At some point in the last decade — nobody can agree on exactly when — someone in a brand strategy meeting said the words “we need to think like a media company.” The room nodded. The consultant smiled. The slide deck had a quote from a publishing executive who had pivoted to branded content. It seemed, in that moment, like the future.
And then every brand tried to become a media company. And here we are.
The Idea That Made Perfect Sense Until Everyone Had It
The logic was genuinely compelling. Media companies had audiences. Audiences had attention. Attention had become the scarcest resource in the economy. Traditional advertising was losing ground — banner blindness, ad blockers, fragmented platforms — and content marketing had shown that brands could build genuine audiences if they produced things people actually wanted to consume.
Red Bull had demonstrated this so convincingly that business schools built case studies around it. If an energy drink brand could become a legitimate sports media operation, what was stopping every other brand from doing the same?
The answer, it turned out, was everything.
Red Bull’s model worked because Red Bull had built it slowly, invested seriously, hired actual journalists and filmmakers, and operated it with editorial independence from the marketing department. They didn’t produce “content.” They produced media — with all the craft, patience, and institutional commitment that implied.
What most brands did was considerably different. They hired a social media manager, bought a content calendar tool, and started publishing. Three times a week on LinkedIn. Daily on Instagram. Bi-weekly “thought leadership” newsletters that went out to 400 subscribers, 300 of whom were employees.
This is not a media company. This is a marketing department with a content calendar. The distinction matters enormously, and the confusion between the two has produced a decade of expensive, exhausting, largely ineffective output.
What “Thinking Like a Media Company” Actually Required
Real media companies have editorial strategies. They have points of view. They cover beats. They develop relationships with sources. They have editors whose job is to make every piece of content better than it would have been without them. They accept that some things won’t perform, invest in quality rather than volume, and play a long game measured in years rather than quarters.
They also — this part is crucial — produce content for the audience, not for the organization. A media company doesn’t publish something because the product team asked for a feature to be highlighted, or because the CEO wants their thought leadership to be more visible, or because it’s Tuesday and the content calendar says Tuesday is LinkedIn day.
They publish it because it’s interesting. Because the audience will want to read it. Because it earns attention rather than demanding it.
Most brand “content strategies” look excellent in a deck and collapse in practice because they were designed around the organization’s needs, not the audience’s. The editorial calendar is full of product announcements dressed up as insights, customer stories selected for flattering metrics rather than genuine narrative interest, and “industry trends” pieces assembled from a Google search and four bullet points.
The audience, who are not stupid, can tell the difference. And they quietly unsubscribe.
The Attention Economy Problem Nobody Solved
Here’s the paradox that makes the “become a media company” strategy so frustrating in practice: it was conceived as a response to the collapse of attention, and it proceeded to make the attention problem worse.
When every brand is producing content — daily newsletters, weekly podcasts, episodic video series, LinkedIn posts, Instagram carousels, TikTok series about “behind the scenes at [INSERT BRAND]” — the total volume of content in the ecosystem increases exponentially. The audience’s capacity to consume it does not. The result is more competition for the same finite attention, and a significant lowering of the threshold for what people will tolerate.
In a media landscape where genuinely great journalism, entertainment, and creative work is available free or for the cost of a streaming subscription, the bar for brand content is impossible to clear if you’re approaching it as a marketing exercise. You are competing not with other brand newsletters but with every podcast, every newsletter, every social account that a person finds genuinely worth their time.
You are competing with things people actually want. And you are asking them to prioritize your quarterly product update dressed as “industry insight” over all of that. The math doesn’t work.
The Brands That Actually Got There (And What It Cost Them)
There are brands that built genuine media operations. Not many, but they exist, and they share some important characteristics.
They committed resources equivalent to an actual media business — not a content team added as an afterthought to the marketing department, but a dedicated editorial operation with its own P&L, its own talent, and its own mandate that was protected from the quarterly priorities of the brand team.
They accepted the timeline. Audience-building takes years. The brands that gave up after six months because the newsletter subscriber count wasn’t growing fast enough were not operating like media companies. They were operating like marketing departments that briefly tried something different.
And they hired people with editorial backgrounds — not “content creators” who were skilled at producing brand-safe material on deadline, but journalists and writers and filmmakers who had spent careers making things that audiences chose to consume. And then — this is the part that most brands couldn’t stomach — they let those people operate with actual independence.
You cannot build a media operation and then subject it to the same approval workflows that govern your product brochures. You cannot produce genuinely interesting editorial content and then run it through seven stakeholders and a legal review before publication. The two systems are incompatible, and when they collide, the editorial operation always loses.
What “Content Strategy” Actually Became
The legacy of the “become a media company” era is visible everywhere in modern marketing. Content marketing roles have multiplied — the Content Strategist, the Content Marketing Manager, the Head of Content, the VP of Content and Brand Storytelling. The “storytelling” conversation that consumed an entire decade of marketing conferences. The SEO-driven content factories producing thousands of “articles” that exist purely to rank for long-tail keywords and have never been read by a human being with genuine curiosity about the subject.
There are brands spending seven figures annually on content infrastructure — tools, platforms, agencies, freelancers, coordinators — that is producing measurable traffic and immeasurable nothing. The content exists. It is indexed. It occasionally ranks. It generates sessions that immediately bounce because it was written for an algorithm, not a person, and algorithms don’t become customers.
Meanwhile, the brands that have quietly, consistently produced content that their specific audience actually values — that answers real questions, takes real positions, treats readers as intelligent adults — have built something durable. Not viral. Not scalable in the way the growth marketers wanted. But real.
The Question Worth Asking in 2026
After a decade of every brand becoming a media company, it’s worth asking the honest question: did it work?
For most brands, no. The content was produced. The calendar was filled. The metrics showed impressions and sessions and occasionally engagement rates that looked good in a monthly report and meant nothing in a board meeting. The audience was not built. The brand was not differentiated. The customers who arrived via content were often the same customers who would have arrived anyway, through channels that had been working before the content strategy was invented.
What changed was that someone now had a full-time job producing things that nobody outside the organization was particularly interested in, and a reporting structure that made it very difficult to say so out loud.
The media company era is not over. But it is, slowly, being audited. And the companies doing the audit are discovering that the gap between “having a content strategy” and “being a brand people choose to spend time with” is not a content problem. It’s a conviction problem. It requires deciding that you have something worth saying, saying it with craft and commitment, and accepting that the audience will be small and right-sized before it is large and broad.
Most brands prefer the alternative: large and forgettable, well-documented in a monthly report, perfectly unread.
If you’re a creative who’s been asked to “develop a content strategy” for the fourth time this year, you know the feeling. The NoBriefs shop has gear for people who understand the difference between content and work that actually matters. Start with the Fuck The Brief collection at nobriefsclub.com — for the days when the brief is the problem.
