For nearly a century, advertising agencies occupied a privileged position in the cultural supply chain.
They sat between capital and culture. Between brands and audiences. Between money and meaning. Institutions like WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Publicis, and Dentsu built global empires by controlling access to scarce media inventory and arbitraging attention at scale. If you wanted to reach people, you went through them.
For filmmakers and creative talent, advertising became a parallel ecosystem. A place to experiment, pay overhead, and stay sharp between projects. At the highest level, it monetized reputation. Martin Scorsese and Alejandro Iñárritu used commercials to cash in on their names while keeping their tools sharp. For others, it was structural. Brady Corbet directed commercials to afford The Brutalist. Producers built commercial companies that later leveraged talent into film and television. Anonymous Content became the clearest expression of that model, a proving ground for directors …
