Every September, Hollywood gathers in a very expensive room to find out who gets a tiny gold statue and who has to smile graciously while a camera zooms in on them losing.
For marketers, though, the Emmys are interesting for another reason.
Award shows are enormous experiments in attention.
They take hundreds of television shows, actors, creators, networks, streaming platforms, fashion choices, speeches, jokes, reunions, surprises, and awkward reaction shots and turn them into one shared event. People watch the broadcast, argue about winners, search for clips, share speeches, dissect outfits, complain about snubs, and discover shows they somehow missed while watching 900 other things.
That ability to turn individual stories into a larger cultural conversation has plenty to teach brands.
The 2025 Emmy Awards drew 7.42 million viewers, an 8% increase from the year before and the ceremony’s largest television audience since 2021. The event generated 1.6 million social mentions, while #Emmys ranked as the No. 1 U.S. trend for seven consecutive hours.
Your marketing campaign probably won’t get seven straight hours at the top of the trending page. We should manage expectations. But still, the mechanics behind that attention are remarkably useful.
1. Give People a Reason to Care Before the Main Event
The Emmys don’t really begin when somebody says, “And the Emmy goes to…” By then, the audience has already spent months building opinions. They’ve watched the shows, picked favorites, argued about performances, followed nominations, read predictions, and decided who was robbed before anyone has even opened an envelope.
That anticipation is part of what makes the event work.
Brands often skip that part entirely. A company spends three months building something, posts “BIG NEWS!” on LinkedIn at 9:03 Tuesday morning, announces it at 9:04, and is mildly offended when everyone returns to their coffee by 9:07.
A stronger launch gives people a little runway. Instead of revealing everything at once, you can start with the problem that inspired the product, introduce the people behind an upcoming event, share progress on a new location, or pull one compelling finding from a larger report before it goes live.
You don’t need manufactured suspense or a week of vague posts hinting that something *huge* is coming. You just need to give people a reason to care before you ask them to pay attention.
2. Build Recognizable Characters
Award shows work because audiences arrive knowing the characters.
They’re rooting for an actor, a series, a creator, or the show they spent eight hours watching on Saturday despite insisting they were going to clean the garage.
Brands need recognizable characters, too. Sometimes that character is a founder. Sometimes it’s an employee, customer, spokesperson, mascot, recurring expert, or even a distinctive brand voice.
The important part is continuity. If every campaign introduces a completely different tone, personality, visual language, and set of ideas, you’re forcing the audience to meet you again every time. Strong storytelling gives people something familiar to reconnect with.
Think about the brands whose advertising you can identify before the logo appears. The personality has already done the introduction.
That kind of recognition doesn’t happen because somebody updated the brand guidelines six months ago. It comes from repeating distinctive characters, ideas, sounds, phrases, visual cues, and points of view until they become yours.
3. Make the Audience Feel Something
Nobody spends Monday morning telling a coworker, “Wow, that acceptance speech communicated its value proposition efficiently.”
People remember the moments that made them laugh, cry, cringe, cheer, or immediately send a clip to someone else, and advertising works much the same way. Brands can get so focused on delivering information that they forget audiences aren’t filing cabinets waiting to store a list of product features. You can explain everything perfectly and still vanish from memory before the next ad loads.
The Emmys’ own Outstanding Commercial category is a good reminder of what happens when advertising gives people more than a sales pitch.
In 2025, nominees included campaigns from Apple, Disney, Nike, State Farm, and Uber, with Uber One’s “Brian Cox Goes to College” taking the award. Instead of simply explaining a student membership offer, the campaign built a comedy around an extremely serious actor attempting college life, giving the audience a reason to enjoy the ad while absorbing the message.
The product still has to be clear, and the selling point still has to land. But information is much easier to remember when it arrives with an emotion attached to it.
4. Specific Stories Beat Generic Messages
Award-winning television rarely tries to be about absolutely everyone. The Pitt can stay tightly focused on the people working inside an emergency department, The Studio can obsess over Hollywood’s particular brand of chaos, and Adolescence can narrow its attention to one family facing one devastating situation.
That specificity gives the audience something solid to connect with. Advertising works the same way.
There’s a huge difference between saying, “We provide solutions that help businesses achieve their goals,” and saying, “Your regional sales team is still updating pipeline numbers manually every Friday afternoon. Here’s how to give them those two hours back.”
The first could belong to approximately 43 million companies. The second sounds like somebody understands the audience well enough to recognize the annoying little problem they deal with every week.
Brands often sand every interesting edge off their messaging because they’re worried that specificity will exclude someone. Usually, it does the opposite. The more concrete the story, the easier it is for the right person to see themselves in it.
Talk about the customer with the bizarrely specific problem. Show the employee who knows the machinery better than anyone else. Explain what went wrong, what changed, and what happened next. Specificity gives a story texture, and texture is what makes it stick.
5. Create Moments People Want to Repeat
The Emmy broadcast lasts for hours, but most people walk away remembering a handful of moments: the joke that landed, the reunion nobody expected, the speech that got emotional, or the reaction shot that became a GIF before the orchestra had finished playing.
