Entertainment social creative is platform-native content built to keep a campaign earning attention after the key art teaser piece drops — short-form video, social-first edits, cast and junket concepts, reactive content, memes, GIFs, Stories, stickers, static posts, and full multi-format campaign systems for film, television, streaming, and franchise marketing.

A key art teaser or trailer starts the conversation. Social has to keep it going.

At The Refinery, social creative isn’t a distribution layer bolted onto the campaign at the end. It’s where the campaign learns how to talk — and where fandom either connects or scrolls past.

How does fandom change the creative approach?

Franchise audiences want recognition: callbacks, inside jokes, details that prove the campaign understands the world they already love. New audiences need a cleaner entry point — tone, premise, a moment that makes the title feel worth their time. Strong entertainment social does both without making either group feel like an afterthought.

The Refinery approaches fandom as a creative resource. Comments, shares, fan edits, theories, and community behavior often reveal what resonates before the campaign does. The work is listening — and knowing what to do with what you hear.

What keeps high-volume social from becoming noise?

A clear creative point of view established early and applied consistently across every asset, whether that’s a video edit, meme, static post, cast video, or quick-turn reactive piece. Consistency isn’t sameness. It’s recognition.

Reactive social only looks spontaneous from the outside. Behind it is planning, organized approvals, platform fluency, and teams that can move fast without letting the work get sloppy. Fast is useful. Frantic is a cry for help in file-name form.

Proof

For Evil Dead Rise, The Refinery delivered 300+ social posts, including 30+ original creative pieces, generating 64M+ impressions on X, a 1.8M total platform audience, and a 276% increase in Instagram engagement. The campaign treated franchise loyalty as creative fuel — giving longtime fans content worth sharing while making the title legible to new audiences.

The strongest entertainment social creative doesn’t just generate views. It builds momentum — the post that becomes the thing someone sends to a friend, and sometimes the reason they finally press play.

For a full overview of what The Refinery creates for entertainment campaigns, start here.

Platform art is promotional artwork built specifically for streaming environments, thumbnails, feature modules, episodic images, post-play recommendations, partner placements, and device-specific assets, designed around where and how viewers actually decide what to watch.

A title can have beautiful key art and still not be ready for the platform. Once a film or series enters a streaming environment, the creative has to work inside rows, rails, thumbnails, feature modules, episodic cards, post-play recommendations, partner placements, and an ever-shifting set of smart TV and mobile templates.

Platform art means the full ecosystem of creative built to extend a title across the streaming experience, helping audiences understand what a title is, who is in it, what it feels like, and why it’s worth watching now. We build this work for studios, streamers, networks, and entertainment marketers across Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, Hulu, Paramount, and Amazon.

How is platform art different from key art?

Key art establishes the campaign. Platform art translates that campaign into the environments where audiences actually choose what to watch. A composition that works as a poster can fail inside a small streaming module — a character crops badly, a title treatment goes unreadable, an emotional read disappears at thumbnail size. A billboard asks for attention with scale. A platform thumbnail has to earn it while sitting next to everything else a viewer could watch instead.

Three creative modes

Key art adaptation — rebuilding the existing campaign identity for platform-specific formats: horizontal, vertical, square, thumbnail, feature, partner, device-specific. Not a resize job. Every format raises new questions around crop, hierarchy, talent scale, and legibility.

Custom platform art — new imagery built when the existing key art isn’t the right solution: alternate talent, a different story moment, a sharper genre cue, an audience-specific entry point.

Elevated unit photography and episodic imagery — turning production stills and frame grabs into platform-ready assets. An episode card shouldn’t feel random — it should make the next episode feel worth starting.

What does each placement actually do?

Asset	Primary job
Key art adaptation	Preserve campaign recognition across platform formats
Custom platform art	Create alternate audience, character, or genre entry points
Thumbnail	Earn attention quickly in browse environments
Episodic image	Make the next episode feel worth starting
Post-play imagery	Encourage continuation into another episode, season, or title
Partner asset	Extend the campaign into additional digital and device environments
Mastered platform art	Survive multiple crops and placements without losing intent

What is mastered platform art?

More platforms are moving toward mastered images — one flexible master built to flow across placements, crops, and device environments. It has to be visually strong enough to attract attention and flexible enough to survive every crop, which takes a clear focal point and controlled composition from the start, not a compromise bolted on after.

