Bose Studios launched last month. But the music company’s entertainment division is the culmination of a strategic shift that has been years in the making.
It already accounts for one-third to 40% of the brand’s marketing, CMO Jim Mollica told Digiday at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity last week. He expects that to reach 60-65% by the end of this year or next. The reason, he said, comes down to one question: when was the last great TV ad you saw?
It’s rhetorical because genuinely great TV ads are rare, and even when they exist, the conditions to make them land no longer do. Ad skipping is rampant, audiences pay premiums to avoid advertising, and AI is accelerating content consumption in ways that reward authority over interruption. Renting audiences, Mollica argued, is no longer sustainable — and it’s only getting more expensive.
“For all of these reasons, renting an audience seemed to be not a long-term proposition that you could sustain,” said Mollica.
Bose Studios is a response to that. It’s an entertainment unit that spans music, film, TV, digital and live events. Its opening slate includes a documentary series on creativity and artistic expression developed with Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh, a docuseries following influential artists, and a YouTube series bridging music and community through intimate performances. The first episode, dropping this fall, centers on British singer-songwriter Sienna Spiro.
“The thought was how do we take the best of what we’re already doing, and create these assets that continue to ascend in value over time,” said Mollica.
The NME C-series is where that thinking started. For several years Bose released annual mixtape compilations, picking 12 bands its internal teams believed in, modelled on the cassette compilations Mollica grew up with. It worked. But the equity sat on someone else’s platform. Bose Records is that same idea, owned — a record label for emerging and underappreciated artists. The wider ambition is a music equivalent of ESPN’s 30 for 30: deep documentary profiles made with world-class directors, earning attention rather than buying it.
Put another way, the artists it signs, the fandom around them and the music culture they’re ensconced in are going to form the root of a lot of the content Bose produces through the studio. Creators are core to that — but Bose’s approach has never been about scale. It’s about depth. Rather than chasing the biggest names, Bose goes narrow: creators with intensely loyal niche followings across music sub-genres. They’re assembled into what Mollica describes as pointilism — mass reach built dot by dot across a canvas of specific audiences. The same logic applies to brand collaborations.
Those efforts are led by Jack Daley, head of global media and partnerships, who is currently hiring for several social media roles out of the brand’s new New York office — a deliberate move, Mollica said, to concentrate more resources in content creation, an area that already employs dozens of people across the business.
Where that nets out is hard to say, but Mollica doesn’t rule out a future where the bulk of Bose’s advertising is made in-house. In some ways it’s already heading there.
“I have not used a creative agency in four or five years,” he said. “Just directly to production companies, or if I need some freelance muscle, I’ll get some really great freelancers.”
That’s not anti-agency. He still sees a role for those businesses, albeit just a narrower one. “Media agencies are one thing, but the creative agency, where more and more money is going into creators, where you’re making less commercials — the smart ones just go directly to the production companies, because you don’t need the agency. It’s just the middleman.”
Mollica, like so many of his peers, is in the midst of a reckoning sweeping through marketing. The interruptive ad model is broken, the purpose era is over, and the monoculture that once made mass brand-building possible has fractured beyond repair. There is no single moment, no shared screen, no cultural weather system that reaches everyone at once anymore — and the brands still acting as though there is one are paying for it.
What’s replaced it is messier and harder to systematize. Culture moves faster, trust is harder to declare and easier to lose, and consumers — particularly younger ones who grew up making content — can detect inauthenticity at a glance. The cost of getting it wrong is no longer just a bad campaign. It’s a boycott, a pile-on, a board conversation.
Mollica’s answer — build owned assets, go deep into sub-cultures, earn attention through music and storytelling rather than buy space near it — is one version of what that reckoning looks like in practice. It won’t be everyone’s answer. For brands without Bose’s independence — its cultural authority in music, or its tolerance for long-game investment — the calculus looks different. But the underlying pressure is the same: renting audiences is getting more expensive, and the audiences are getting harder to find.
“It is clear that the current marketing model for many is broken — everyone needs to think and act more like a creator,” said Olly Lewis, who runs the agency arm of StudioB, the creative studio owned by creator Brandon Baum. “CMOs have been lining up this week to speak with creators like Brandon to understand how to build owned attention in a meaningful, lasting way. Providing them with this insight means that studios like ours can walk away with not just leads, but briefs.”
There’s also a more immediate commercial logic to it. “It’d be foolish to not consider how many people are using LLMs as a search mechanism — or as an answer mechanism,” Mollica said.
The volume and authority of content Bose puts into the world doesn’t just build brand equity in the traditional sense. It shapes how AI systems surface and recommend the brand when consumers come looking. Owned content that earns genuine engagement signals authority in ways that paid advertising never did — and in an AI-mediated discovery environment, that gap is only going to widen.
“Taste and curation are really at a premium right now,” Mollica said.
What we’ve heard
“We’re moving all of our agencies toward output-based pricing vs time & materials, all new biz is output based and 50% of existing clients have been transitioned over to output.”
— Joe Maglio, CEO, Cheil Agency Network
Numbers to know
1.8x: Click-through rate on affiliate links by the eighth integration with the same YouTube creator, versus the first
42.4%: Percentage of U.S. adults surveyed that believe brands should remain neutral to politics on social media
39%: Percentage of consumers surveyed that said they feel excited about the future of generative AI
68%: Percentage of agencies that prefer Google as a partner to implement AI services, capabilities and products, vs 65% for OpenAI
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source digiday.com ’
