Kristen Bell enters the ad biz with Dunshire Productions 

Actor and entrepreneur Kristen Bell has entertained adults and kids alike with her comedic antics on series including “The Good Place” and the recent Netflix hit “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window,” as well as with her melodious singing (playing on repeat in the heads of families with young kids thanks to the Disney “Frozen” franchise). Now, she’s officially bringing her entertainment chops to the ad world with Dunshire Productions.

Bell has teamed with her longtime collaborators, award-winning Hollywood vets Morgan Sackett, Dean Holland, Troy Bailey and agency exec Benjamin Hart to open the creative studio and production company, which will bring their expertise to brands in the form of traditional spots, short-form digital content and more.

Their combined experience includes production and direction on series such as “Parks and Recreation,” “The Good Place,” “The Office” and “Veep.” On the brand side, they’d previously worked together on campaigns for Samsung, Spindrift, Lagavulin and Hello Bello, the plant-based baby products company Bell founded with her husband Dax Shepard in 2019. 

Making Dunshire an “official” company has been a long time coming. “I’ve been working in commercials, film, TV and branding for about 10 years now,” Bell explained in an interview with Ad Age. On such jobs, she found herself repeatedly turning to the members of the Dunshire crew. “We were each individually calling the other four members to work on something, and we realized that’s because we have a really unique way of getting every single job done between the five of us,” she said. “So one day, we realized we should probably form a proper company.”

Dunshire’s platform is a simple one: Make stuff worth watching, and do it with good people only. 

“Kristen and I have a nice philosophy that in general, work is kind of stupid and sucks,” added Dunshire Partner Hart. “It takes you away from people you love, and things that you want to be doing, so if we have to participate in this work system, let's do it with great people who want to build great things in the world.”

Hart also serves as president of L.A.-based creative agency Brains on Fire. The company has led the marketing for Bell and Shepard's Hello Bello, which reportedly had been projected to reach $200 million in sales in 2021. Dunshire and Brains on Fire will serve as sibling companies in order to offer a full suite of creative services to brands.

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Dunshire’s roster of writers, producers and directors also includes Monica Padman, co-creator and co-host of the popular “Armchair Expert” podcast with Shephard; and Gustavo Delgado, Hello Bello creative lead at Brains on Fire. The company’s founders also promise brands not just their team's expertise but also access to other entertainment talents who’d helped make their previous projects a success.

“If you’re a company that wants spots written in the vein of ‘Parks and Rec,'" all those writers are our friends, so they’re very easy hires,” said Bell. “You’re going to get the real deal.” 

And those established partnerships, they believe, will lead to wins in the long run. “You save everyone money, the shoot goes easier, you come up with more electric ideas,” Bell said.

It's the sort of streamlined model that has fared well with Ryan Reynolds and his agency, Maximum Effort. 

Though Dunshire will predominantly work with brands directly, it's also open to teaming with agencies. Over the course of her career, Bell has worked with shops including Wieden+Kennedy and McKinney on campaigns for her own CBD brand Happy Dance, as well as Samsung. “We would have no problem sprinkling our magic on whatever they're attempting to produce,” she said.

Previously, Wieden had worked with the Dunshire team to produce a Q&A-style ad starring Bell being quizzed by her doppelgänger about whether CBD can get you high. Bell’s husband Shepard served as director. 

Read: Kristen Bell's Happy Dance is parents' latest aid for coping with pandemic-fueled anxiety.

While Bell herself has become a well-known brand spokesperson, her involvement in Dunshire will be as a producer. That said, "if I make a deal with a brand, I certainly hope the brand will agree to have it be produced by Dunshire because it will be better if it is," she laughed.

Dunshire’s forte is comedy, and “that's going to be our bread and butter,” Hart said. “What we’re really good at is human emotion and connecting in that way. This is a group of people who talk a lot about comedy being one of the hardest things to move [people], especially in a real way, not in a low-hanging fruit way.”

As for the name of the new company, Bell explained that it was inspired by an episode of “Parks and Recreation,” which featured a fictional board game with convoluted rules, “Cones of Dunshire.” It actually satirized the real-life board game “Settlers of Catan,” which happens to be Bell’s favorite game. “Dean and Morgan and I were on the phone late one night, popping around ideas,” she recalled. “Dunshire” is “a word that doesn't really mean anything, and we're creating something genuinely different here,” Bell said. “And it's a joke about one of our old jokes. It just felt right.”

The company promises to make fun central not just to its messages, but also to the process of creating them. “We have found that in any job, there can be more fun involved, even to accomplish goals that previously have been hard to reach,” Bell said. We’re just trying to do good work and infuse fun into it. “

“One thing we preach constantly is that we’re successful because of our values, not despite of them,” said Hart. “Having a moral compass, having fun and trying to bring joy into the market doesn’t mean we’re sacrificing on what works in the real world and guiding business goals and objectives.”

Currently, Dunshire is continuing work for Hello Bello and developing campaigns for Shipt and Lagavulin. It also has an arm focusing on entertainment projects, one of which is “The Tiny Chef Show” kids series. Developed in partnership with Imagine Entertainment, it’s set to debut on Nickelodeon later this year.