Will Ferrell just talked a luxury automaker and a hard lemonade brand into handing him their marketing budgets for a round of golf.
Netflix is rolling out two separate tie-ins for "The Hawk," Ferrell's new golf comedy and his first-ever scripted series regular role, premiering July 16.
Genesis and Mike's Hard Lemonade each built their own version of the joke.
This meant working directly with Ferrell and his creative team so the ads stay within the absurd world built around his character, golf villain Lonnie Hawkins.
Magno Herran, Netflix's VP of Global Brand Marketing and Partnerships, said both brands treated the show as an opening to try something outside their usual marketing tone.
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"What I love about these two partnerships is how both brands used the opportunity as permission to take a swing at something new," he said.
"For Genesis that was comedy, and for Mike's Hard Lemonade that was a bold step into golf."
He added the studio was "proud of the work we made and the collaboration we had with both Genesis and Mike's Hard Lemonade on Will Ferrell's first season of The Hawk."
Two Brands, Two Jokes
Mike's Hard Lemonade's spot revolves around Luke Wilson's Golden Fisk, Hawkins' on-screen rival within the show's plot, a sponsor of the brand.
Emmy winner Lucia Aniello, known for directing "Hacks," directed the ad, which plays with the idea of a fictional antagonist becoming the real-world face of a product relaunch.
The campaign moves off-screen too, with Mike's x The Hawk branding hitting retail stores nationwide and a sweepstakes offering limited-edition merch built around the pairing.
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Genesis takes the opposite route, establishing the quiet cabin of its GV80 SUV as the only real defense against a Hawkins-induced meltdown.
Jimmy Tatro returns as Lance Hawkins, Lonnie's son, for what the automaker calls its first comedic campaign.
It's an unexpected move from a brand that typically plays things straight and serious.
Pairing a scripted comedy with two unrelated categories at once shows how Netflix is treating "The Hawk" like a shared world sponsors can borrow characters from.
It's a similar model to what Liquid Death has run with Prime Video's "The Boys."
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Here, recurring in-universe characters like The Deep and Ashley Barrett have carried multiple campaigns across years rather than a single spot.
The difference is that instead of one brand building its own recurring bit, Netflix is letting two unrelated categories run separate storylines inside the same title at once.
And for golf specifically, it also shows that mainstream brands see the sport's younger audience as worth chasing through comedy.
Netflix's Dual-Sponsor Comedy Strategy
The pairing shows how one title can carry two sponsors without either message getting lost, as long as each brand voice matches its own goals instead of the show's.
Junior golf participation alone has climbed 58% since 2019, the largest increase of any age group in the sport.
This helps explain why brands outside golf's usual advertiser pool are willing to experiment here.
Marketers eyeing a similar entertainment brand partnership can take a few things from how Netflix structured this one:
- Give each sponsor an angle that fits their identity: Genesis and Mike's Hard Lemonade get separate storylines instead of sharing one generic tie-in spot, giving their respective partnerships distinction.
- Cast existing characters as the pitch: using Golden Fisk and Lance Hawkins keeps both ads inside the show's canon instead of bolting a logo onto unrelated content.
- Push the bit past the screen: retail branding, sweepstakes, and merch give fans a reason to engage after the spot ends.
Ultimately, the strongest part of this rollout is that neither brand had to soften its own identity to fit the Hawk world.
Our Take: Can Two Brands Crash the Same Movie?
We've seen plenty of shows lend their world to one sponsor, but it's rarer to watch a comedy hand its whole premise to two brands with nothing in common.
Let alone to let them run their own separate bits inside it.
What makes this work is that nobody's fighting for the same punchline.
Mike's Hard Lemonade gets the villain, Genesis gets the getaway car, and both premises land because they never overlap.
That's a harder trick than it looks, since most co-sponsored campaigns end up flattening into one interchangeable ad.
Now, only time will tell whether either brand still feels distinct once the fans start swapping GIFs of Ferrell's fairway meltdowns.
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