<\/p>\n
Brands are building in-house entertainment studios on the promise that great content earns the audiences advertising can\u2019t buy. OpenAI just revealed what that promise actually costs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Last week the AI company acquired TBPN, a daily tech talk show that streams live on YouTube, X and other platforms, in a deal the Financial Times reported in the low hundreds of millions of dollars. For a company that has spent the past year acquiring an AI device startup and shutting down its own video generation product, buying a three-house live show seemed, at a minimum, like an odd use of capital. <\/p>\n
Sam Altman, OpenAI\u2019s CEO, didn\u2019t see it that way.<\/p>\n
\u201cTBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well,\u201d he posted on X. \u201cI don\u2019t expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I\u2019ll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
His candor was deliberate. TBPN\u2019s value isn\u2019t the production, the distribution or the ad revenue \u2013 though the show is on track to generate more than $30 million this year. It\u2019s the fact that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who rarely does press, has sat down with its hosts. That Microsoft boss Satya Nadella has. That Altman himself keeps coming back. <\/p>\n
The show, founded in 2024 by former startup founders John Coogan and Jordi Hays, became the place where tech\u2019s most powerful figures would speak candidly. It felt like a conversation among insiders rather than an interview. That took two years to build. It cost OpenAI hundreds of millions to acquire.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Which is where the branded entertainment parallel gets uncomfortable. Brands are building their own branded entertainment studios on the same thesis \u2013 that owned content builds the kinds of audience relationships paid media can\u2019t. Gap hired Pam Kaufman, formerly of Nickelodeon, as its first chief entertainment officer. Other companies like Starbucks, Fanatics and Mazda have made similar bets, staffing up production operations and commissioning original programming. But building an audience from scratch, without editorial credibility or an existing community, is slow and uncertain work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
James Kirkham, co-founder of brand consultancy Iconic, summed it up: \u201cOnce a brand starts thinking in terms of things like formats, characters and narrative arcs, the timeline changes completely though because instead of a three-month campaign cycle you\u2019re suddenly building worlds that unfold over much longer spans, with audiences who return to them the way they return to shows, teams or artists.\u201d<\/p>\n
That timeline is a problem, Most brands aren\u2019t built for it. The media industry is littered with expensive experiments from companies that thought commitment to content was the same thing as competence at it \u2013 that hiring the right exec or greenlighting the right series would be enough. Sometimes it is. More often, the audience doesn\u2019t show up, or shows up once and leaves, because the content feels like what it is: a brand trying to act like it isn\u2019t one. To avoid that, brands have to accept that the line between where the marketing ends and the entertainment begins isn\u2019t theirs to draw. It\u2019s the audience\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n
David\u2019s Bridal knew this when it acquired Love Stories TV rather than building its own version. As its president and CMO Elina Vilk explained: \u201cWe want to be there when they\u2019re inspired, not when they\u2019re being sold to.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The practical reality of that ambition meant dismantling the usual silos.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve pulled the teams into the marketing team under our chief creative officer, and it\u2019s integrated into our social cadence.,\u201d continued Vilk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Acquiring a way into entertainment is one thing. Keeping the audience once they know is another. That\u2019s the problem OpenAI now inherits. It bought the one property in its world that had already solved what so many brands are chasing:\u00a0 an audience that doesn\u2019t think of itself as an audience, guests who don\u2019t think of themselves as subjects and hosts credible enough to make both feel true. The show\u2019s value, in other words, was always that it didn\u2019t feel owned. Now it is. Whether that changes anything is the only question that matters, and only the audience gets to answer it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHuman connectivity is so important,\u201d said Chris Elrin, CEO of independent celebrity and entertainment agency Attachment. \u201dI think that\u2019s where you\u2019ll see so many more celebrities and so many more creators. People will want to use them as their vehicles.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bottom line: brands like billionaires, from the Ellison family buying celebrity.land to merge it with CBS News to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon mulling his own media venture, are chasing the same thing: not the biggest audience \u2013 but the right one.\u00a0<\/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":" Brands are building in-house entertainment studios on the promise that great content earns the audiences advertising can\u2019t buy. OpenAI just revealed what that promise actually costs.\u00a0 Last week the AI company acquired TBPN, a daily tech talk show that streams live on YouTube, X and other platforms, in a deal the Financial Times reported in […]<\/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_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-2361084","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\/2361084","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=2361084"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2361085,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361084\/revisions\/2361085"}],"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=2361084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2361084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2361084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}