Branded Entertainment Network Chief Executive Gary Shenk is not shy to talk about the milestones the company has achieved this year. Early in the year the entertainment industry advertising agency, owned by billionaire Bill Gates, relocated its headquarters to Sherman Oaks from Seattle. A few months later it won a Digiday award for its work on the video game “Tom Clancy’s The Division” for client Ubisoft Entertainment SA, and was a finalist in the online publication’s employer of the year competition in the ad agency category. Later in the summer the firm was ranked in Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest growing private companies. “This year has been a year of a lot of recognition for a lot of hard work we’ve been doing to get to this point,” Shenk told the Business Journal. Branded Entertainment Network, or BEN, has two businesses – product integration into feature films, television, streaming programs and on digital platforms, including YouTube and Instagram; and licensing the images of iconic personalities for marketing purposes. “It is BEN’s job on a data-driven basis to find the shows and characters that are going to meet the brand criteria and then once we’ve done that work with the creators to get the brands into the shows,” Shenk said. In 2016, the company did about 6,000 brand placements and this year is on track to do more than 10,000, Shenk said. He added that the fourth quarter tends to be the busiest because advertisers tend spend more in the last three months of the year to support holiday campaigns. The personalities represented by BEN include Albert Einstein, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Buzz Aldrin. The company works with personalities that represent big ideas, whether it is Einstein and innovation or Muhammed Ali and tenacity or Aldrin with new frontiers, Shenk explained. “Everyone that we choose to represent is associated with some larger-than-life concept,” he said. “That is why advertisers tend to use these materials again and again and again.” With traditional advertising such as newspaper and magazine placement or even broadcast television ads not attracting the eyeballs they once did, brands have shifted to getting their products mentioned or displayed within the content itself. Brands provide detailed information on the audience demographic they want to reach and then BEN takes that information and compares it with demographic data on 3,000 traditional shows and movies and 50,000 digital audiences. If General Motors Co., for instance, is interested in placing the Cadillac Escalade in a show, BEN’s data would point toward a specific set of programs. “Once you get on those shows there might be characters you want to drive the Escalade because that character is very aligned with the type of person the brand is trying to reach,” Shenk explained. Editing Awards Post-production firms with locations in the San Fernando Valley have been nominated for the 2017 HPA Awards given by the Hollywood Professional Association, previously known as the Hollywood Post Alliance. Since 2006, the awards have recognized the work of individuals and teams in editing, sound, visual effects and color grading for work in feature films, television and commercials. This year the awards will be presented on Nov. 16 at the Skirball Cultural Center. Nominees include Alan Murray, Bub Asman, John Reitz and Tom Ozanich from Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services in Burbank for outstanding sound in a feature film for their work on “Sully”; Dennis Hamlin of Hamlin Sound in Encino for outstanding sound in television for his work on “The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble”; and Paul Ghezzo of CoSA VFX in North Hollywood for outstanding visual effects in television for his work on the episode “The Bicameral Mind” for the series “Westworld.” Formosa Group, in West Hollywood, with locations in North Hollywood and Burbank, was nominated for outstanding sound in a feature film and television; as well as EFilm, in Los Angeles, with a facility at Universal Studios, being nominated for outstanding color grading in a feature film. Estrella Audience Gains Spanish-language broadcast network Estrella TV saw an increase in its daytime audience for the 2016-17 television season. The Burbank network had a 50 percent jump in viewers between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., Monday through Friday. Competing networks such as Univision and Telemundo had a decrease in viewers. Lenard Liberman, chief executive of EstrallaTV’s parent, LBI Media, said the key to success was in the programming options offered to viewers. “Latino viewers are no longer settling for the tired telenovela and narco series formats that our competitors have boxed themselves into,” Liberman said in a prepared statement. Staff Reporter Mark R. Madler can be reached at (818) 316-3126 or [email protected].