When a Czech company wants people to notice it, it buys an advert or an influencer for a campaign. The American clothing house Gap chose a different path. Instead of another campaign, it hired a chief entertainment officer and began producing its own content, which people watch voluntarily.
Gap created a brand-new role of Chief Entertainment Officer and filled it with Pam Kaufman, a veteran of Nickelodeon. Her task is to turn Gap, Old Navy and Athleta into brands that people follow for the content, not for the discount.
To make sure this is more than a job title, Gap added Justin Breton as vice president of development at the end of August. Breton works with the Hollywood agency CAA and leads the selection of projects from idea to green light. That is how a film studio talks. And that is precisely the point.
The creator showed the way, brands are copying it
The model that Gap is imitating was invented by creators. The Kelce brothers built an audience around their podcast New Heights, and Amazon then connected that audience directly to a shop. In January they launched together “Kelce Clubhouse”, a sales hub inside Amazon, which brings together clips from the podcast, links to episodes and rotating exclusive products in one place.
The Kelces' deal with Amazon is worth more than $100 million. The difference from a classic brand is subtle but crucial. The Kelces did not start with a product that they then backed with content. They started with content, from which a product grew. The creator is not the face of a campaign. He is the founder of a company whose distribution channel is his own show.
From advertising to a show people choose to watch
Companies that have grasped this shift are stopping shooting spots and starting to shoot series. Cuisinart, a maker of kitchen appliances, launched a fourteen-episode scripted comedy, “A Work of Cuisinart”, made specifically for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, in which a home cook lives with a starving artist from the Baroque era.
The location-sharing app Life360, meanwhile, built a comedy series around Jamie Oliver, in which the chef plays himself in the middle of a midlife crisis, and location-sharing technology is woven right into the plot.
The execution differs, the idea is the same. To create something people spend time with voluntarily, and to give them a reason to return. That is a different discipline from producing content to support a campaign. Advertising optimises for impact, a series for return. And when people come back on their own, the brand does not just collect impressions. It builds fans, and fans can be turned into customers.
Filming is cheap. Knowing what to film is rare.
As content production gets cheaper, how to make something stops being scarce. What becomes scarce is knowing what is worth making at all. The new role at Gap goes to a person from the television business who can recognise a format with the potential of a series, as opposed to another post in the queue.
The creator model has stopped being a fringe genre and become a template for large established brands. Imitating creators does not mean adding another channel. It means changing how a company decides what gets produced at all. The boundary between your own show and your own company keeps blurring. Creators have shown that content can be the start of a company. Brands are now proving the same thing from the opposite end.
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