Why The Refinery

Our platform practice began with Netflix and expanded across Disney+, Apple TV, Hulu, Paramount, and Amazon. We built an in-house team specifically for the conception, adaptation, production, and delivery of streaming platform assets — work that requires understanding key art plus crops, safe zones, device behavior, episodic storytelling, and post-play logic.

Proof

For Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 2 on Disney+, we delivered 100+ platform assets, including five custom audience-based creative suites tailored to distinct viewer segments. Recent work also includes custom platform art for Sesame Street on Netflix.

For a full overview of what The Refinery creates for entertainment campaigns, start here.

Out-of-home used to be more obedient. A campaign had key art, the key art became a billboard, maybe a bus shelter, maybe a few transit placements. Digital boards, when they appeared, were often just the same art with a little motion added — a JPEG learning to blink.

Now it’s a fully custom creative execution, using motion, pacing, reveal, and environmental context to make a title feel bigger than the placement. At The Refinery, out-of-home isn’t a media placement that gets creative attached at the end. It’s treated as a campaign moment.

We partner with studios, streamers, networks, and entertainment marketers on static, specialty, digital, 3D, anamorphic, and immersive OOH for film, television, streaming, entertainment brands, and awards campaigns, connected to the larger system: key art, platform creative, social strategy, PR, FYC, and finishing.

How has digital OOH changed?

“When I started, digital OOH was not really a thing in the way it is now,” says Molly Kloss, The Refinery’s executive creative director. “A lot of the time, it was basically key art resized for a screen, maybe with a little motion added.”

Now it’s a custom-built creative moment, using motion, pacing, reveal, and environmental context to make a title feel bigger than the placement. The Refinery’s recent 3D and digital work includes IT: Welcome to Derry, Ted 2, America’s Got Talent, The Copenhagen Test, The Traitors, and The Day of the Jackal. The strongest boards weren’t larger versions of existing art — they were built as moments with their own behavior and timing.

What makes OOH worth stopping for?

Scale is useful but it isn’t a concept. The better question isn’t how large a placement is — it’s what the placement is doing that only it can do. For Final Destination: Bloodlines, buses were designed to look like semi-trucks carrying logs, a billboard was staged to look like an installer had fallen, and a shelter appeared shattered. Those aren’t placements — they’re disruptions in the day that understand the title and the audience.

Does OOH need to work for social too?

Yes. The real audience now includes the person walking past, the person filming from across the street, and the person who never sees the physical placement but experiences it through a vertical video. That changes the creative questions: where’s the reveal, how long is the loop, does it read in a shaky phone video, is the title visible at the right moment. The best OOH isn’t just seen — it circulates.

Does location change the creative approach?

Yes, meaningfully. Times Square is pedestrian, dense, vertical, and built for social capture. Los Angeles is automotive, horizontal, speed-based, built for a quick read from a car. A Times Square 3D board can use spectacle and duration. A Sunset placement needs instant clarity and a graphic read.

International markets push that logic further. Tokyo’s major station environments are high-density, multi-surface, and built around commuter flow, which changes how motion, timing, and hierarchy need to work. A campaign that reads well on Sunset may need to be completely rethought for a transit hub or open-air crossing in Shibuya.

What The Refinery creates for OOH campaigns

Format	Job	Recent example
Static OOH	Fast recognition: billboards, transit, wild postings	SNL 50 Sunset barricade
Specialty OOH	Dimensional, custom-fabricated builds	Final Destination: Bloodlines bus wraps, shattered glass-skull shelter
Digital OOH	Motion, timing, screen-native reveals	Survivor 50, Godzilla boards (FOX, NYC)
3D and anamorphic OOH	Forced-perspective, social-first spectacle	IT: Welcome to Derry, The Day of the Jackal
Environmental/immersive	Block takeovers, fan-facing installations	Descendants: Wicked Wonderland barricade, Percy Jackson and the Olympians S3 Comic-Con fan experience
Social-first OOH	Built to be filmed, posted, replayed	Paradise Season 2 bunker

Proof

The Refinery builds OOH inside the larger campaign system — key art, platform creative, social, PR, FYC, and physical placement moving together. Four things guide the work: specific to the title, specific to the place, legible in the real world (distance, glare, traffic, crowds), and worth remembering.