That’s a useful way to think about marketing, too. You don’t need every person to absorb every piece of a campaign. You need a few strong moments that can travel beyond the original placement and give people something worth repeating.
The 2025 Emmys show how powerful that can be. While 7.42 million people watched the ceremony, the event generated 1.6 million social mentions and an estimated 60.9 billion potential impressions. The broadcast was only one part of the reach; the moments people shared, quoted, clipped, and argued about kept extending it.
That doesn’t mean every brand needs to chase virality. Please don’t make the accounting department learn a TikTok dance.
It does mean campaigns benefit from having something memorable enough to escape the ad itself. That could be a surprising statistic, a sharp line of copy, an unexpected visual, a useful tool, a clever activation, or a genuinely funny video.
The question is simple: if someone forgot where they saw the ad, would they still remember the moment?
6. Let Different Channels Add to the Story
The Emmy experience extends well beyond the television broadcast. There’s the red carpet, interviews, social coverage, streaming clips, backstage footage, nominee campaigns, brand activations, press coverage, and whatever fresh argument the internet has decided to have by midnight. Each one gives people a different way into the same event.
Brands can borrow that model instead of forcing the exact same creative into every channel and calling it omnichannel.
A billboard has a few seconds to land one clear idea, while connected TV has time to build a scene. Paid search can catch the curiosity that comes next, social can add personality and invite participation, and a landing page can provide all the detail the billboard wisely left off the side of the interstate. Email can pick up the conversation later and give the audience another reason to come back.
The strongest integrated campaigns feel connected without feeling copied and pasted. Each channel should reinforce the same larger story while doing the job it’s best suited to do.
Otherwise, you’re not really building a campaign. You’re making the same ad wear six different outfits.
7. Give People Something Worth Talking About
The Emmys recognize television, but the event gets much bigger when it becomes a conversation about television. People debate who won, who should’ve won, what everyone wore, which speech landed, and why they’ve somehow never heard of the show every critic on Earth appears to consider essential viewing.
That conversation extends the life of the event, and brands should pay attention to the same dynamic. Marketers spend a lot of time deciding what they want to say, but much less time asking what someone might say about the brand afterward.
Strong storytelling gives people something they can carry with them: a sharp idea, a useful fact, a funny observation, a recognizable character, or a story worth repeating to someone else. That kind of participation can be more valuable than simple exposure because the audience starts helping the message travel.
Brands are increasingly building that idea into live experiences, too. For the 2026 Emmy season, official partners including LG, United Airlines, FIJI Water, and Raising Cane’s created activations around the event rather than settling for passive logo placement. The Television Academy framed those partnerships around integrating brands into the larger Emmy experience.
That’s the difference between being present and being memorable. Visibility gets you noticed. Participation gives people a reason to keep talking.
Your Brand Probably Doesn’t Need an Acceptance Speech
Award shows make storytelling look enormous because everything happens on a giant stage surrounded by famous people wearing clothes that cost more than a used Honda. Strip away the spectacle, though, and the lessons are pretty practical.
Good brand storytelling builds interest before the big reveal, gives audiences something recognizable to latch onto, creates an emotional response, and leaves behind a moment people can remember or repeat. It also understands that different channels have different jobs. A billboard, social post, video, landing page, and email shouldn’t all say the exact same thing in slightly different dimensions.
None of that requires a Hollywood production budget. It requires a clear story, a strong point of view, and enough consistency to keep building on the same idea instead of reinventing the brand every three weeks.
At Kinetic319, we help brands connect creative, media strategy, audience insights, and measurement so the story and the media carrying it work together. With more than $1 billion in media planned and managed and experience working with 500+ brands, we know that getting attention is only the opening scene.
What you do with that attention determines whether anyone sticks around for the rest of the show.
Ready to give your audience something worth watching? Talk to Kinetic319 about your next campaign.
FAQ
What is brand storytelling?
Brand storytelling uses characters, experiences, values, conflicts, customer problems, and other narrative elements to communicate what a company does and why people should care. It can appear across advertising, social media, video, websites, events, out-of-home media, email, and other customer touchpoints.
Why is storytelling effective in advertising?
Stories provide context and emotion around information. Rather than presenting audiences with an isolated list of features or claims, storytelling can show who a product helps, what problem exists, and how the brand fits into the situation.
What can brands learn from award shows like the Emmys?
Award shows demonstrate how anticipation, recognizable personalities, emotional moments, audience participation, cultural conversation, and cross-channel content can extend the life of a single event. Brands can apply the same principles without copying the spectacle.
Does brand storytelling require video?
No. A billboard, search ad, case study, social post, email campaign, podcast, event activation, or landing page can all contribute to a larger brand story. The format changes. The central idea should remain recognizable.
How does media strategy support brand storytelling?
Media strategy determines where, when, and how audiences encounter the story. Different channels can perform different jobs, from creating initial awareness to answering questions, reinforcing a message, generating action, or maintaining the customer relationship.