I Sold My Soul to the Label
The stories
Hollywood missed.
Now in vertical.
PaintBox Shorts is the multicultural micro-drama studio building branded series for Fortune 500s — produced with the creators, talent, and culture-makers who actually move audiences. In partnership with PaintBox Labs.
$2.7T
U.S. Hispanic Spending Power
NielsenIQ · 2025
23%
U.S. Retail Dollar Growth From Hispanic Households
NielsenIQ · 2025
38%
Of U.S. Population Is Multicultural
Nielsen
6–8 wk
From Brief to Distribution
Our pipeline
I Sold My Soul to the Label
The James Bond Gang
Rideshare
Hood Cop
The Man Curse
When It Hurts So Bad
TABU Social Club
Purple Lipstick
Larry's Girls
Change For A Dyme
Decatur Cab
Love's Home Run
Courting Miss Thang
I Sold My Soul to the Label
The James Bond Gang
Rideshare
Hood Cop
The Man Curse
When It Hurts So Bad
TABU Social Club
Purple Lipstick
Larry's Girls
Change For A Dyme
Decatur Cab
Love's Home Run
Courting Miss Thang
The Thesis · §01
The opportunity
01.
The vertical drama boom is a $11 billion industry built almost entirely on one type of story — and one type of audience.¹
ReelShort, DramaBox, and the wave behind them have proven viewers will sit through 50+ episodes of branded fiction. Now Fortune 500s are looking for the next case study after P&G's Golden Pear Affair.
The whitespace isn't another billionaire-CEO romance. It's the multicultural audience Hollywood has chronically under-invested in. U.S. Hispanic households alone account for $2.7 trillion in spending power and contribute 23% of U.S. retail dollar growth.² By 2040, multicultural Americans will be a numerical majority commanding over $5 trillion.³
That's the studio we're building — Black, Latino, Asian, and immigrant stories told by the people who live them, produced at the speed and scale this format demands.
¹ Vertical drama market sizing — Sensor Tower / industry analyst estimates, 2025.
² NielsenIQ, "Multicultural Momentum," 2025.
³ NielsenIQ Multicultural Measurement, 2025 outlook.
² NielsenIQ, "Multicultural Momentum," 2025.
³ NielsenIQ Multicultural Measurement, 2025 outlook.
Two Sides of the Same Story · §02
Built for the brands telling stories — and the people worth telling stories about.
For Fortune 500 BrandsA
Beat ad fatigue. Become the show.
Branded micro-drama series with cultural specificity — produced fast, integrated cleanly, and distributed where your customers already are. Enterprise-grade approvals baked in from day one.
- Brand-safe scripts & legal review
- Talent & creator activations included
- Multicultural insight-led storytelling
- Performance reporting + iteration
- 6–8 week production windows
For Creators & TalentB
Real budgets. Real ownership.
We pay creators, writers, directors, and on-camera talent at scale — with backend participation in shows that actually carry your name. No content-mill grind. We're building the next generation of Black, Latino, and AAPI franchise IP.
- Union & non-union opportunities
- Series creator royalties + IP equity*
- Distribution across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, ReelShort, DramaBox
- Direct paths to Fortune 500 brand deals
- Writers' room access for staff writers
Run The Math · §03
A 60-second model for your next campaign.
Pull the levers. See where vertical drama actually beats your current spend on branded content, talent partnerships, and traditional video. No login. No follow-up email. Just math.
Projected Outcome
~85M
impressions
impressions
across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and vertical platforms over the campaign window. Multicultural-weighted reach: 34M.
Estimates based on industry benchmarks (PQ Media, IAB) and our production-cost model. Actual results vary by brand, category, and creative. Book a pitch for a custom forecast.
The Slate · §04
In production: thirteen series, one studio, one vision.
← Scroll →
The James Bond Gang
Rideshare
Hood Cop
The Man Curse
When It Hurts So Bad
TABU Social Club
Purple Lipstick
Larry's Girls
Change For A Dyme
Decatur Cab
Love's Home Run
Courting Miss Thang
The Engine · §05 · Powered by PaintBox Labs
Twenty years of Hollywood & Madison Avenue, pointed at vertical.
PaintBox Shorts is powered by PaintBox Labs — a New York creative consultancy whose ECD has built campaigns for some of the most recognizable franchises in entertainment, sports, and culture. We're not learning the format. We're applying every lesson from twenty years of brand-side production to an entirely new medium.
A partial list of brands our team has produced for:
Universal Orlando
Netflix
Nike
Adidas
Walmart
Sony Animation
Coca-Cola
American Express
LeBron's Uninterrupted
Calvin Klein
WNBA NY Liberty
Johnson & Johnson
Now in Production · §06
Three live PaintBox originals, coming to vertical.
PaintBox Shorts is the format-native arm of an active production studio. These are real projects in the PaintBox Labs in-production stable — being adapted, packaged, and produced for vertical. Not a hypothetical brief. Not a sizzle reel. Live IP with decks, scripts, and episodes already in motion.
In Production
Legacy Sounds
Legacy Sounds
A multi-generational music industry drama built for the vertical format from the ground up. PaintBox's first ReelShort original — pitch deck, character bible, and the first 10 episodes already packaged. The proof that we know how to ship this format, not just talk about it.
