The brand is the studio now

But they won’t be the only ones there. Gap is also recruiting an HR manager for the entertainment and licensing division, a senior counsel for entertainment and commercial contracts alongside a senior manager of photo and video production.

Stack those postings together and it’s not hard to see why Karten got deja vu. A decade ago, CMOs were scrambling to hire a social media manager — a role that hadn’t existed three years ago, that HR had no salary band for, and that agencies insisted they could handle. For many, it was a necessary response to people who had stopped responding to the language brands had spent decades perfecting. They didn’t want to be spoken at. Social media teams were the first serious answer to that problem. The in-house entertainment studios are the latest version of that, and the brands building them are making the same bet the early social believers made.

None of this is new. Soap operas got their name because brands sponsored them first. What’s different now is the scale — the org charts, the Sunset Boulevard offices, the Emmy nomination — and the ambition behind it. 

Dick’s Sporting Goods launched Cookie Jar & a Dream Studios last summer. Fanatics followed in January with its own studio. Starbucks made good on its 2024 announcement and moved into active development of original projects with partner Sugar23. Saint Laurent Productions reached a milestone when its co-produced film Emilia Pérez won an Oscar, cementing its status as a legitimate movie studio. P&G’s studio, meanwhile, earned an Emmy nomination last year for The Cost of Winning. Chick-fil-A rolled out its first slate of original programming throughout 2025. And David’s Bridal — yes, the wedding dress retailer — launched a documentary series last week in which real couples get married on active volcanoes and at Universal Studios theme parks.

The show, Breaking Bridal, is the first original production from David’s Originals, the programming slate the company has been building since it acquired digital media company Love Stories TV in December 2024. Doing the deal, according to president and CMO, Elina Vilk, was less about content and more about timing. Brides spend around 10 hours a week watching and reading wedding content, most of it in the early stages of planning — long before they’re anywhere near a purchase decision with a company like David’s Bridal.

“We don’t just want to be there in the transaction,” said Vilk, who came up through Meta and HootSuite before joining David’s Bridal. “We want to be there when they’re inspired.”

Breaking Bridal is the first original series built on that thesis. It won’t, however, be the last.

“We think there’s an opportunity for more dramatic series and different formats,” Vilk said. 

Nothing is confirmed, she added, but the direction of travel is clear: YouTube long-form first, then shorter platform-native formats as the audience develops. She added: “The relationship with the customer doesn’t start at the end. It starts in the beginning.”

The talent question is key to solving that: “The most important challenge is the talent of storytelling,” said Vilk. “Right now in particular, because you can use AI for a lot of programming and a lot of scale disciplines, but the art of storytelling and unique storytelling is not an art form that you can quite yet get with AI. So that’s what I’m looking for, no matter what the discipline, I’m looking for a storyteller.”

Most brands won’t do any of this. The economics are hard, the talent is expensive and the incentive to keep outsourcing is enormous. But for the ones that get it right, the upside is straightforward: an audience that showed up by choice. 

“For the last 15 years marketing has been built around distribution really — i.e the buying of media and gaming algorithms, figuring out how to insert a message into feeds that people are already scrolling,” said James Kirkham, co-founder of brand consultancy Iconic. “What these hires now suggest is something slightly more ambitious that brands realize the real leverage sits upstream right in the creation of the shows, or stories, amongst the characters and formats that people actually gather around.”

Take Duolingo, for instance. Its CMO Manu Orssaud hasn’t ruled out a dedicated entertainment function but isn’t close to one either. For now, the brand is scaling its IP through collaboration — its 2024 partnership with Netflix for “Squid Game” being one of the most visible examples. That means production stays with its external agency partners, while the animated, character-led work is handled internally. In short, the Gap model is something worth considering down the line but that’s a different conversation from the one Duolingo is already having.

“There is a lot of appetite in this direction, for us to scale our IP and make sure that Duo [the Owl] is part of your life, both on the app and outside of the app,” said Orssaud. 

The conditions for having it have rarely been more favorable. A contracting Hollywood has made serious production talent more available and more willing to work with brands than at any point in the last decade. Streaming has fragmented viewing habits to the point where the line between a brand-backed documentary and a platform original is, for most audiences, invisible. And people who grew up watching YouTube, where every creator is also a sponsor, have a working understanding of how branded content functions that their parents simply didn’t.

“You get certain trends that happen at certain bits,” said Chris Elrin, CEO of independent celebrity and entertainment agency Attachment. “Digital first became a thing, so the digital team started. Then social becomes the next thing — and everyone was like ‘we need a social team inside.’ Now it’s entertainment.”

The last time CMOs faced a moment like this, the ones that hired seriously early built advantages that took competitors years to close. The question back then was how to show up on platforms people were already using. The question now is whether to become the reason they show up at all.

—Kimeko McCoy contributed to this report.