Dive Brief:

• Sheraton Hotels & Resorts, part of Marriott International, has teamed up with premium cable network Showtime for a digital content series that offers fans a behind-the-scenes look at the network’s original series including "Shameless," "Billions" and "Homeland," per a press release.
• The nine-episode series, "Sheraton Hotels presents Beyond The Scenes with Showtime," launched yesterday on Sheraton’s YouTube channel with a video featuring Shanola Hampton from Shameless. The campaign is an extension of Sheraton’s "Go Beyond" campaign launched earlier this year that focuses on employees' background stories.
• "Sheraton is in the business of people. Our associates Go Beyond for our guests around the world every day, and without them we could not continue the time-honored hospitality that we've delivered for 80 years," said Indy Adenaw, Vice President and Global Brand Leader of Sheraton Hotels & Resorts, in a statement. "As we further build a nearly ten-year partnership with Showtime, we are excited to bring this exclusive content to life with a line of site into the many people behind the scenes who go above and beyond as a vital factor to the shows' critically acclaimed success."

Dive Insight:

With this effort, Sheraton becomes the latest brand to take its content strategy up a notch by partnering with the entertainment industry. For marketers looking to reach consumers who aren't interested in traditional ads, entertaining content can be a way to get noticed. In another recent example, H&M partnered with Baz Luhrmann on a short film.  

The video content partnership is a natural fit for Sheraton because the hotel chain provides Showtime for its guests and the underlying idea around the content is a natural extension of the chain's existing Go Beyond campaign.

Sheraton has turned to original video series in previous marketing efforts, such as for its partnership with Major League Baseball from this past May, which resulted in current and former baseball players sharing previously untold stories. That campaign, called “Beyond Influential,” was also part of the Go Beyond brand platform.

Marriott, Sheraton’s parent company, has been involved in some of the more innovative and ambitious video content marketing over the last couple of years with its “Two Bellmen” series of films that are more cinematic and longer — at around 40 minutes each — than any typical advertising spot. The storytelling in the films is subtly branded by essentially turning the hotel into a character in the plot.