View on PaintBox Labs
In Development
The James Bond Gang
The James Bond Gang
A modern twist on true crime: an FBI-led task force took down a real burglary gang in 1995. Our adaptation follows DJ — a finance and crypto exec by day, heist crew leader by night. Originally a TV series in PaintBox Labs' stable. Now being packaged as a 50-episode vertical drama.
View on PaintBox Labs
In Development
Reggaetón Hustle
Reggaetón Hustle
Angel Ramos, a Dominican music executive from Washington Heights, gambles his career, his relationship, and his savings on a Puerto Rican music genre nobody believed in. The origin story of an entire global sound — and exactly the kind of culturally-specific narrative a Fortune 500 brand can build around.
View on PaintBox LabsHow It Ships · §07
From brief to feed in six to eight weeks.
Our process is built for brand timelines, not awards-season ones. Strategy, scripts, casting, production, and distribution-ready cutdowns — locked into a single, accountable pipeline.
/01
Week 1–2
Discover & Insight
Brand goals, KPIs, audience deep-dive, multicultural insight workshop. Our consultancy DNA shows up here.
/02
Week 2–4
World & Scripts
Story-world bible, 50–60 episode arc, brand-integration pass, legal & compliance review. Writers room driven by underrepresented voices.
/03
Week 4–7
Cast & Produce
Talent & creator casting, location scouting, principal photography. Cinematic production values, not influencer DIY.
/04
Week 7–8+
Distribute & Iterate
Platform-native cutdowns, paid + organic toolkit, key art, performance dashboards, and ongoing optimization sprints.
Engagement Models · §08
Three ways to get into the show.
Whether you're testing the format for the first time or building an always-on vertical content engine, we have a path that matches your investment and ambition.
/ Tier 01
Pilot Drop
For brands testing branded vertical storytelling for the first time.
From $185K
Single short-form series, 8–12 episodes
Single short-form series, 8–12 episodes
- Strategy + insight workshop
- Story world & full scripts
- Production & principal cast
- Distribution-ready cutdowns
- 30-day performance reporting
/ Tier 02
Season Launch
For brands ready to launch a full episodic campaign with cultural weight.
Mid-six-figure investment
50–60 episode microsoap, cinematic production · Scoped to brief
50–60 episode microsoap, cinematic production · Scoped to brief
- Everything in Pilot Drop, plus —
- Full story-world bible & IP development
- Multi-platform distribution strategy
- Influencer & creator activation layer
- Brand-integration measurement
- 90-day optimization & iteration
/ Tier 03
Always-On Studio
For enterprises building a continuous vertical content engine in-house.
Annual partnership
Dedicated team, ongoing slate · Investment scoped to brief
Dedicated team, ongoing slate · Investment scoped to brief
- Embedded creative & production team
- Quarterly slate planning
- Continuous content output
- Owned IP development with backend
- Quarterly business reviews + reporting
- First-look on PaintBox originals
For Creators & Talent · §09
If you can tell the story — we'll put it on screens.
We're actively casting and crewing across our slate. Writers, directors, on-camera talent, DPs, editors, social-first creators — paid market rates with backend participation on the shows you help build.* Black, Latino, AAPI, immigrant, and indigenous voices welcomed and prioritized.
Currently casting series in Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. Remote writers' room positions also open.
Questions Before You Pitch · §10
The questions every CMO asks first.
Influencer agencies sell you talent. We sell you a show. The deliverable is a 50–60 episode branded series with a real story-world, scripts, and production values — not a posting schedule. Influencers and creators participate in our shows, but the IP is built around a narrative your audience returns to, not a personality whose attention they rent.
It means three things, structurally. One: writers' rooms led by people from the cultures the show portrays — not consultants, leads. Two: casting and crew sourced from our talent pipeline in Atlanta, LA, NY, and Miami, weighted toward underrepresented backgrounds. Three: cultural insight workshops baked into Week 1 of every engagement, so brand briefs translate into stories that feel earned rather than imported.
Enterprise-grade. PaintBox Labs has shipped work for Walmart, Nike, Coca-Cola, J&J, and dozens of regulated categories. Standard scope includes script-level legal review, IP clearances, talent agreements, music licensing, and platform compliance. We treat your CMO and your General Counsel as parallel stakeholders from the kickoff call.
Native vertical platforms (ReelShort, DramaBox, GoodShort) plus organic and paid distribution across Meta, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. We deliver platform-native cutdowns optimized for each surface, so a single 50-episode arc generates 200+ short-form social assets without a separate post-production budget.
6–8 weeks for a Pilot Drop. 10–14 weeks for a full Season Launch. Always-On Studio engagements run on a continuous quarterly cadence. The single biggest variable is brand-side approval cycles — we move at the speed your legal and brand-marketing teams can move.
It depends on the engagement model. Pilot Drop and Season Launch IP is co-owned, with the brand owning their integration and key art and PaintBox Shorts retaining the underlying story-world for spin-off and franchise potential. Always-On Studio engagements are typically structured as work-for-hire on commissioned series with brand-side ownership. Specifics get papered up in the kickoff phase.
Media Inquiries Welcomed →
Ready When You Are · §11
Let's build the
next case study.
30-minute working session with our founding team. Bring a brief, a brand, or a bigger ambition — we'll walk you through what's possible and what it takes to get there.