For Final Destination: Bloodlines, The Refinery created specialty OOH that turned everyday street objects into campaign moments — buses redesigned as log-carrying semi-trucks, a billboard staged to look like an installer had fallen, a bus shelter appearing shattered. For Alice in Borderland on Netflix, The Refinery created a subway takeover in Tokyo and a digital OOH campaign at Shibuya Crossing, two of the highest-density media environments in the world.

For a full overview of what The Refinery creates for entertainment campaigns, start here.

Entertainment key art is the hero image, title treatment, and visual system that shape how audiences first understand a film, series, documentary, or awards contender — and the foundation every other campaign surface is built on.

Before the trailer plays, before the reviews arrive, there is usually one image making the first move. It has to introduce a world, signal a genre, hold the talent, suggest the story, and make the title feel worth someone’s time. Then that same image has to work as a theatrical one-sheet, streaming tile, outdoor board, paid unit, social crop, press image, FYC placement, and internal deck slide.

At The Refinery, key art is the foundation of a campaign and what we do best.

What does key art actually have to do?

Key art is a visual argument: this is what the title is, this is how it feels, this is why it deserves your attention. For Brad Hochberg, founding partner and creative director at The Refinery, that argument lives in the relationship between image, type, and message.

“I have always had admiration and respect for the visual, type, and message,” Brad says. “To unite those elements in a perfect symphony is a triumph, and when you see it done well, it leaves you in awe.”

Key art is rarely one decision. It is a thousand decisions made to look like one — the crop, the eye line, the negative space, the billing, the color temperature, the gesture, the amount of story revealed and the amount withheld. When it works, the image feels inevitable. When it doesn’t, everyone can feel the effort.

What’s the difference between beautiful key art and effective key art?

A piece of key art can be visually striking and still wrong for the campaign. Too broad for a specialty film. Too cold for a comedy. Too prestige-coded for a genre title. Too chaotic for a streaming tile. Too quiet for theatrical outdoor.

Key art has to respect the work and sell the work simultaneously. It has to create intrigue without losing clarity, reward fans without closing the door on new audiences, feel elevated without becoming vague. It has to feel like the title — not like an agency performing taste in the general vicinity of the title.

How does a strong key art campaign survive every format?

The same master creative may need to work as a theatrical one-sheet, streaming platform tile, outdoor board, transit placement, digital display unit, paid social asset, press image, trade ad, FYC placement, and thumbnail. A campaign image no longer lives in one perfect rectangle — it is cropped, compressed, animated, localized, resized, and judged in places it was never designed for.

This is where key art becomes systems thinking. A strong campaign needs a hero image, but it also needs visual logic, hierarchy, flexibility, and a way to preserve the idea when the format changes. Because the smallest crop may be the one the audience sees most.

What shapes the creative approach at The Refinery?

Brad’s influences move across design, typography, painting, photography, and modern art — Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Herb Lubalin, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Walker Evans. That range matters because entertainment key art rarely has a single visual problem.

“Having a solid foundation of the past helps you grow through time as a visual storyteller,” Brad says.

That historical fluency helps a campaign avoid the default visual language of the moment and find something more specific to the title. Not every show needs the same face, glow, and floating city.

Brad is also deliberate about collaboration. “For me, it has always been a partnership between everyone who collaborates on a project. Inside our agency, I learn from everyone all the time and count on them to help me grow as a creative and agency leader.”

Proof

For 20 years, The Refinery has created Key Art for some of the most iconic films and series, and has earned 110 Clio (formerly the Key Art Awards) Entertainment Awards, 107 Graphis Awards, 42 GEMA Awards, and 40 Golden Trailer Awards.

The Refinery created the key art for The Matrix, and for Green Book and CODA, both Best Picture winners. The White Lotus Season 3 marketing campaign won a Clio Gold in 2025. The Squid Game campaign has generated wins across multiple seasons, including Graphis Gold and Clio recognition.

Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and American Horror Story are among the titles that built the agency’s reputation for key art that becomes part of a show’s cultural identity.

What The Refinery creates

Hero key art, title treatments, campaign systems, shoot concepts, platform creative, digital display, social assets, OOH extensions, FYC creative, retouching, versioning, and finishing — for film, television, streaming, and entertainment brands across theatrical, platform, awards, and franchise campaigns.

