Meet every brand's new MVP hire

And how these roles could make (or break) a perfectly curated reputation

Brands are taking matters into their own hands.

For most of the last decade, a brand’s attention playbook has become standard - build a brand channel, hire a community manager, post content, hope the algorithms show it to people, etc.

And if you want media coverage, you write a formal press release that’s fully vetted by an internal PR spokesperson and/or the C-suite before self-publishing to various wires while pitching a few journalists on the side.

Then you keep your fingers crossed that someone, somewhere picks it up.

Now, in 2026, that model has broken down.

Mostly because much of it is just ungodly slow (I used to write and send press releases out in my first job, and I would’ve rather watched paint dry.) By the time a press release gets picked up (if it even gets picked up) the news cycle has already changed.

Even social media brand channels feel like a utility more than anything, as they’ve been relegated to running ads or posting product updates.

So because of that, brands are doing something different right now to earn more attention, faster: they’re becoming the media themselves.

I experienced this firsthand when I was on the digital team at Red Bull Media House 10+ years ago, which built an entire media company inside the beverage brand. Athletes, musicians and the like were the brand’s mouthpiece, in addition to the brand’s owned channels.

At the time it felt like we were an outlier, but now it’s becoming the blueprint.

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What’s actually happening

I caught a post on my LinkedIn feed tonight from Noah Greenberg about software company Gusto’s latest job posting, and it only further solidified this new direction.

He mentioned that Gusto is hiring a Chief Economist, someone who can essentially become the external, media-facing face of their proprietary small business economic data.

Zillow already has a Chief Economist who testifies before Congress and appears on national TV, and Indeed has an entire Hiring Lab research team publishing original labor market data that journalists now use as a primary resource.

But economists represent just a fraction of these kinds of new media roles. WSJ ran a story in December 2025 about how LinkedIn job postings that mentioned the word “storyteller” doubled this past year. Multiple major companies across the board are looking for Corporate Editorial and Storytelling roles, many of which are attracting former journalists.

Notion has even taken it one step further and combined their entire comms, social, and influencer teams into one storytelling unit.

And then there’s a third lane that has nothing to do with data at all…

Gap has created a new role, Chief Entertainment Officer, and hired a former Paramount exec to fill it. They call this strategy “fashiontainment” but it’s less marketing and more licensing and media from external agencies/partners to internal ideation and strategy.

The takeaway here is that brands are building their own media arms right now. Whether the raw material is data, storytelling, or entertainment, doesn’t matter - it’s that this structural shift is happening.

Why now?

These hires might feel random, but really, they’re a direct response to something that’s broken.

The traditional media landscape as we know it has collapsed, i.e. the infrastructure that’s been used to tell the stories.

Take the dismal job market for journalists right now. At least 3,400 journalist jobs were cut in 2025, and most recently, WaPo laid off a third of their newsroom last month. Print circulation has fallen 70% since 2005, and traffic to news websites has dropped over 40% in the last four years.

And this is where it gets particularly interesting, because at the same time media is contracting, there’s now a huge pool of experienced journalists who suddenly need new homes. These people are experts at telling stories, and brands are giving them a soft landing.

On the flip side, the surge of AI has enabled every company with a pulse to churn out press releases and blog posts at the blink of an eye. And while many of them do it, it doesn’t make the information itself any better. We haven’t even hit peak AI slop yet, and the Internet is already drowning in it.

So brands are stuck between a media ecosystem that’s broken and unreliable, and a content ecosystem that’s too generic to stand out in.

Which raises the real question: what do these brands actually have to offer that makes any of this worthwhile?

The first party data advantage

Now that search engines and LLMs can instantly synthesize any information that’s publicly available, the only information that has real value is

1. contextually relevant, real world experience and

2. 100% proprietary/exclusive data

And it’s not just data that isn’t public yet - it’s data that’s owned by a brand that they can put their stamp on.

Look at Walmart. They know what people are buying (or not buying) before the government releases any consumer spending reports - it’s just that their proprietary data usually lives in a dashboard with an internal team, and now it can be leveraged as raw material for a smarter media distribution strategy.

A typical press release sits on the wire and says “Hi, pick us up (if you’d like!) our story is right here.”

Now, a chief economist or storyteller can say “This is timely, and it’s critical you talk about this right now because of XYZ.”

Suddenly, the brand is proactive by being reactive to headlines and giving publications something they can’t get anywhere else - all while packaging it in a way that makes a journalist’s job 10x easier.

