The Show Is the Ad Now: What Netflix’s The Hawk Says About the Next Brand Deal

It starts as a viewer’s question: why are there so many brands in this show? Then the stranger possibility comes into focus. Product placement may be too small a phrase for what Netflix is doing with The Hawk.

The series is not simply placing recognizable products beside its characters. In several confirmed partnerships, the characters themselves move out of the fictional world and into real advertising, retail and brand campaigns. The story becomes the bridge between entertainment and commerce.

Image: Colleen E Hayes/Netflix © 2026.

Product placement is too small a phrase

Traditional product placement is easy to understand. A character drives the car, drinks the soda or wears the watch. The brand pays for proximity to the story and hopes some of the story’s attention transfers to the product.

The Hawk pushes further. Netflix says Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Genesis worked on bespoke campaigns developed with Will Ferrell and the show’s creative team so the advertising would fit the series’ world. That is a different proposition from buying a logo in the background.

The character walked out of the show

Luke Wilson plays Golden Fisk, a rival golfer who is sponsored by Mike’s Hard Lemonade inside The Hawk. Then Fisk effectively leaves the series and becomes the face of an actual Mike’s campaign outside it. The partnership extends into retail displays, a sweepstakes and co-branded merchandise.

SKIMS used a similar trick before the series premiered. Its menswear campaign featured Will Ferrell as Lonnie ‘The Hawk’ Hawkins — the fictional golfer — rather than simply hiring celebrity Will Ferrell to pose in an unrelated advertisement.

That distinction matters. The advertiser is not only buying the actor’s fame. It is borrowing a character, a tone and an already-built piece of intellectual property.

Genesis enters the plot

Genesis is a confirmed official U.S. auto partner for the series. Its vehicles appear throughout the show, and the partnership also produced custom creative with Jimmy Tatro reprising his role as Lance Hawkins. The brand relationship is designed to operate both inside the program and beyond it.

There is an important reporting line here: a visible logo does not automatically prove a paid deal. The Hawk contains plenty of recognizable brands, but only partnerships confirmed by Netflix, the brands or credible reporting should be described as commercial integrations.

What Netflix is actually selling

The more useful way to understand the model is as a shared story world. A brand is no longer purchasing only a few seconds of screen presence. It can purchase a route into the narrative identity surrounding the show.

Story → character → brand → campaign → retail and social → back to the story.

Netflix has reason to make this work. In August, the company said its 2026 U.S. upfront advertising commitments had nearly doubled year over year. As its ad business grows, a streaming service with hundreds of millions of viewers has an incentive to sell something more distinctive than another pre-roll spot.

A character who can exist in a show on Thursday, an ad on Friday and a store display on Saturday gives the advertiser continuity. The fictional world itself becomes media inventory.

The publisher lesson

There is a useful idea here for independent publishing, but it requires a firewall. A publication should not disguise advertising as reporting or let a sponsor purchase the conclusion of a story. Trust is too expensive to spend that way.

The transferable idea is different: stop thinking of every advertisement as a one-off unit and start building recognizable editorial properties that can support clearly disclosed partnerships.

A recurring franchise can have a name, visual language, reporting rules and a consistent reason for readers to return. A partner can support a season of that franchise instead of buying a single banner. The franchise can extend into original photography, short video, newsletter editions, events, print objects and social cuts while the reporting remains under editorial control.

That changes the pitch from ‘buy an ad on this page’ to something closer to ‘become the founding partner of an original editorial property.’ The value comes from association, continuity, creative production and distribution — not from permission to rewrite the journalism.

The risk is the same as the opportunity

The Hawk also demonstrates the danger. Once the machinery becomes too visible, the viewer stops seeing a story and starts seeing the transaction. The same is true for publishing. If a reader has to wonder whether a subject was chosen because a sponsor paid for it, the model has already gone too far.

The safeguards are plain language and structural independence: clear ‘Presented with’ disclosure, no sponsor control over subjects or conclusions, and an obvious distinction between reported work and paid creative. A commercial partner can support the world around the journalism without owning the journalism itself.

The valuable unit may be the world around the story

For years, publishers have tried to make individual pages carry the business model. Netflix’s experiment suggests another possibility: the more valuable commercial asset may be the durable world built around a recurring story.

That is the part worth watching. The show is becoming the ad. For publishers, the parallel opportunity is not to turn the article into an ad. It is to build editorial franchises strong enough that brands want to stand beside them.

Sources

Netflix — ‘Netflix Brings the Funny to the Fairway With Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Genesis For The Hawk,’ July 8, 2026: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-brings-the-funny-to-the-fairway-with-mikes-hard-lemonade-and-genesis-for-the-hawk

Genesis Motor America — ‘Genesis Joins Netflix’s The Hawk as Official U.S. Auto Partner,’ July 16, 2026: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/genesis-joins-netflixs-the-hawk-as-official-us-auto-partner-302826079.html

Marketing-Interactive — ‘How SKIMS turned a Netflix character into a brand campaign,’ June 30, 2026: https://production.marketing-interactive.com/how-skims-turned-a-netflix-character-into-a-brand-campaign

Netflix — ‘Netflix Gets Closer, Closes 2026 U.S. Upfront,’ August 10, 2026: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-gets-closer-closes-2026-us-upfront

THE CUPCAKE QUESTION: WHEN A BRAND IS THE PUNCHLINE

Then comes the moment that makes the model harder to classify. In Episode One, Lonnie takes a sip of Cupcake Vineyards Chardonnay, spits it out, retches, names the bottle and pours it down the sink. MediaPost singled out the scene as a conspicuous reversal of conventional product placement: the brand is unmistakable, but the exposure is openly negative.

There is no public evidence that Cupcake declined a deal for The Hawk, that Mike’s Hard Lemonade paid to attack a competitor, or that Cupcake paid to be insulted. Netflix’s July 8 partnership announcement names Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Genesis as the two bespoke partners developed with Ferrell and his creative team; Cupcake is not named.

The wrinkle is that Cupcake was already inside Netflix’s commercial orbit. In January 2024, Cupcake Vineyards and Netflix announced a Love Is Blind collaboration called “Love Is Wine,” a limited-edition Chardonnay tied to the series. That history makes the Hawk scene more interesting, but it still does not establish what, if any, commercial agreement governed the joke.

For publishers and advertisers, this is where the experiment becomes provocative. If viewers remember, search and discuss a brand because it was mocked, brand participation no longer has to look flattering to create attention. The value may simply be in becoming part of the conversation. The reporting line, however, has to stay firm: visibility is not proof of a paid relationship, and a publisher should never turn an inference into a fact.