Michael Jordan made an iconic career out of passing the ball to himself. The Chicago Bulls legend would bank shots off the backboard to teammates who'd set him up for the perfect assist.
Funny enough, media strategy works the same way—the most valuable campaigns pass to themselves, creating momentum that compounds over time.
Media planning has typically worked like ordering from UberEats: you pay for what gets dropped off and hope it satisfies your audience's appetite. But what if those media dollars could open their own restaurant instead?
Corbin Brown knows the difference.
As our Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, Brown joined as the agency's first employee 11 years ago and has watched media strategy evolve from buying audiences to creating business value.
"We know in our bones, and now we've studied it,” he explains, “that thinking and behaving expansively, and breaking the rules of marketing is a shortcut to growth.”
The bad romance between brands and platforms
Media teams have become trapped in what Brown calls "optimization theater.” It’s the endless tweaking of targeting parameters while brands slowly suffocate their own reach.
The culprit to blame are platforms that reward efficiency over effectiveness.
"Because so much media goes to the exact same platforms, and you're optimizing towards ROAS, you get in a death spiral where you're reaching fewer and fewer people.”
The end result, as Brown puts it, is that “you end up watering down the value proposition and brand of your product.”
The pattern plays out like a bad romance. Brands fall hard for algorithmic efficiency, chase increasingly narrow audiences, and end up marketing to the platform instead of people. Meanwhile, competitors playing the same optimization game create a race to the bottom where everyone's fighting over the same shrinking pool of cheap clicks.
This creates what Brown identifies as the core problem: brands treat media buying as a vending machine for attention rather than an opportunity for strategic partnerships that could fundamentally transform their business.
How to go from buying media to creating media
The same principles that helped turn House of the Dragon into a cultural moment—with higher viewer interest and no paid ads—can transform any media budget from buying attention to building business value.
Here's how to make the shift:
- Create media people are willing to pay for
The most successful partnerships start with a simple question: "If you thought about our media dollars as an innovation fund, what experiences and content ideas have you been wanting to build for your audience?" It shifts the conversation from buying impressions to creating value.
American Express’ Departures proves this principle in action. We transformed a legacy print publication into a digital media business generating substantial revenue with millions of newsletter subscribers. The media investment became a profit center, with the platform becoming a magnet for the world’s most coveted brands and a weekly source of travel inspiration for subscribers.
- Build partnerships that multiply over time
Transactional relationships limit potential impact. Strategic partnerships unlock opportunities to co-create experiences that neither party could develop independently, like ELF's shoppable livestream on Twitch—the first of its kind that shows how brand and platforms can innovate together when they ask what they could build collaboratively.
Brown also points to Giant Spoon's work with GE as another example that proved this. Instead of buying traditional media placements, they created monetizable IP through media innovation. “We were their media agency of record,” he explains, “but ultimately, we created podcasts, and we turned the New York Times newspaper into a Google Cardboard VR experience.” The podcast hit number 1 overall on the iTunes Charts — and yes, it was a piece of marketing
- Break down the silos that limit breakthrough thinking
Organizations that maintain rigid silos between creative and media teams miss opportunities for expansive thinking. House of the Dragon succeeded because both the planners and creatives understood both creative storytelling and media mechanics, enabling them to turn landmarks into brand storytellers.
The campaign achieved what Brown calls the "multiplier effect,” or when integrated thinking creates results that exceed the sum of individual tactics. People exposed to both traditional trailers and expansive activations showed 29% higher intent to watch compared to those who saw traditional elements alone.
- Prove creative decisions drive business outcomes
Contrarian approaches require proof to gain acceptance. The effectiveness study with Lab42 provided the data needed to validate our thesis that expansive campaigns outperform traditional optimization. "I always felt like our story would be stronger if we were able to connect our thesis with a business outcome," Brown notes.
The research showed that when people experienced unexpected campaign elements, they weren't just more aware, but more emotionally engaged, with 19% increases in feeling "surprised" and 18% increases in feeling "impressed." These emotional responses translated directly into business outcomes.
The brands winning this decade won't be the ones with the most efficient media buying. They'll be the ones who figured out how to transform media budgets into business engines—creating IP, generating revenue, and building competitive advantages that compound over time.
When Peloton chose homes over gyms, when the Warriors chose three-pointers over superstars, and when Taylor Swift chose re-recording over label control, they broke conventional models entirely. They created a sustainable upper hand above their competitors that couldn't be replicated through optimization alone.
The momentum is building. Time to jump on.