Everyone is a media brand now

As brands build studios and buy platforms, companies are reshaping media by turning marketing into entertainment and journalism into in-house content

Photo by Barry Lewis/In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)

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OpenAI bought a tech talk show last month. The deal, announced April 2, brings TBPN inside the company whose executives the hosts had spent the past year interviewing. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, framed it as a response to the fact that "the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to us."

It’s a thing a lot of bosses are saying right now. Every company with a marketing budget is trying to become a studio, and the ones that already are studios are trying to become something bigger. Shoe companies produce microdramas. Jane Street, a trading firm that spent most of its existence trying to remain under the radar, now produces a podcast.

The shift is partly economic. Traditional advertising still works, but consumer attention keeps........

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