One image. Many jobs. No room for almost.

For a full overview of what The Refinery creates for entertainment campaigns, start here.

FYC creative — For Your Consideration — is the awards-season campaign built to keep a title present in voters’ minds from first impression through final consideration. It includes strategy, copywriting, awards messaging, key art adaptation, trade ads, digital display, specialty OOH, guild mailers, premium packaging, talent and craft spotlights, versioning, and delivery.

A trailer starts the campaign. FYC has to finish it.

At The Refinery, awards creative is not treated as a separate project bolted on at the end of the season. It is the campaign’s final argument — more focused, more deliberate, and built around a different job: not introducing the title, but making sure voters remember why it mattered.

What makes FYC creative different from launch creative?

The audience narrows. The tone shifts. The proof changes. A launch campaign introduces a title to everyone. An FYC campaign makes a specific case to a specific audience — guild members, academy voters, critics — about why a performance, a craft choice, a piece of writing, or a body of work deserves recognition.

That case has to feel earned, not assembled. A campaign can have strong quotes, beautiful stills, and all the right materials and still fail to create momentum if the pieces don’t add up to a point of view. Awards creative has to arrange proof into feeling — the image that brings the title back into focus, the line that names the thing a voter already sensed but couldn’t articulate, the physical object that makes the campaign feel more intentional than the scroll.

What does prestige actually mean in FYC work?

Not a color palette. Prestige is a positioning problem.

The question isn’t how to make the campaign look elevated. It’s what kind of elevated this title needs to feel — quiet and devastating, bold and populist, intimate and actor-driven, epic and technical, funny but not lightweight, genre but undeniable. That specificity shows up in the image, the crop, the copy, the cadence, the quote selection, the typography, and the restraint. Every touchpoint builds the same argument without repeating itself to death.

FYC can fall into sameness quickly: a tasteful image, a serious typeface, a pull quote, some gold. Those tools can work. But they are not the strategy.

Does the physical object still matter?

Yes — differently than it used to, but yes.

There was an era of FYC where the physical piece carried enormous weight. Guild mailers with screeners, premium packaging, objects that arrived on a desk and stayed there. For Mad Men across multiple seasons, The Refinery created OOH, trade ads, guild mailers, and physical objects — including screeners sent with branded whiskey glasses — that made the campaign feel like an event rather than a reminder. That level of physical gifting is largely gone now, replaced by digital screeners and streamlined delivery. But the instinct behind it was right: a physical object gives voters something to hold, open, and return to away from the scroll.

The Brokeback Mountain FYC coffee table book that The Refinery made is an early example of that thinking done with real care. It included a new essay by Annie Proulx written specifically for the campaign, words from Ang Lee, Larry McMurtry, and Diana Ossana, reader letters organized by region across a US map, and critical quotes alongside performance and craft recognition. It was not a press kit. It was a document designed to make a voter feel, again, what the film had made them feel the first time.

That is what the best physical FYC work does. It doesn’t summarize the campaign. It extends the emotional experience of the title.

What keeps high-volume FYC from losing its point of view?

Planning. Quotes change, nominations arrive, category pushes shift, trade deadlines move, guild audiences need tailored messaging, digital units multiply. Someone needs a new size. Someone needs an animated version.

This is where elegance at speed becomes the actual job. The Refinery builds FYC campaigns to handle that pace — strategy, messaging, key art, digital display, trade ads, specialty OOH, packaging, guild mailers, versioning, and delivery moving together so the campaign can scale without losing its argument.

Fast is useful. The work should not look like it had to be.

What The Refinery creates for FYC campaigns

Format	Primary job
Strategy and messaging	Position the title, define the case, set the voice
Copywriting and awards language	FYC lines, category messaging, quote integration, craft spotlights
Key art adaptation	Shift launch creative toward prestige, craft, and memory
Trade ads	Full-page, half-page, multi-format print and digital placements
Digital display	Static and animated banners, rapid versioning, platform delivery
Specialty OOH	Billboards, murals, high-impact placements, physical campaign moments
Guild mailers and packaging	Coffee table books, box sets, custom mailers, wraps, premium physical pieces
Finishing and delivery	Versioning, quality control, spec delivery across all awards-season surfaces

Proof

The Refinery has built FYC campaigns for films, series, and documentaries across the full awards season landscape — from early guild outreach through final consideration. The Brokeback Mountain coffee table book remains one of the more ambitious physical FYC pieces The Refinery has produced: a campaign object designed not to inform voters about the film, but to return them to it. The Refinery and our clients also collaborated on a beautiful Poor Things FYC piece that won a Clio Bronze in 2024..

