<\/p>\n
Bose Studios launched last month. But the music company\u2019s entertainment division is the culmination of a strategic shift that has been years in the making.<\/p>\n
It already accounts for one-third to 40% of the brand\u2019s 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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 \u2014 and it\u2019s only getting more expensive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFor all of these reasons, renting an audience seemed to be not a long-term proposition that you could sustain,\u201d said Mollica.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bose Studios is a response to that. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thought was how do we take the best of what we\u2019re already doing, and create these assets that continue to ascend in value over time,\u201d said Mollica.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s platform. Bose Records is that same idea, owned \u2014 a record label for emerging and underappreciated artists. The wider ambition is a music equivalent of ESPN\u2019s 30 for 30: deep documentary profiles made with world-class directors, earning attention rather than buying it.<\/p>\n
Put another way, the artists it signs, the fandom around them and the music culture they\u2019re ensconced in are going to form the root of a lot of the content Bose produces through the studio. Creators are core to that \u2014 but Bose\u2019s approach has never been about scale. It\u2019s about depth. Rather than chasing the biggest names, Bose goes narrow: creators with intensely loyal niche followings across music sub-genres. They\u2019re assembled into what Mollica describes as pointilism \u2014 mass reach built dot by dot across a canvas of specific audiences. The same logic applies to brand collaborations.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s new New York office \u2014 a deliberate move, Mollica said, to concentrate more resources in content creation, an area that already employs dozens of people across the business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Where that nets out is hard to say, but Mollica doesn\u2019t rule out a future where the bulk of Bose\u2019s advertising is made in-house. In some ways it\u2019s already heading there.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have not used a creative agency in four or five years,\u201d he said. \u201cJust directly to production companies, or if I need some freelance muscle, I\u2019ll get some really great freelancers.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not anti-agency. He still sees a role for those businesses, albeit just a narrower one. \u201cMedia agencies are one thing, but the creative agency, where more and more money is going into creators, where you\u2019re making less commercials \u2014 the smart ones just go directly to the production companies, because you don\u2019t need the agency. It\u2019s just the middleman.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 and the brands still acting as though there is one are paying for it.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s replaced it is messier and harder to systematize. Culture moves faster, trust is harder to declare and easier to lose, and consumers \u2014 particularly younger ones who grew up making content \u2014 can detect inauthenticity at a glance. The cost of getting it wrong is no longer just a bad campaign. It\u2019s a boycott, a pile-on, a board conversation.<\/p>\n
Mollica\u2019s answer \u2014 build owned assets, go deep into sub-cultures, earn attention through music and storytelling rather than buy space near it \u2014 is one version of what that reckoning looks like in practice. It won\u2019t be everyone\u2019s answer. For brands without Bose\u2019s independence \u2014 its cultural authority in music, or its tolerance for long-game investment \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is clear that the current marketing model for many is broken \u2014 everyone needs to think and act more like a creator,\u201d said Olly Lewis, who runs the agency arm of StudioB, the creative studio owned by creator Brandon Baum. \u201cCMOs 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a more immediate commercial logic to it.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019d be foolish to not consider how many people are using LLMs as a search mechanism \u2014 or as an answer mechanism,\u201d Mollica said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The volume and authority of content Bose puts into the world doesn\u2019t 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 \u2014 and in an AI-mediated discovery environment, that gap is only going to widen.<\/p>\n
\u201cTaste and curation are really at a premium right now,\u201d Mollica said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re 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.\u201d\u00a0 1.8x: Click-through rate on affiliate links by the eighth integration with the same YouTube creator, versus the first<\/p>\n 42.4%<\/a>: Percentage of U.S. adults surveyed that believe brands should remain neutral to politics on social media<\/p>\n 39%<\/a>: Percentage of consumers surveyed that said they feel excited about the future of generative AI<\/p>\n 68%: Percentage of agencies that prefer Google as a partner to implement AI services, capabilities and products, vs 65% for OpenAI<\/p>\n OpenAI ads boss David Dugan on third-party measurement: \u2018it\u2019s a natural step\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n During Cannes Lions, OpenAI ads boss Dave Dugan told Digiday third-party measurement is \u201ca natural step\u201d for ChatGPT ads \u2014 getting ahead of verification most platforms resist for years. But analysts say it\u2019s no silver bullet: no one\u2019s yet cracked how to measure influence inside a conversation.<\/p>\n \u2018There\u2019s two ways to build these platforms\u2019: OpenAI\u2019s ads boss David Dugan on going the other way<\/a><\/p>\n Also during Cannes Lions, OpenAI ads boss David Dugan sat down with Digiday to discuss its fast-moving ad business \u2014 from going CPM to CPC to conversions in four months, to why it\u2019s chosen the open path over a closed walled garden. But what he didn\u2019t say \u2014 on verification and trading deals \u2014 matters just as much.<\/p>\n OpenAI looks beyond a single ad format with image, video and conversational ads in the works Creators aren\u2019t just in marketing\u2019s entertainment era. They\u2019re driving it<\/a><\/p>\n Cannes Lions confirmed marketing is now entertainment, with creators taking the influence once held by CMOs and UTA outshining the holdcos. Brands increasingly hire them for always-on partnerships, though for many creators the economics barely break even.<\/p>\n Why the tech industry can\u2019t keep up with the AI backlash<\/a><\/p>\n Platformer argues AI\u2019s harms \u2014 data-center opposition, evidence of shrinking entry-level jobs in AI-exposed roles, and chip shortages raising hardware prices \u2014 are outpacing the industry\u2019s ability to address them. It warns that unless tech starts paying more of its share, today\u2019s backlash will look mild in hindsight.<\/p>\n Meta names Alex Schultz first-ever chief data officer<\/a><\/p>\n Meta promoted CMO Alex Schultz to its first-ever chief data officer, tasked with overhauling AI analytics and building a semantic layer across its data warehouse, per Axios. Denise Moreno, who scaled Threads past 500 million users, replaces him as CMO.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Joe Maglio, CEO, Cheil Agency Network<\/em><\/p>\nNumbers to know<\/strong><\/h2>\n
What we\u2019ve covered<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a>OpenAI job listings show its building image, video, native, conversational and interactive ad formats beyond its initial single unit. The roles embed privacy, safety and policy compliance into the ad infrastructure, reflecting OpenAI\u2019s stance that ads can\u2019t erode trust in ChatGPT.<\/p>\nWhat we\u2019re reading<\/strong><\/h2>\n