Companies investing in content typically house those initiatives within their marketing departments. That’s a mistake.
Having editorial and content functions reporting to marketing organizations frequently results in misaligned incentives, reputational hazards, and wasted potential. Instead, most companies would benefit from building content arms that function independently from their marketing departments. Here’s why:
Content isn’t marketing, it’s corporate identity
Consider what great content divisions do. They don’t just “generate content,” they tell stories. In the aggregate, these stories are like the bricks of a house. Each brick builds the narrative that ultimately defines a company. And it’s actually working out pretty well in a lot of cases: See thriving content divisions inside Resy, Lyft, Robinhood, Montage International, and The Agency IP Holdco). When done right, content can even be the start of an entirely new revenue line, as some retail media networks have shown.