The Garden Harvest: All About Brands
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
A slightly shorter edition today as we head into the holiday weekend. Hope you’re enjoying some rest this Passover/Easter.
Today, it’s all about brands, a conversation that comes up constantly in the creator economy and broader entertainment space. We’ve been covering some of these conversations and moves, but the question we want to ask today is: as the lines between creators, studios, and advertisers continue to blur, what happens when brands stop buying space in someone else's garden and start planting their own?
FRESH CLIPPINGS
Brands Want to Be Hollywood Power Players
There’s a take worth sitting with this week, courtesy of a post from David Freeman in the context of this Adweek article about how the ambitions of brands in Hollywood might actually work this time.
Distribution is open, creation is democratized, and gatekeepers are optional. For the first time, brands genuinely don’t need permission to build media. Yet most still act like they do.
The core mistake, David argues, is racing to make content for content’s sake. That’s not the game. The race is to own an audience. Content without an audience is a cost. Content with one is an asset.
Starting on someone else’s platform (Amazon, Netflix) is fine, but the goal has to be building toward something you own. The moment a brand owns its audience, it owns the economics. From renter to owner. From campaign to franchise. From impressions to fandom.
He goes on to say that YouTube is the most underutilized asset in marketing today, not as an ad platform but as a destination. A global channel where any brand can develop formats, build recurring programming, and accumulate real fans rather than buying attention that disappears when the budget stops.
The question worth asking internally: if you stopped paying to reach your audience tomorrow, would they come back? If the answer is no, that’s not a content problem. That’s the whole problem.
The most important new title in corporate America right now isn’t CMO. It’s Chief Entertainment Officer. The Gap’s VP of Development hire, which we highlighted a few weeks back, is starting to look less like a novelty and more like the beginning of something.
So what does this all mean for Creators and Hollywood?
When Ad Budgets Build Hollywood Instead of Renting It
Ok, now that it’s established that brands should stop renting attention and start owning audience, Randy Greenberg’s piece in his Substack this week takes that argument and gives it a number.
Global advertising spend crossed $1 trillion in 2024. Procter and Gamble alone spent $9.2 billion. Coca-Cola spent $5 billion. At the end of the year, what does a brand have to show for it? Nothing permanent. The spots ran, the impressions were logged, and the budget resets to zero on January 1st.
Greenberg’s provocation is simple: what if brands redirected just 5% of that spend toward equity in scripted entertainment content? Not branded social series or sponsored segments on someone else’s show, but actual scripted content developed with professional writers, directors, and talent, placed inside the distribution systems built to monetize it over time. The 22 largest brand spenders in America at 5% would produce a combined scripted content budget of roughly $3.5 billion. For context, that is the size of a major streaming platform’s content operation, from money that was going to be spent on advertising anyway.
The distinction he draws is worth holding onto. A thirty-second spot costs what it costs and when it’s over, it’s over. A scripted show is an asset that enters a system, streaming, syndication, licensing, international distribution, where payback is at least structurally possible. Advertising pays for other people’s programming. The question is whether some of those dollars could be funding content the brand actually owns.
The most instructive case study in the piece is Dick’s Sporting Goods, which has been operating a real brand studio for a decade. Two Sports Emmys, Netflix distribution through Obama’s Higher Ground, a SXSW premiere, and a formal studio launch in 2025 with Imagine Entertainment. That’s what institutionalizing the creative function actually looks like.
For Hollywood, this is the conversation that should be happening more openly. Brand equity in scripted content is not a new idea, but the infrastructure to make it work at scale is newer than it has ever been.
Where to next?
The old boundaries between brand, creator, and studio are dissolving, and the question of who finances, makes, and owns content is genuinely up for grabs in a way it hasn't been since the network era. As we’ve been exploring here, it’s the era of the Open Gardens.
Creators built audiences that brands now want access to. Brands have budgets that Hollywood needs. And Hollywood has the craft and distribution infrastructure that creators are actively trying to acquire.
It’ll be very interesting to see how this all plays out.
Have a great weekend…