How Marriott Created a Branded Series Worthy of Amazon Prime Video

Undoubtedly, Annie Granatstein has mastered the art of balancing company goals with creating entertainment value for her audience. In her latest travel series, ‘Travel by Design,’ Granastein’s team showcased the design inspiration behind some of Marriott Bonvoy’s most iconic destinations. While the Marriott brand helped secure the locations, it was the focus on beautifully told story that got the buy-in from Amazon Prime. Tune in to discover the creative strategies behind Granatstein’s success and how she managed to seamlessly blend storytelling with brand messaging in this series.

Jesse Roesler: I was so struck by not only the locations look so beautiful it inspires wanderlust, but also the design aspect. I think it was the nature, architecture balance episode in Hawaii? I’m putting one of those fern walls in my home because that’s so cool! This design language translates because you’re getting inspired to go places, but you’re getting inspired by the design which you can bring in to your everyday life. So it’s engaging on multiple levels in that way.

Annie Granatstein: It’s been great. We’ve seen a really great response. Getting the films onto Amazon Prime Video was a really big deal. Because Amazon Prime has a very stringent creative review process. There’s a lot of reasons this is a big deal. One of the reasons is that we’re the first to do this with Amazon Prime Video. So we were the pioneer there which always has its pros and cons. And there’s a very stringent creative review process. I think of it as kind of in-between a media buy and earning your spot because. The Amazon team had to feel that this series belonged on Amazon Prime alongside some of the best entertainment out there. 

Jesse Roesler: That must have been how you were reviewing for the Washington Post. You had editorial standards that you’re incorporating a brand voice in to. Is it kind of a similar way that they’re looking at it?

Annie Granatstein:Y es. I guess the analogy could hold for when we were taking content that had been created by the brand and running it. Mostly we were co-creating, like actually creating for the Washington Post audience to accomplish the brand's goals. 

Jesse Roesler: So this was more like an acquisition on Amazon’s behalf, not a co-production. 

Annie Granatstein: That's right. That’s why it’s like in-between a media buying and an acquisition. That's a good way to put it actually. It took a while, but it felt great to get through that creative review process. It meant that there was an objective judgment that this was rising to that level, that people would actually want to watch it on Amazon Prime.

Jesse Roesler: And sorry, is this happening in pre-production, in post-production? When are you starting to collaborate with them on what will work?

Annie Granatstein: It was after we'd already produced. Because the finished episodes need to go through their creative review.  

Jesse: Did you have an idea of the types of things they would be looking for, potentially flagging?

Annie Granatstein: No, we didn't. We were not focused on Amazon Prime or any other channel really. I mean, we knew we were going to put them in the hotel rooms. We knew we were going to put them on our YouTube channel and that we would like to get large distribution, but we didn't know we were gonna put it on a streaming service even.

Jesse Roesler: Wow. Well, it's a genius way to… You see a lot of brand funded content where the brand is out front and it's clearly, it feels like you're being marketed to, there's a lot of brand content where it's so embedded in the internal DNA that it doesn't feel that way. Then there's the third category where it's like, “Is that even connected to the brand? How am I even going to know or measure that?” So it's when something is so integral to the DNA of like hotel design, A, there's already hotel design shows out there, so there's precedent for it. People love this kind of stuff. And then, oh yeah. By the way, once we're done exploring this person's creative vision and point of view, this happens to be a hotel that's in our portfolio, great. But that's not what the show's about.

So it walks this line that I think it's so genius. And I think it's one of the first show to do this on Hulu was a similar case study. It was Deluxe Corporation. Amanda Brinkman who spearheaded the show, was the host, and it was about small businesses. How do you help Main Street stay alive in the face of big chains and the Walmarts of the world? And it was about the small businesses. It happened to be that the Deluxe was providing some services to help them elevate, but it was about the small stories of the businesses. So it's interesting, if you can kind of think about who you're serving and then pivot and think, well, what's the content that surrounds it? Maybe that could land somewhere where it is more known for entertainment. 

Annie Granatstein: Like I said, we know what the company wants to accomplish. It's our job to then figure out what do people want to watch? And the intersection of those two is what we do. It's a balancing act of accomplishing what you wanna accomplish as a brand and also creating something that is entertainment-first. It's not easy, but it's kind of fun 'cause it's challenging.

Jesse Roesler: The format is interesting too. The show we did was also this mid-format. It's like this 10 to… I mean, most of these are like, what, 9 to 13?

Annie Granatstein: No, they're, they're five to nine.