No one on the agency side can prove that any piece of FYC creative directly caused a vote. That is the strange truth of awards work. What The Refinery can do is build the conditions for consideration — campaigns that feel as considered as the work they’re representing, and that give voters a reason to remember the title at the moment that matters.

The strongest FYC creative doesn’t remind voters a title exists. It shapes how the work is remembered.

For a full overview of what The Refinery creates for entertainment campaigns, start here.

A campaign can be approved and still not be ready.

Approved means the idea made it through the room. Finished means it can survive the world — the billboard, the platform tile, the social crop, the PR pull, the FYC ad, the last-minute resize, the file that gets opened at 6:47 p.m. by someone who notices the one thing everyone else missed.

At The Refinery, finishing is where approved entertainment campaign creative becomes production-ready artwork: retouched, rebuilt, color-consistent, versioned, quality-checked, and delivered across key art, OOH, digital, social, platform, theatrical, streaming, PR, and FYC placements.

It is not just polish. It is protection.

What does a finishing artist actually see?

Most people look at a finished campaign and see the image. A finishing artist sees what makes that image work.

Zack describes it this way, “Most people walk past someone on the street and think, there’s a person. A finisher sees that the sun is in front of them, so the shadow extends behind. They’re walking under a purple awning, so there’s a slight cast of color, heavier on one side. There’s a brick wall behind them — the pattern would continue a certain way. A car drives past and its window would carry a reflection, and the reflection would look a specific way based on the car’s proximity and angle.”

“All those things that we take for granted when we see something and think of it as an absolute,” Zack says, “are all things that only look real because of the details.”

Entertainment campaign creative is often built from many pieces — photography, compositing, retouching, typography, backgrounds, textures, effects, extensions, alternate crops. The audience should not feel any of that assembly. They should feel the title.

“Our ultimate goal would be that you can’t tell if this was one shot put into a poster or ten shots assembled,” Zack says. “The goal would be that you wouldn’t know anything was assembled.”

A finisher may be zoomed in at 500%, working through edges, masks, shadows, reflections, and transitions that most people would never consciously notice. But if those details are wrong, the whole image can feel off. A shadow can make a composite feel fake. A color shift can make talent feel separated from the world. A rough mask pulls the eye to the wrong place.

The details are not decoration. They are what make the image believable.

How does The Refinery’s finishing team work?

Finishing typically arrives at the end of a long creative process — seven or eight months in, files due in three days. “We’re usually the end of the process,” Zack says. “These files have to deliver in three days and that’s when we get it.”

The Refinery’s finishing team operates throughout the world: in the US, Asia and Europe. Zack calls it the 24-hour shift. A US finisher hands off at the end of their day. The Asia team team takes it for the next five hours, and then Europe picks it up from there and works until the US team comes back in the morning.

“We call that advancing the plot,” Zack says.

When the original finisher logs back in, the file has already received fifteen more hours of work. What they would have been starting fresh, someone else has moved forward.

This structure does two things. It keeps projects moving efficiently. And it protects quality — because after eight or nine hours on the same image, even a highly skilled artist starts to miss things. Fresh eyes catch what tired eyes fill in.

“I think the finishes we do are better because one person doesn’t have to look at them for seventeen straight hours,” Zack says. “A better work environment creates a better environment for the work.”

What does Zack’s role actually involve?

Zack describes is not a hands-on finisher, but he is the person who clears the path so the artists can do their best work.

“Whenever any of the finishers reach a wall and they’re like, ‘Hey, it would be great if I had…’ — my job is to knock down that wall so they get it,” he says.

That means finding missing assets, solving workflow problems, coordinating handoffs across time zones, protecting focus time, and making sure the team is not carrying administrative load that keeps them out of the pixel.

“Finishers are very specific artists and there’s not as many of them as maybe art directors and other roles,” Zack says. “I want to make sure they spend as much time as possible in the pixel.”

