put out by a studio or network—a show set in the world of AI, say—they’d been given a creative brief that laid out the brand’s parameters and goals: target audience, competitive landscape, mission, and tone.  One of the objectives was to make the brand “young and hip and accessible,” says Jeff Astrof. There was also a mandate to not set the story within the brand’s industry. 

Leading up to the meeting in L.A., the showrunners sketched out ideas to pitch during their two-day meeting with the brand executives. The idea was to generate characters and themes that could define the series. Jeff Astrof joked that if they could dream up a Ted Lasso-type character, that would be ideal. (Lasso’s character first appeared in ads for the Premier League on ESPN before it became the basis for the hit Apple series.) Still, he stressed that hitting that kind of goal would be hard to do in two days. In Hollywood, developing a TV show or film can take years. “I think they are going to have to lower their expectations,” he says. “I don’t think there’s been a show that’s been broken in in two days. No one is like, ‘Let’s get together for two days.’ ‘What’d you come up with?’ ‘Succession.’” 

A few days after the meeting, Liz Astrof said the experience involved “a learning curve because it was not advertising, but it was also not what we normally do. But it’s kind of what we normally do—it was definitely very new.” 

Nickoll said what struck him the most was having executives—the equivalent of a buyer in Hollywood—in the room during a creative pitch meeting. Normally, TV or movie writers pitch development executives or producers before taking the idea to a distributor, which tends to weigh in quickly with a yes or no. “It was like having the studio in the room,” he says. “In a way, it saved us from developing an idea that we felt was great but that would be a complete nonstarter. So, on one hand, it saved us time. But on the other hand, I think sometimes you have to take those circuitous paths to the winning idea, and having someone in there who was a little bit of a fun police—that term is a little misleading, but someone who is trying to keep us always on track—can feel limiting.”  

Nonetheless, the process seemed to work. The writers say that they pitched six or seven ideas, and that two of them had resonated with the marketing executives. Now it’s just a matter of waiting to see how the executives want to move forward.  

Asked if he would do this kind of work even after Hollywood resolves its stalemate with writers, Jeff Astrof says, “It’s something that, if successful, I would want to do. I would transition to it. Our business is very tenuous. It’s very shaky. I have the premiere of my show coming up on October 13. Depending on how that does, I may be selling soap again.”