Jesse Roesler: Five to nine, okay. So short- to mid-form. There's enough there that this is something that you're going to lean back and watch. I mean, it deserves to be seen, I think, on a screen, on a TV in a hotel room, or when you've got Amazon Prime on your Smart TV, you're gonna watch it there versus on your phone. So I'm curious, you mentioned a few places this would live. So you've got Amazon. Can you kind of go through the mix and then maybe talk about …

Annie Granatstein: Everywhere it lives? 

Jesse Roesler: Yeah. Everywhere it lives. And then which one are you watching most closely? How are you measuring the different places its out there?

Annie Granatstein: So a lot of that is driven by the measurement that's available actually. So, for example, it's on our YouTube channel. On YouTube we have access to a lot of metrics. So we can really see what's going on with people watching. We can see which episode they're watching more than others. We can see watch time, we can see every metric that you'd want. YouTube is great for that, frankly. Then we also have it on in our hotel rooms where we have very little metrics and the way we handle that is by doing focus groups and so forth to try to figure out what people wanna watch in their hotel rooms. But not the kind of metrics you're gonna get from a YouTube. 

Amazon Prime is in between. We have some metrics, but not nearly as much as we have on YouTube. Because of that, I would say we're very focused on how it's performing on YouTube. Because we can, we can really slice and dice very finely. But Amazon Prime's really important because actually, that's, that's where we're gonna get much bigger scale. Though we are getting scale on YouTube. We do have seven-figure views of some of the episodes now. And we've done some really, I think, smart promotion on YouTube. 

And ultimately, it's gonna tell a really good story for us because the watch time overall, oh, that's another metric we get from Amazon. The watch time overall is really mind boggling in comparison with, let's say an ad campaign and look at the watch time of a 30-second spot. So you can take that 30-second spot and put it everywhere and even if you get a 50% completion rate of that 30-second spot, that's still only 15 seconds a person. 

So yes, it might be by many, many, many millions of people, but it's still only 15 seconds. Here we're talking about people spending an average of, you know, five to seven minutes with our content across many millions. And so the number of hours is really high. And that's just deep brand engagement. Right. So I think that there's a really good story to tell there about why you want longer form content to be at the heart of your marketing strategy and not like on the side Yeah. Or your ad campaigns at the heart. And over here, we're gonna do some video series. 

Jesse Roesler: I love that. Wow. This time has flown. This is fascinating. We're already coming up on it, but I guess in closing, I'd love to hear what you're thinking of next. Like, now that you've got a few of these shorter form series out, what's, what's on the horizon for you? 

Annie Granatstein: We are very much in planning mode right now and waiting a little bit for some results from ‘Travel by Design’ also we have a series called ‘Power of Travel’ that's also on Amazon Prime. It’s very different from ‘Travel by Design.’ It's a value-based series. So we're profiling different trailblazers who are making a positive impact on the world via travel and because it's so different, we really wanna see how that does and look at how that does and how ‘Travel by Design’ does on Amazon. You know, kind of help us figure out what people wanna see from us. 

Jesse Roesler: You've got a great AB test on a new platform here.

Annie Granatstein:  It's apples and oranges, so it's hard to compare. We don’t have to decide between these two, but, you know, you don't have all the money in the world. And especially as you figure out if you wanna do make longer format. We want to get into 30 minute episodic or true short films or features. That's placing a big bet on one thing. Right. So we want as much data as we can get about what might perform best. So we do really want to see full reporting from the Amazon Prime series, which we're not gonna have for like, I think like March. We'll have it a couple months. And so we're, we're waiting a little bit for that to figure things out. But we're also trying to figure out…’Travel By Design’ for example. It's done incredibly well, we did it for two years. Do we want to continue with that or are there other passion points that we might want to lean into? Other reasons people travel, other inspirational aspects of travel that we could explore or maybe not. Maybe we should just double down on what's working. So we're, we're very much in that phase right now and looking at a lot of data, not just performance data as I mentioned, but also about what travelers are interested in and how is that changing in 2024, and bringing that to bear on our planning. 

Jesse Roesler: Awesome. Well, it's beautiful work. Thank you for sharing so much about the how and the why behind it. I'm sure our listeners are gonna take a lot away from this. So, I'll encourage everyone. We'll put links to both of these series and I hope everyone goes and looks at 'em and we're excited to see what you do next. 

Annie Granatstein: Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. 

Jesse Roesler: I hope you've been enjoying the podcast and I'd love to hear from you. If you have ideas for guests or topics for future episodes, drop me a note at jesse@credononfiction.com.