FIRST-EVER BRAND FILM ACCEPTED TO THE SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

Overview

eBay doesn’t have shoppers; it has winners and losers. And auction losers tend to take longer to come back to eBay. This piece of a broader effort to launch video on eBay involved creating entertaining content that would bring “losers” back to eBay sooner. Designed to be established as “movie of the week” type programming, we created a series of films that told the stories behind the listings. We called them eBaysodes. One of them, “Force 1 TD,” was the first-ever brand film accepted to the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Randy Krallman, the short film follows three friends – one of whom is visually impaired and has a miniature guide horse named Carmine – who set off to find Carmine a very special pair of sneakers for a very special occasion.

Outcomes

• Sundance selected “Force 1 TD” from more than 5,100 submissions, making it the first branded content officially accepted to the film festival.

• “Force 1 TD” was one of ten films selected to stream on sundance.org and made available for download from iTunes, Xbox, and Netflix. In addition, eBay received 50% of net profits.

• The eBaysodes earned millions of dollars in media value and hundreds of millions of impressions across multiple platforms with a distribution cost of $0