What The Refinery provides for finishing

Service	What it covers
Retouching and compositing	Key art, theatrical, streaming, OOH, digital assets
Color consistency and light refinement	Talent, environments, and campaign worlds across formats
Versioning and mechanicals	Print, digital, outdoor, platform, social, PR, FYC
Quality control and file prep	Technical, creative, and format-specific review before delivery
Final delivery	High-resolution print, digital, paid media, platform, theatrical

What makes a good finishing artist

The Refinery hires for a specific kind of attention. Candidates with photography backgrounds tend to do well — they understand what light does, how composition works, what things are supposed to look like in the real world. The team also looks for people who are detail-oriented to the point of chronic curiosity, willing to spend three months on fundamentals before touching live work, and able to take precise feedback on their craft without taking it personally.

“It’s like a really small button that you’ve got to land on,” Zack says.

The work is not always glamorous at the pixel level. It is essential at every other level.

For a full overview of what The Refinery creates for entertainment campaigns, start here.

Experiential entertainment marketing is physical campaign creative built around the title — in-theater activations, immersive environments, specialty builds, photo moments, environmental takeovers, and social-first fan installations that connect back to the larger campaign system.

What fans want is to go deeper into the world of the title. A doorway. A prop. A photo. Something that gets them closer than a trailer, a poster, or a social post can on its own.

At The Refinery, experiential creative is built for that appetite — and connected to the larger campaign system across key art, OOH, platform creative, social, and finishing.

What makes experiential work actually work?

Not size. Specificity.

Does the experience feel like the title? Does it reward the fan? Does it photograph well without becoming hollow? Does it give the audience something to participate in, not just look at? Does it connect back to the campaign idea?

That is the difference between an activation and a memory. One checks a box. The other gives fans a reason to stop, step closer, and say: I need a picture of this.

A campaign does not need to be enormous to feel experiential. It needs to create a behavior. Stand here. Hold this. Find that. Take the photo. Step inside. Bring someone over. Post it. Tell the group chat.

The physical moment can be small. The fandom around it usually is not.

How does experiential connect to the larger campaign?

A physical environment should feel like the campaign, not like it wandered in from somewhere else. The strongest experiential ideas extend the campaign’s visual language into space — color, material, typography, scale, texture, lighting, story cues, and the emotional promise of the title.

The Refinery’s background in key art, OOH, social, platform creative, and finishing shapes that thinking. We know how a campaign image becomes a system. Experiential asks a related question: what happens when that system becomes physical?

The answer should not be more signage.

What does modern experiential have to do for two audiences?

The person who is physically there, and the person who sees it later on a phone.

A fan photo, talent post, recap video, shaky vertical clip, or social carousel can keep the experience moving long after the first audience has left. That means the experience has to be built with replay in mind. Can someone understand it in one photo? Is there a natural frame? Is the title visible? Does the detail reward a closer look? Does it give people something to do with their hands, their camera, their friends, their fandom?

Experiential is physical. Its afterlife is usually digital.

What The Refinery creates for experiential campaigns

Format	Primary job
In-theater activations	Standees, photo moments, decals, wraps, door clings, lobby displays
Immersive environments	Multi-room builds, escape rooms, environmental art for walls and floors
Specialty OOH builds	Dimensional placements that invite physical interaction and social capture
Environmental takeovers	Block takeovers, themed spaces, franchise installations
Story corners and fan installations	D23, conventions, fan-facing campaign touchpoints
Social-first photo moments	Frames, props, and builds designed for in-person participation and digital sharing

Proof

The Refinery has created in-theater activations and physical campaign extensions across studios, streamers, and franchise campaigns.

For Snow White, the work included in-theater standees, photo moments, and mirror decals — and a fully realized four-room escape room experience where guests entered through an enchanted storybook, with The Refinery delivering all art for walls, floors, and environmental surfaces throughout. Story corner activations for the title also appeared at D23.

For Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 3 at San Diego Comic-Con, The Refinery created a choose-your-own-adventure fan activation built around a towering Poseidon’s trident. Fans entered through the trident and chose one of three character paths — Percy, Annabeth, or Thalia — each leading into a distinct environment reflecting that character’s traits and story. Prophecy-led clues, hidden Easter eggs from the upcoming season, and exclusive Camp Half-Blood pins were embedded throughout. It is the kind of activation that gives a franchise audience exactly what they came for: a reason to feel like they are already inside the world.