To be clear, this isn’t a spokesperson

Brand spokespeople are essentially external HR. They exist to protect the company, and they’re usually very well media trained to not rock the boat. That’s their job.

A brand spokesperson protects the brand. These new roles extend the brand.

Think about it: someone in one of these new roles can go on TV, write for trade publications, pitch journalists (maybe even their former colleagues) speak at conferences, write a Substack, etc. the list goes on. This turns a single expert hire into legs of distribution that a singular brand channel could never provide on its own.

I’ve talked before about brands needing both EQ (emotional intelligence) and PQ (political intelligence) and the spokesperson model has neither, because it was designed to be deliberately inert.

These new roles, though, require both: the emotional intelligence to connect with audiences authentically, and the political intelligence to navigate what to say, when, and how far to go.

Where there’s friction

This isn’t going to be smooth sailing for brands, though.

By handpicking which proprietary data to surface and which to keep quiet, these companies are behaving like journalists - a profession that’s long been held to integrity and transparency standards.

But now, brands are actively choosing to shape narratives using their own selectively presented data. Either that, or brands leverage these roles to provide exclusive commentary on current events.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, so to speak, as it’s what PR has always done. BUT when you dress it up as a “Chief Economist” role, it definitely carries noticeable weight.

This can absolutely have implications on how the brand is perceived, not just by media - but by customers, regulators, and competitors.

Beyond that, brands are used to having total control. Hiring someone and telling them to have strong, data-backed opinions is nice…until that hire publishes or broadcasts an off-the-cuff take that angers a client, an investor, even the CEO.

Look at what happened when Redfin’s Chief Economist publicly contradicted Zillow’s decision to remove climate data, using her own company’s data to make the case. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes these roles valuable, and exactly the kind of thing that makes a legal team sweat bullets.

The value of this strategy is also the risk. This person shouldn’t sound like a corporate mouthpiece, because that’s not what gets real coverage. But real people have opinions that don’t always align with the traditionally corporate narrative.

Lastly, by hiring someone into these roles, their face becomes part of the brand. Like it or not, if you successfully build someone into a recognized media figure, they become associated with your company the same way a CEO is. Retention is going to be a sticking point, not just operationally, but from a fundamental branding perspective.

It also begs the question of - does this person actually want to be the face of the brand for a sustained period? Traditionally when we read an article, we might rarely, if ever, notice the journalist’s name or avatar among the story.

But this strategy thrusts these roles into the spotlight, giving them an entirely different relationship to visibility.

This gets even more complicated when you’re a smaller brand without the resources or the reputation to absorb these risks.

What about for smaller brands?

The brands I mentioned earlier like Gusto and Zillow sit on datasets that are, by and large, culturally significant (jobs, housing, etc.) but what if you’re a small brand without a massive dataset?

Yes, you probably don’t need a $250K salaried Chief Economist. But you DO need to think about who your version of this is, or could be.

It could be someone in the C-suite who’s willing to be the external-facing voice, someone with real opinions and access to data that your vertical cares about.

Or you could look at creator relationships differently. Instead of a traditional ambassador or creator partner posting sponsored content, what happens when you give a credible creator actual access to your proprietary data?

For example, I’ve had a long-standing content partnership with Tracksuit (love the team and the product, not sponsoring this post either) and I’m able to produce content for my channels that leverages Tracksuit’s proprietary data.

And then there’s the talent pipeline that traditional media is creating right now. Former journalists in your industry who have been laid off and are looking for a home where they can still tell the stories they care about, but with the extra boost of data and resources behind them.

Trade publications, industry newsletters, conference stages, and the Substacks that your buyers actually read now become YOUR media network.

You likely have some kind of data or first party information somewhere - the question is, are you willing to turn it into a story that matters?

The bottom line

Branded channels aren’t dead, they’re now just an expectation (in my opinion, as a former community manager and someone who has been in or around social for 16+ years)…

The smart brands winning the next phase are the ones building distribution through expertise - experts, creators, storytellers, etc. - who carry the brand’s credibility without sounding like they’ve gone through 12 rounds of excruciating legal approval.

These experts need to be given the tools to provide real, tangible value. Think education, insight, commentary, proprietary data that makes someone’s life or work better.

I’ve said for years that value dictates your visibility (whether you’re a brand or a creator) and that’s never been more true than right now.

The new strategy to win eyeballs at scale is creating content that actually matters, delivered by people audiences trust, using data that no other person or platform has access to.

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Comment below: have you seen this shift happening in your line of work or industry? Or have you observed other brands doing this right now? Do you think it’s actually working?

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