Hello, and welcome to the very first edition of Owned, a newsletter about how companies create and use effective owned media.

I’m writing this as an experiment. About 2 years ago, I was looking at the rapid devlopment of AI and feeling very pessimistic about the future of my job as a writer and content strategist, but as time has gone on I’ve become less and less worried.

Now I feel more optimistic than ever about the opportunity. So what changed?

Simply put, owned media is any content that you (or your business) has complete control over. You dictate what it says, where it goes and when it’s published. This is distinct from earned media, where you create a piece of content (such as a press release) in the hope that someone else picks it up and publishes it on their website, channel, podcast, or whatever platform they own, subject to their own edits.

As AI has rolled out, it has become easier than ever for companies to create their own content. So a lot have.

For a long time, many people at these companies have approached their marketing as ‘I should really write a blog post’, but they never got around to it. Now they can do it almost instantly, but what they’re creating is AI slop that doesn’t help their business. Lots of content, very little strategy.

In response, they are looking for ways to make their content help them grow their businesses. This requires a narrative and a strategy, and so both the Wall Street Journal and The Times of London are reporting on the surge in companies hiring ‘storytellers’ to help solve their problems.

But, as both of these stories attest, ‘storyteller’ is a nebulous term. And while content strategy has existed for a long time now, it’s undergoing a messy transition from a largely SEO-driven model into whatever comes next. The new playbooks for how to win are still being worked out.

In response, some are falling back on the old web 2.0 cliche that ‘every company is a media company’. I get it, but I don’t think that works as a strategy either.

Media companies are hard to build. Content creation is a tough skillset to master, and it’s ultimately only half of what most companies need.

If you’re a media company or a content creator, attracting attention is the whole point. They don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have an agenda for what they want you to do once they have your attention. That’s why so many content creators end up flailing around looking for ways to monetise, cosplaying as rappers, or boxers, or trying to sell chocolate.

Journalists, meanwhile, are typically fairly insulated from the commercial side of the businesses they work in to protect the integrity of their work. It’s the right thing to do, but as a result many simply don’t have any commercial experience.

On the other end of the spectrum there are LinkedInfluencers, who are keenly aware of how they want to monetise, but don’t have the nous (or the skill) to create quality content that their audience values.

It’s very difficult to get the balance between quality and commerciality right, but when you do, owned media is incredibly effective way to build brand, grow sales and launch new products.

That’s why companies like Andreessen Horowitz and Hubspot have acquired media companies and acqui-hired media talent. And why small businesses like The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills have been able to rack up more than 290 million views by treating their social channels like their own TV series.

So the reason I’m so optimistic is this: it used to be possible to take a brute-force approach to content with a flood of SEO-optimised posts. AI is making it so that doesn’t work anymore, while at the same time making the most arduous parts of creating original content (researching, getting to grips with complex topics and drafting) considerably easier.

And companies are starting to realise that the only way to win is to focus on creating novel, genuinely valuable content.

Last year my new year’s resolution was to experiment with posting regularly on LinkedIn. It was sort of successful. I posted 67 times over the course of a year (bad), gained 420 followers (OK) and generated 188,118 impressions (great) - very happy to talk through my strategy if anyone is interested.

I’m not cut out for LinkedInfluencing, but in the process I noticed that the most effective people on social media were all focused on original longform content (usually off-platform), and that the algorithms seem to be rewarding them for it (more on this in the Research & Reading section below).

So this year, I’m going to focus on how companies are using original content to grow. That requires a longer wordcount that LinkedIn will give me, so here I am.

(It’s also an opportunity to learn more about how newsletters work, which is valuable given email is about the same age as me and still among the most effective marketing channels.)

I’m aiming for a weekly read of about 10 minutes on how to create effective owned media, along with 2-3 links to relevant books, articles, videos or podcasts on the topic.

Of course, if that approach turns out not to work I may change my approach - the beauty of doing this on my own time is I’m not wasting my employer (or my clients) time.

I hope that you enjoy reading so much that you sign up!

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