Why every brand will need to be a media company

People skip ads. They do not skip things they chose to watch. That simple fact is pushing more brands to stop renting attention with ads and start earning it with content of their own: shows, podcasts, livestreams, documentaries and YouTube series. In other words, to act like media companies.

• Red Bull has run its own media house for years, with films, live events and series. It is a media company that happens to sell energy drinks.
• Patagonia makes feature length documentaries about the places and causes its customers care about.
• Shopify launched Shopify Studios in 2019, a film and TV arm that tells stories about entrepreneurs, including series for its YouTube channel.
• Hot Topic runs Hot Takes, a fandom debate show on YouTube where players argue about anime, horror and animation.
• Ramp put Brian Baumgartner from The Office in a glass box for an 8 hour livestream of manual accounting.
• Taco Bell streams its annual Live Más LIVE event on Peacock, a brand event run like a TV special.

None of these are ads in the old sense. They are things people would watch even if no brand was attached, which is exactly why they work.

YouTube has become the TV of the internet, and more and more of it is watched on actual TV screens. Feeds are now sorted by interest, not by who you follow, so a good piece of content can find an audience no matter how many followers the brand has. And making a show is cheaper than it has ever been. The bar is no longer a TV budget. It is having something worth watching and showing up every week.

A 40 minute episode is great for the people who find it. The problem is getting found. Discovery happens in short form, on TikTok, Reels and Shorts, where nobody is searching for your show. Most brands publish an episode, post one trailer and hope. The episode deserves hundreds of chances to be discovered, not one.

Long form is the source. Clipping is the distribution. Every episode, stream or event holds dozens of moments that work on their own, and clippers find them, cut them and post them on pages whose audiences already care about that topic, with a line pointing back to the full episode.

1. 1Make one great piece of long form on a regular schedule: a show, a podcast, a livestream or an event.
2. 2Clip it into hundreds of short moments, each cut for a different audience.
3. 3Let the feed find the winners, and pay only for the views they earn.
4. 4Use what wins to shape the next episode, and put paid behind the clips that already work.

This is the loop behind our biggest brand campaigns. Ramp's livestream became 809 clips and 28.76M views. Taco Bell's Live Más LIVE became 453 clips and 16.98M views. One piece of long form, hundreds of ways in.

Every brand is going to need something worth watching, and a way to put it in front of the people who would love it. The first part is the show. The second part is clipping. Book a demo and we will show you how it works for your content.