Tom Cunha and the audience before the audience

A horror film can ask a surprisingly sociable question: what would you do? For The Purge, that question became a way for people to enter the film’s world before they entered a cinema. The campaign invited responses, imagined scenarios and fan participation. Tom Cunha appears among its credited collaborators. A movie about a night of suspended rules had found a rather orderly place in the marketing calendar.

Cunha’s story begins before the screening, when a film is still an idea someone might repeat to a friend. An audience has to gather around that idea. Someone has to find the invitation. In Cunha’s career, the work of making that introduction runs through editorial desks, studio marketing departments and the New York agency he helped establish.

Today he is Brigade’s co-founder and CEO. The titles describe a business responsibility. The career behind them describes a particular position in entertainment: close enough to the work to understand its character, and concerned with the people beyond the production who might respond to it. A campaign lives in that gap. So does much of the business of getting a film seen.

Three desks, one agency

Before Brigade, Cunha worked as an assistant editor at Movieline and in digital marketing at MGM Studios and 20th Century Fox. He also headed the interactive division at Mammoth, where his projects included The Queen, No Country for Old Men, Precious and Project Runway. His early career brought together magazine work, studio experience and agency assignments, with both film and television in the mix.

Those are different places from which to look at the same cultural object. A magazine gives a film editorial context. A studio has to introduce a release to its prospective viewers. An agency has to translate a brief into work that somebody can make, approve and publish. Cunha’s route passed through each of those settings. It is a more concrete origin story than the usual entrepreneurial vocabulary about having a vision.

In October 2010, Brigade launched with Cunha, publicist Adam Kersh and social media strategist Jean McDowell. The arrangement put complementary experience into one company. Kersh led traditional publicity; Cunha and McDowell oversaw digital marketing. The early offering included outreach, promotions, social media, media planning, websites and online creative. The company was based in New York, with support in Los Angeles.

The founding arrangement is worth pausing over. A review, a website, an interview and a social post can all concern the same release, yet require different kinds of judgment. Bringing those disciplines into one agency created a place where the conversations could meet. The business proposition was practical: filmmakers and distributors had several connected jobs to get done. Brigade offered to handle them together.

Give the audience a part

The Purge campaign gives that proposition a visible form. Brigade and Universal Pictures used the film’s premise to invite people to imagine how they would survive its night. The work included question cards, fictional public notices and animated imagery. Fans also supplied their own responses. Cunha is named as a Brigade partner in the entry credits; the campaign won the Animated GIFs category at the sixth Shorty Awards.

The creative premise contains a small piece of hospitality. It gives the viewer a role. A survival question is available to anyone with an imagination; it requires no expertise in distribution or advertising. For this campaign, the film itself supplied the subject of the conversation. A marketer could open the door, and the people arriving could bring their own answers.

For Furious 7, Brigade and Universal worked with an existing fan community. The campaign combined a sequence of social releases, cast participation, event coverage and fan submissions. Cunha appears in its credits alongside Universal’s Doug Neil and Dylan Bridges, and Brigade’s Jason Sawtelle and Ashley Richardson. At the eighth Shorty Awards, the work received Gold Honor in Entertainment and Bronze Honor in Online Community.

The entry reported more than 4,000 submissions to its fan-video initiative. That is a useful number because it describes an action: people made something and sent it in. The figure belongs to the shared campaign, with a studio, an agency, a cast and fans involved. It offers one small window into what participation looks like once an invitation has left the planning document.

Read the two campaigns together and the contrast is interesting. One invites a response to an unsettling fictional situation. The other makes room for enthusiasm around an established franchise. The invitation changes with the story. That is a useful way to understand Cunha’s field: audience work begins with the material at hand, and with something a person might actually want to contribute.

The first hire gets a name

Campaigns have public outcomes. Departments have a daily life. One detail concerns Jennifer Hewell, whom he identified as his first hire while heading Mammoth’s interactive division. In a public recommendation, he described her development from an entry-level position into an account executive and credited her contribution to the department’s growth.

He singled out “great instincts as a marketer.” Around that phrase, his praise covered practical abilities: keeping work organized, communicating clearly, managing simultaneous assignments and helping establish processes. It is an unusually useful detail for a profile of an executive. We get to see what he chose to notice in another person’s work, rather than merely which titles he held himself.

“great instincts as a marketer”

Tom Cunha, on Jennifer Hewell

There is a modest comedy to the contrast between film marketing’s public face and this list of virtues. The public face has premieres and stars. The list has the ability to follow through. Somewhere between those two sits the actual working day. Cunha’s recommendation gives the quieter contributions a name and a place in the account of how a department grew.

A different kind of opening night

Cunha’s work has also put him in rooms where the subject is how the industry operates. The 2011 Independent Filmmaker Labs materials listed him among documentary workshop leaders. His biography there connected strategic and creative campaign experience with films including Winter’s Bone. The setting brought an agency co-founder into a program for filmmakers, early in Brigade’s history.

By 2018, he was among the marketing professionals participating in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s third Industry Academy. The four-day program served fifteen selected emerging professionals, with sessions covering programming, sales, distribution, exhibition and publicity as well as marketing. Cunha appeared in the marketing group with Sara Kiener of Cinereach and Nicholas Kemp of Kino Lorber.

The composition of the program matters. A filmmaker’s work moves through a chain of decisions, and an emerging industry professional benefits from understanding the adjacent jobs. A marketing workshop sits beside distribution and programming because the audience encounters their combined effects. Cunha’s appearance places his experience within that wider conversation about how films travel from a finished work to a public life.

His SeriesFest board connection adds episodic storytelling to the picture. The organization’s team page lists him as a Brigade partner among its board members. Film campaigns and a series festival have different rhythms, but each involves introducing creative work to people who might follow it. Here the career extends into an organization built around the work and opportunities of other storytellers.

The work before the lights go down

Cunha has taken the discussion onto microphones, too. In 2014 he appeared on Business of Film, episode 22, a conversation framed around digital marketing for films, Facebook and Twitter, and how a film can get noticed. In February 2021, Hashtag Influencer featured him in an episode about running a digital marketing agency. The questions around his work were becoming questions about the business itself.

The 2021 episode biography placed his team leadership across films including Get Out, Phantom Thread, The Shape of Water, 1917 and Soul. The range gives the career its shape: different tones, different fictional worlds, different reasons a viewer might care. It is easy to assemble a row of titles. The more interesting thought is how much the introduction must change from one title to the next.

Brigade’s current practice spans social strategy, community management, creative production, digital publicity and national publicity. The services run from scripting and animation to filmmaker interviews, festival representation and screenings. Read as a working sequence, the list reaches from deciding what to say through making the material to arranging the encounters around a release. It puts several parts of a film’s introduction within one business.

That sequence returns us to Cunha’s path. The assistant editor, the studio marketer and the agency founder occupy different desks, but all work near the point where a story meets somebody else. His credited campaigns, his praise for a colleague and his appearances in industry programs give that point a human scale. There are people making the introduction, people learning the business and people deciding whether to join in.

A film’s opening scene belongs to its makers. The conversation before it belongs to a much larger cast. Cunha’s career has been spent among that cast, helping arrange the occasion on which a stranger becomes a viewer. The lights eventually go down. By then, some of the story’s social life has already begun.