Everyone is a media brand now
As brands build studios and buy platforms, companies are reshaping media by turning marketing into entertainment and journalism into in-house content
Photo by Barry Lewis/In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images
Photo by Barry Lewis/In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images
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OpenAI bought a tech talk show last month. The deal, announced April 2, brings TBPN inside the company whose executives the hosts had spent the past year interviewing. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, framed it as a response to the fact that "the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to us."
It’s a thing a lot of bosses are saying right now. Every company with a marketing budget is trying to become a studio, and the ones that already are studios are trying to become something bigger. Shoe companies produce microdramas. Jane Street, a trading firm that spent most of its existence trying to remain under the radar, now produces a podcast.
The shift is partly economic. Traditional advertising still works, but consumer attention keeps fragmenting, and a 30-second spot slotted between YouTube clips does not travel the way a five-episode sitcom does. People skip ads, block ads, pay to avoid ads, and scroll past the ones that slip through. A show, by contrast, is something they might finish.
So the brands are making shows. Adobe $ADBE released season two of a workplace sitcom in March starring Hasan Minhaj and Patty Guggenheim as marketers at a fictional firm that runs on Acrobat. Crocs put out a five-part Valentine's Day microdrama about a woman falling for a mystery neighbor identified by his shoes.
Procter & Gamble $PG followed with a 55-episode romance built around its Native personal care line. Under Armour $UAA opened an in-house studio called Lab96 in Baltimore and is producing a high school football series and a women's flag football docuseries. Google $GOOGL quietly launched a production company last May and has started commissioning microdramas from SNL’s Kenan Thompson and the creator of The Bachelor.
The bet is that attention is the scarce resource and a well-made show is the way to get it. A Crocs ad gets skipped. A Crocs microdrama gets watched, recommended, stitched, and duetted. The first episode pulled more than 20,000 views on TikTok in its opening days, which is not a blockbuster number but is roughly 20,000 more than a pre-roll for the same product would have earned. The economics of a sitcom are different from the economics of an ad, and the attention math is too.
The rise of the brand studio is happening alongside a long contraction in American journalism, and the two are related. Local papers keep closing. Magazine staffs keep shrinking. The tech and business reporters who once served as the primary public interpreters of companies like OpenAI and Adobe have been thinning out for years, and the ones still standing are competing for eyeballs with their own subjects, who have more money, more talent, and a direct line to the audience.
Into that gap, companies are not just making content. They are bringing the journalism in house. Andreessen Horowitz has spent years building a publishing and podcast operation of its own. Stripe, the payments company, runs a press, a magazine, and a talk show hosted by one of its founders. A press release is boring. A podcast episode is not.
The OpenAI deal is the clearest version of the same move. The company faces a steady stream of uncomfortable questions from the mainstream press about its finances, its safety record, its copyright fights, its nonprofit-to-for-profit restructuring, and whether the technology it is selling will do what its executives say it will.
A daily talk show hosted by two friendly interviewers who report to OpenAI is a more agreeable venue to work those questions out in. Editorial independence was promised in the announcement, the usual assurance that holds until it doesn't.
A company that owns the platform, the camera, and the distribution does not need to be flattered by the press, because it does not need the press. It needs a story, a few recognizable faces, and a release schedule. Hasan Minhaj does not have to be convinced that Acrobat is interesting. He just has to read the lines.
Media has never looked better. The lighting is good, the casts are recognizable, the production values are up. What is getting harder to find, in all that gloss, is anyone on camera who does not work for the subject.