For Zootopia 2, The Refinery created in-theater mirror decals, escalator wraps, and theater-entrance door clings. For Toy Story 5, floor clings and a lilypad archway installation brought the film’s world into physical space. For Kingsman, in-theater standees and activations extended the campaign into theater environments.

The line between OOH and experiential is also getting thinner. A specialty outdoor build, dimensional takeover, or immersive placement can function as both media and experience — seen by passersby, captured by fans, and remembered as a real-world encounter with the title. The Refinery’s OOH work for Paradise Season 2 and Descendants: Wicked Wonderland sits in that space. (For more on how The Refinery approaches specialty and immersive OOH, see our post on out-of-home creative.)

For a full overview of what The Refinery creates for entertainment campaigns, start here.

High-volume digital display production is the craft of adapting entertainment campaign creative across hundreds of formats, placements, specs, and deadlines without losing the idea, the hierarchy, or the will to live.

Every campaign eventually meets the banner grid. The key art is approved, the message is set, the media plan is moving — and then the creative has to become dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of digital assets across placements, sizes, devices, platforms, and specs.

At The Refinery, digital display production is built around large entertainment campaigns where asset counts are high, timelines are tight, and accuracy still matters.

What makes high-volume display production actually hard?

A 300×250 does not behave like a 728×90. A mobile banner does not have the same job as a rich media placement. A static unit does not communicate like an animated one. Every format changes the available space, pacing, hierarchy, and creative pressure.

The work is not to squeeze the campaign into smaller boxes. The work is to keep the campaign intact.

That means making smart decisions about what matters most in each placement: talent, title, message, date, CTA, logo, motion, legal. Not every element belongs in every size. Some sizes need a tighter crop. Some need a new visual hierarchy. Some need animation to guide attention. Some need restraint, because the unit is already fighting for its life at 320 pixels wide.

The goal is consistency, not sameness.

When should display ads use motion?

When it has a job.

Sometimes motion should reveal a title. Sometimes it should guide the eye to a date or call to action. Sometimes it should add energy, tension, comedy, or genre signal. And sometimes the smartest choice is a clean static unit that says the thing clearly and leaves.

A reveal, flicker, pulse, wipe, character moment, or timed message shift can make a banner feel intentional instead of automated. The question is not “Can this move?” The question is “What should the movement do?”

What happens at small sizes?

Small digital placements are where weak hierarchy gets found out.

When space is limited, every element has to earn its place. Imagery, talent, messaging, dates, platform branding, and calls to action cannot all be treated like the hero. Something has to lead. Something has to support. Something probably has to go.

The Refinery builds clear visual hierarchies so each asset communicates quickly, even when the placement is small, the scroll is fast, and the audience is one thumb twitch away from leaving.

What The Refinery creates for digital display campaigns

Format	What it covers
Static display ads	Campaign adaptation across placements, sizes, and media plans
Animated display ads	Motion, timing, reveals, and visual hierarchy to guide attention
High-volume versioning	Titles, talent, dates, CTAs, markets, platforms, and technical specs
Paid media assets	Studios, streamers, networks, and entertainment brands
Production artwork and finishing	Campaign assets prepared for launch
Quality control and delivery	Review and final delivery across large batches of digital display files

Proof

For UFC on Paramount+, The Refinery serves as a high-volume digital display production partner, delivering thousands of assets across live sports streaming campaigns including UFC 324 through 329, UFC 250 for America’s 250th birthday, and additional UFC on Paramount+ events.

When a lead fighter was injured mid-campaign, The Refinery rebuilt and re-delivered more than 500 digital assets in 72 hours, helping support what became Paramount+’s most successful live event to date.

That is the real test of high-volume display production — not whether a campaign can become hundreds of banners, but whether it can change overnight, still look right, and launch anyway.

For a full overview of what The Refinery creates for entertainment campaigns, start here.

Most campaigns don’t fail at the idea. They fail somewhere between the idea and the hundredth asset that had to carry it. The Refinery builds entertainment campaign creative designed to survive that distance, from key art through platform, OOH, social, experiential, digital display, FYC, and finishing, without losing what made the concept worth approving in the first place.

