Good morning. LimeWire (yes, the music download platform we all abused in high school) recently outbid Ryan Reynolds to purchase the Fyre Festival brand for $245,000 in an eBay auction. Throw in a sock bun and a BuzzFeed quiz and we’d think it was the 2010s all over again.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Max Zavidow, aka formerteenheartthrob, has a vision: Only take on three brand deals per year, but make them all “really short films.” Here’s why it might just work ➡️

Zavidow’s latest partnership with Dr. Squatch includes a 2.5-minute surreal narrative video of one man’s search for his girlfriend. The video gained over 12 million views in 24 hours on TikTok. Two weeks later, it's sitting at 30 million TikTok views with another 16 million on Instagram.

The details →

The risk: “We all took less money than we usually would have gotten for the opportunity to do a really short film as a brand deal because I don't want to do traditional ads where they need the video in a week,” Zavidow told us. 

Zavidow said this partnership serves as a proof of concept to help him get bigger partnerships and raise the bar on sponsored short films with 5–7-week lead times. 

The reward: “Now I can go to market and say ‘this is what I do, and this is how it does, and this is how much it’s worth,’ and I think the video I just put out—three of those a year should be enough to sustain my life and allow me to create art in the fashion I want to do it,” Zavidow said.

Zoom out: Creator brand partnerships have been shifting away from high-output deliverables and toward creativity and world-building. Creators similar to Zavidow are standing out by taking a cinematic approach—and more brands (like clothing brand Reformation and fragrance brand Ffern) are showing interest.

Thin, ultra-wide Reels have been appearing all over Instagram this week—from filmmakers to business advisors to podcast creators. What’s the deal? We spoke with creators and Instagram to get to the bottom of it.

And? It got over 350K views and 250 comments, far outpacing Per’s expectations.

“It was a good break in the feed from all of the vertical content, I think that’s why it took off,” Per told us. 

Within days, brands including HBO and Poppi joined in with their own wide-angle videos. Both Instagram and Per said the trend was organic. “This isn't a new feature to IG and the trend seems to have developed natively by creators,” a Meta representative told us.

For several years now, journalists have been carving a trend: leaving traditional media to become independent newsletter creators.

Now, two standout independent journalists are staffing up →

Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me newsletter is launching a food podcast hosted by food critic J Lee. The weekly Expense Account show is Feed Me’s first venture into audio and video and serves as an extension of the column of the same name Sundberg brought Lee on to start last December.

Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter is bringing on two writers from Vanity Fair and The Wrap. The newsletter will increase from five to seven days per week with the new hires.

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