This week I write about how your marketing team is a media company? You ask why? Well, read below.

Here's an uncomfortable question for every B2B marketing leader: if your company stopped paying for distribution tomorrow, would anyone still hear from you?

For most brands, the honest answer is no. Turn off the paid social, pause the sponsored newsletters, skip the conference booth — and the silence is immediate. That's not a budget problem. It's a structural one. Most B2B marketing is built on rented attention. You pay, you appear. You stop paying, you disappear.

Creators figured out the alternative years ago. And in 2026, the gap between how they operate and how most B2B brands operate has become impossible to ignore.

The top creators today aren't waiting for brand deals. They're running diversified media businesses — shows, newsletters, live events, product lines, licensing, equity stakes in the companies they work with. When a brand partners with a top creator now, the negotiation looks less like an ad buy and more like a media deal. You're not buying a mention. You're partnering with a company that owns its audience.

Think about what that actually means. Alex Cooper didn't stay a podcaster — she built a media network. Emma Chamberlain turned an audience into a coffee brand. The pattern repeats at every scale: content builds the audience, the audience becomes the asset, and the asset compounds into multiple revenue streams.

Now ask yourself why your company — with more budget, more expertise, and more proprietary insight than any individual creator — is still running the same playbook it used in 2015. Campaign, launch, report, repeat.

This isn't theoretical. The playbook is running in plain sight.

a16z doesn't market like a VC firm. It publishes like a media company — podcasts, newsletters, research, events — and the deal flow follows the audience. Workweek flipped the model entirely: hire operators with real expertise, build their personal media brands, let the business grow on top. In ad tech, Marketecture turned explainer content and personality-driven shows into the industry's water cooler. None of these companies are "doing content marketing." They're operating media properties that happen to drive a business.

Notice what they all have in common: a face. A voice. A point of view you'd recognize without seeing the logo. Which brings us back to something I keep hammering in this newsletter — the executive-as-creator shift isn't a personal branding trend. It's the front door of a media operation. People subscribe to people. The company collects the upside.

This is more than a mindset poster for the marketing team's Slack channel. Operating like a media company changes four concrete things:

The objection I hear from every mid-sized B2B company: "We're not a16z. We don't have the budget."

Good news — you don't need one. The riches are still in the niches. You don't need a million subscribers; you need the 3,000 people who actually buy what you sell showing up every week. One credible voice, one recurring format, one channel you own outright. A biweekly podcast with your sharpest operator. A newsletter that teaches before it sells. A quarterly dinner that puts the right 40 people in a room.

That's a media company. A small one — but it's yours, and it compounds. The brands still renting attention will be starting from zero again next quarter. You won't.

Stop asking "what's our next campaign?" Start asking "what's our show?" The companies winning attention in 2026 aren't the ones with the biggest media budgets. They're the ones that became the media.

If you’re looking for guidance on content marketing, social, email marketing or brand building you can contact me here.