<\/p>\n
In-house entertainment studios are the new social media team.<\/p>\n
Social media consultant and author of newsletter Link in Bio Rachel Karten flagged it last week after spotting a job post: Gap is hiring a vp of development at $300,000 to $360,000, reporting to Pam Kaufman \u2014 the Paramount exec Gap poached in January to become its first chief entertainment officer, reporting directly to the CEO. Kaufman\u2019s remit spans music, television, film, sports, gaming, film, sports, gaming, consumer products and cultural collaborations. She and whomever lands the vp role will be based in a new office on Sunset Boulevard.<\/p>\n
But they won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Stack those postings together and it\u2019s not hard to see why Karten got deja vu. A decade ago, CMOs were scrambling to hire a social media manager \u2014 a role that hadn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
None of this is new. Soap operas got their name because brands sponsored them first. What\u2019s different now is the scale \u2014\u00a0the org charts, the Sunset Boulevard offices, the Emmy nomination \u2014 and the ambition behind it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dick\u2019s 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 P\u00e9rez won an Oscar, cementing its status as a legitimate movie studio. P&G\u2019s 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\u2019s Bridal \u2014 yes, the wedding dress retailer \u2014 launched a documentary series last week in which real couples get married on active volcanoes and at Universal Studios theme parks.<\/p>\n
The show, Breaking Bridal, is the first original production from David\u2019s 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 \u2014 long before they\u2019re anywhere near a purchase decision with a company like David\u2019s Bridal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t just want to be there in the transaction,\u201d said Vilk, who came up through Meta and HootSuite before joining David\u2019s Bridal. \u201cWe want to be there when they\u2019re inspired.\u201d<\/p>\n
Breaking Bridal is the first original series built on that thesis. It won\u2019t, however, be the last.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think there\u2019s an opportunity for more dramatic series and different formats,\u201d Vilk said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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: \u201cThe relationship with the customer doesn\u2019t start at the end. It starts in the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n
The talent question is key to solving that: \u201cThe most important challenge is the talent of storytelling,\u201d said Vilk. \u201cRight 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\u2019s what I\u2019m looking for, no matter what the discipline,\u00a0I\u2019m looking for a storyteller.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most brands won\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the last 15 years marketing has been built around distribution really \u2014 i.e the buying of media and gaming algorithms, figuring out how to insert a message into feeds that people are already scrolling,\u201d said James Kirkham, co-founder of brand consultancy Iconic. \u201cWhat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Take Duolingo, for instance. Its CMO Manu Orssaud hasn\u2019t ruled out a dedicated entertainment function but isn\u2019t close to one either. For now, the brand is scaling its IP through collaboration \u2014 its 2024 partnership with Netflix for \u201cSquid Game\u201d 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\u2019s a different conversation from the one Duolingo is already having.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere 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,\u201d said Orssaud.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou get certain trends that happen at certain bits,\u201d said Chris Elrin, CEO of independent celebrity and entertainment agency Attachment. \u201cDigital first became a thing, so the digital team started. Then social becomes the next thing \u2014 and everyone was like \u2018we need a social team inside.\u2019 Now it\u2019s entertainment.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2014Kimeko McCoy contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source digiday.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In-house entertainment studios are the new social media team. Social media consultant and author of newsletter Link in Bio Rachel Karten flagged it last week after spotting a job post: Gap is hiring a vp of development at $300,000 to $360,000, reporting to Pam Kaufman \u2014 the Paramount exec Gap poached in January to become […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2322533,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[450131],"class_list":["post-2322532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-brands-in-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/The-brand-is-the-studio-now.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2322532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2322534,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322532\/revisions\/2322534"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2322533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2322532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2322532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2322532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}