How acting like a media company saves you millions whilst your competitors chase shadows across fragmented platforms.
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping every scroll, swipe, and search. Brands face an unprecedented challenge: maintain visibility or risk their business slowly dying. Traditional advertising has become a game of diminishing returns, with audiences scattered across numerous platforms, resulting in a 30% increase in cost-per-click and making advertising budgets less efficient. Yet whilst most brands burn through budgets chasing these fragmented audiences, the smartest companies have discovered something rather brilliant. They’ve stopped being advertisers and started being storytellers.
This isn’t just another marketing evolution; it’s a survival strategy. In 2025, content marketing has emerged as the antidote to brand invisibility, offering a path back to meaningful customer relationships whilst dramatically reducing acquisition costs. The evidence? Companies acting as media houses aren’t only thriving; they’re rewriting the rules of customer engagement entirely.
The Great Brand Disappearing Act
Picture this: you’ve meticulously crafted the perfect advertisement, allocated substantial budget across multiple platforms, and launched with confidence. Yet your target audience never sees it. They’re using ad blockers, they’re platform-hopping, or worse, they’ve become so adept at filtering out marketing messages that your carefully crafted content becomes background noise in their digital lives.
Brand invisibility has become the greatest challenge in marketing. As Zoe Oz, Chief Marketing Officer at Bilt, observes: “Audiences are so adept at spotting advertising. How do we start to get people to pay attention, to engage with us without us having to, you know, throw it in their face?”
The traditional response has been to spend more, advertise harder, and chase audiences across even more platforms. But this approach has created a vicious cycle: higher costs, lower engagement, and increasingly desperate attempts to capture attention. Meanwhile, audiences continue to fragment, moving between TikTok and Instagram, from YouTube to emerging platforms, creating a never-ending game of digital whack-a-mole.
The Media Company Transformation
The most successful brands have recognised something fundamental: they’re effectively media companies that happen to sell products rather than the other way around. This shift represents more than a tactical adjustment. It’s a complete reimagining of how brands connect with their audiences.
Instead of interrupting content consumption, these brands create the content their audiences actively seek. They’ve moved from being advertisers to being entertainers, educators, and storytellers. The result? Dramatically reduced customer acquisition costs and significantly higher engagement rates.
Consider the mathematics: traditional advertising requires continuous spend to maintain visibility. Create compelling content once, however, and it can attract and engage audiences for months or even years to come. The economics are compelling.
The Economics of Entertainment
The financial logic of content marketing becomes clear when compared to the costs of traditional advertising. Brands typically spend enormous sums acquiring customers across multiple platforms, with costs rising as audiences become increasingly fragmented. Each platform requires different creative approaches, separate budgets, and continuous investment to maintain visibility.
Content marketing flips this model. Create compelling content once, and it works across multiple platforms whilst continuing to attract audiences long after publication. The initial investment in content creation, whilst potentially significant, eliminates the need for continuous advertising spend while building genuine audience loyalty.
Bilt’s approach exemplifies this perfectly: “We allocated resources not just for production, but for the entire ecosystem – from content creation to community management to performance tracking. It required buy-in from leadership because we’re playing a longer game here than traditional advertising.”
The long-term value compounds as content builds brand equity, audience loyalty, and organic reach that traditional advertising simply cannot match.
Case Study: Bilt’s Roomies Revolution
Bilt is a financial technology company that has revolutionised the rental market by allowing tenants to earn rewards points on their monthly rent payments. Previously, an expense that generated no benefits. Founded to serve the millions of renters across America, particularly young professionals navigating expensive urban markets, Bilt partners with property management companies to enable renters to pay rent with their Bilt Mastercard and earn points redeemable for travel, fitness classes, and even home down payments. Their target demographic is precisely the cohort struggling with housing costs, career transitions, and the complexities of adult life in major cities.
Bilt’s “Roomies” series exemplifies this new approach perfectly. The financial startup created a mockumentary following a 25-year-old from Ohio navigating life in New York City, exactly the demographic they serve. The series, shot in the style of “The Office,” lives entirely on Instagram and TikTok through dedicated accounts that never mention the brand directly.
The results speak volumes: over 8 million views and more than 130,000 followers across platforms, all achieved through organic growth without paid promotion.
The brilliance lies in Bilt’s approach to audience connection: “We saw how our members were all navigating these universal experiences: roommate drama, career pivots, figuring out adulting. And we thought, what if instead of interrupting their content scroll with ads, we actually created something they’d genuinely want to watch?”
Most remarkably, ten episodes in, there hasn’t been a single brand mention. Yet the strategy is already working. Viewers often mention Bilt in the comments and educate each other about what the platform offers. When someone eventually needs what Bilt provides, they want them to think of Bilt as a brand that truly understands their lifestyle and challenges.
Building Your Content Empire
For brands ready to embrace the media company model, the path forward involves several key principles:
Understand Your Audience’s Real Challenges – Don’t just identify demographics; understand the genuine struggles, aspirations, and daily experiences of your customers. Bilt succeeded because they recognised their audience was “navigating these universal experiences: roommate drama, career pivots, figuring out adulting.”
Prioritise Entertainment Value Over Product Features – As content marketing experts note: “Today’s consumer is more educated than ever. They won’t be fooled by marketing jargon and salesy tactics. The idea central to content marketing is that brands must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show.”
Invest in Quality Production – Bilt’s “Roomies” success demonstrates their serious commitment to content quality. As Zoe Oz explains: “We approached Roomies the same way we’d approach any marketing initiative: with proper planning, dedicated resources, and a clear ROI framework.” Their fully in-house production maintains the quality standards they want, representing their brand whilst remaining “nimble enough to make it work for social.” Half-hearted content efforts typically yield half-hearted results.
Embrace Platform-Native Content – Bilt exemplifies platform-native thinking by creating entirely separate accounts (@RoomiesRoomiesRoomies) rather than mixing content with traditional marketing messages on their main brand channels. The mockumentary format was specifically chosen because “it’s inherently authentic and relatable” to social media audiences, whilst the weekly episode structure keeps viewers returning. By building content that feels genuinely native to Instagram and TikTok rather than repurposed advertising, they’ve achieved completely organic growth.
Practice Strategic Patience – Content marketing requires a different mindset: Going ten episodes without any product mentions is likely to make most CMOs blanche. But both organic social media and advertising are changing. They both need to be more entertaining than ever and be willing to take their time to draw in audiences before pushing the hard sell.
The Future Belongs to Storytellers
As artificial intelligence continues reshaping how audiences discover and consume content, brands face a critical choice: continue chasing fragmented audiences with increasingly expensive traditional advertising, or build their own media empires that attract customers naturally.
The evidence strongly suggests that content marketing isn’t just surviving the AI era; it’s thriving in it. As marketing expert Anthony McGuire observes: “TV isn’t dead. Advertising isn’t dead. Content isn’t dead. But they’re all evolving, and the smarter brands know how to adjust their strategy to 2025.”
The brands succeeding in this new landscape understand a fundamental truth: audiences don’t want to be sold to. They want to be entertained, educated, and inspired. By acting as media companies first and product sellers second, these brands aren’t just saving money on customer acquisition; they’re building lasting relationships that traditional advertising never could achieve.
The question isn’t whether content marketing will replace traditional advertising. It already has for the brands brave enough to embrace it. The question is whether your brand will join them before your competitors do.
In a world where attention is the ultimate currency, content marketing isn’t just a strategy; it’s the strategy. The brands that master it won’t just survive the AI era; they’ll define it.