The work has to hold up everywhere the campaign has to go.

Key art and campaign creative

The Refinery creates entertainment key art and campaign creative for film, television, streaming, theatrical, franchise, documentary, comedy, and awards campaigns.

This includes hero imagery, title treatments, one-sheets, campaign systems, shoot concepts, visual positioning, key art adaptations, digital extensions, OOH extensions, FYC creative, and finishing.

Key art is the foundation of the campaign: the image, type, message, and visual system that help audiences understand what a title is, how it feels, and why it deserves attention.

Streaming platform art

The Refinery creates streaming platform creative and platform art for studios, streamers, networks, and entertainment marketers.

This includes key art adaptations, custom platform art, platform thumbnails, episodic images, post-play imagery, partner assets, mastered platform art, elevated unit photography, title frame grabs, platform suites, production artwork, finishing, versioning, and delivery.

Platform art is not resized key art. It is creative built for the moment someone decides what to watch next.

Out-of-home and immersive campaigns

The Refinery creates out-of-home campaign creative for film, television, streaming, entertainment brands, and awards campaigns.

This includes static OOH, billboards, barricades, transit, wild postings, bus shelters, vehicle wraps, building placements, specialty builds, digital OOH, 3D billboards, anamorphic OOH, Times Square moments, LA Live placements, environmental takeovers, immersive OOH, and social-first outdoor creative.

The best OOH does not just make a title visible. It makes the title feel present in the world.

Experiential campaign creative

The Refinery creates experiential campaign creative and physical entertainment marketing extensions for studios, streamers, networks, and entertainment brands.

This includes in-theater activations, movie theater installations, immersive OOH, specialty builds, themed popups, fan-facing installations, photo moments, environmental takeovers, social-first experiences, physical campaign objects, and branded entertainment environments.

Experiential work gives fans something to enter, touch, collect, post, repeat, and make their own.

Social content and strategy

The Refinery creates entertainment social creative and content strategy for film, television, streaming, franchise, and live-event campaigns.

This includes social content strategy, platform-native video, TikTok creative, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, social-first trailer edits, cast content, junket concepts, Content Day ideas, memes, GIFs, stickers, Stories, carousels, static posts, reactive content, fandom campaigns, and high-volume social systems.

Social creative is not filler between trailers. It is where the campaign keeps earning attention.

Digital display creative production

The Refinery creates digital display creative and high-volume banner production for entertainment campaigns.

This includes static display ads, animated display ads, paid media assets, platform-specific formats, campaign adaptations, high-volume versioning, motion creative, production artwork, quality control, finishing, and final delivery.

Digital display is not simply resizing banners. It is preserving the campaign idea across hundreds or thousands of sizes, specs, placements, platforms, and deadlines.

FYC and awards campaign creative

The Refinery creates FYC and awards campaign creative for studios, streamers, networks, and entertainment marketers across film, television, streaming, documentaries, performances, craft categories, and entertainment brands.

This includes awards strategy, campaign positioning, FYC copywriting, awards messaging, visual concepting, FYC key art, key art adaptation, trade ads, talent spotlights, craft spotlights, digital display, specialty OOH, 2D billboards, hand-painted murals, guild mailers, box sets, coffee-table books, custom mailers, wraps, belly bands, premium packaging, versioning, finishing, and delivery.

FYC creative has to make consideration feel earned, specific, and easy to understand across every awards-season surface.

Finishing and production craft

The Refinery provides entertainment campaign finishing and production craft for studios, streamers, networks, filmmakers, and entertainment brands.

This includes retouching, compositing, masking, color consistency, light and shadow refinement, texture work, resolution rebuilding, mechanicals, versioning, file prep, quality control, technical finishing, and final delivery.

Finishing is not the last step. It is what protects the concept, the talent, the title, and every surface the campaign has to survive.

Built as one campaign system

The Refinery’s strength is not only creating individual assets. It is building entertainment campaign systems that hold together across formats.

Key art informs platform creative. OOH connects to the campaign idea. Social speaks in the title’s voice. Digital display scales the system. Experiential gives fans something to do. FYC turns the campaign toward memory and consideration. Finishing protects all of it.

The campaign and all the places it has to go next.