Expert Mode: The 360-Degree Brand: Thriving at the Intersection of Media and the Creator Economy
This article was based on the interview with Andrew Perlman, Co-Founder and CEO at Recurrent by Greg Kihlström, Marketing AI Adoption keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
The projection of over a billion creators active in the next decade is a number that should give any marketing leader pause. It’s not just the sheer volume of content, which already feels like a digital firehose aimed directly at our collective attention spans. The more profound implication is the fundamental reshaping of the media landscape itself. The once-clear lines separating a brand, a publisher, and a creator have become increasingly, and perhaps permanently, blurred. This isn’t a future-state problem; it’s the operating reality. Success is no longer defined by winning a campaign cycle but by building a resilient, multi-faceted media ecosystem that earns, rather than interrupts, audience engagement.
This new reality requires a new playbook. As leaders, we’re tasked with navigating this convergence, understanding how to leverage the authority of an established brand while embracing the agility and authenticity that defines the creator economy. It’s a delicate balance. How do you maintain brand integrity while empowering passionate, individual voices? How do you measure success when a single page view is meaningless, but a 15-minute watch time on a connected TV is an indicator of deep brand affinity? To explore this, we turn to a leader whose business sits squarely at this intersection. Andrew Perlman of Recurrent manages a portfolio of iconic media properties like Popular Science, Dwell, and Outdoor Life, breathing new life into them by adopting the very tactics that are disrupting traditional media. His approach offers a compelling model for any enterprise brand seeking to build an authentic, engaged community in an overwhelmingly noisy world.
Beyond Publishing: Adopting the 360-Degree Business Model
The transition from a traditional publisher to a modern media entity isn’t an incremental change; it’s a complete transformation of the business model. For decades, brands and publishers operated in relatively straightforward lanes: create content, attract an audience, and sell advertising against that audience. The creator economy, however, has demonstrated a far more integrated and dynamic approach, seamlessly blending content, community, commerce, and live experiences. Perlman notes that this evolution mirrors a similar disruption in another industry, forcing a necessary reinvention.
“25 years ago, when I graduated college and started at Sony Music, we were making money off CDs, then streaming became a thing… it took them almost two decades, but with streaming, they ultimately morphed into 360 businesses. So the first thing I would say is we think about our business as a 360 business, not as a simple website business, which was what the world looked like when we started out in 2018.”
This “360 business” mindset is the critical strategic shift for enterprise leaders. It means moving beyond thinking of your content arm as a blog or a social media calendar. It’s about building an ecosystem. For Recurrent, this manifests in tangible ways. Their Military Influencer Conference isn’t just an event; it’s a powerful experiential anchor for their military and defense vertical. Their automotive brand, Donut, hosts car shows and racetrack events, translating digital engagement into real-world community. This is a far cry from simply publishing a product review and linking to Amazon. For a CPG or B2B brand, the lesson is clear: your content strategy must extend beyond the screen. It should inform and integrate with experiential marketing, community management, and even product development, creating a virtuous cycle where each component reinforces the others.
Brand Trust as the Ultimate Moat in the Age of AI
As artificial intelligence continues to lower the barrier to content creation, we face a paradoxical future: a world with infinite content but a finite—and perhaps shrinking—pool of trust. The temptation to use AI to scale content production at a dizzying pace is immense, but it risks flooding channels with a sea of homogenous, soulless material. In this environment, Perlman argues that the most valuable assets a brand can possess are a trusted name and the authentic passion of its storytellers.
“I think actually in the age of of AI, we’re actually going to see brands and trust matter more and more as more content gets created. So existing under a halo brand like a Donut, like a Popular Science… creates real value and gets eyeballs… In video, even more than text, people feel when it’s not authentic. People feel when the person that’s a host in a video is passionate and excited about the subject matter that they’re that they’re covering.”
This is a crucial insight for marketing leaders. Authenticity isn’t a buzzword; it’s a competitive advantage. Perlman points to a video from their Donut channel where a host, genuinely passionate about the Japanese domestic car market, rode shotgun with a street racing gang in Osaka. The resulting video garnered over 12 million views. No AI prompt could have conceived of or executed that idea with the same passion. The takeaway is not to shun AI—Perlman himself notes its utility in testing and optimization—but to recognize its limitations. True connection comes from human passion. In fact, he adds that some of their most successful text articles were the result of the editorial team explicitly ignoring SEO and AI suggestions to pursue a story they felt in their gut. For enterprise brands, this means empowering your internal subject matter experts—the engineers, the product managers, the designers—and giving them a platform to share their genuine passion, unvarnished and unfiltered.
Trust Your Creatives and Measure What Truly Matters
In many large organizations, data is king. Marketing decisions are often run through a gauntlet of A/B tests, focus groups, and predictive models. While valuable, this data-first approach can sometimes stifle the very creativity it’s meant to optimize. When asked for his “universal principle” on selecting video formats, Perlman’s answer is refreshingly direct and should be posted on the wall of every marketing department.
“You know, my my universal principle is, uh, get a great editorial and creative team and just trust them… I think the world is way past this place where you can measure measure it just in page views or in bounce rate. Right. Really what we’re looking for is having people that are truly engaged with the content… The biggest metric to me is watch time. Time on site. Time engaged with our posts.”
This philosophy is twofold: empower the right people, and then measure their success with the right metrics. He cites examples of breakout videos from The Drive that defy conventional wisdom—explainers on why L.A. street signs were repainted by a graffiti artist or why streetlights are turning purple. These aren’t topics a marketing algorithm would likely surface, but they deeply resonated with the audience because a creative team had the freedom to follow their curiosity. This trust must be paired with a sophisticated approach to measurement. By shifting focus from vanity metrics like page views to deep engagement metrics like watch time—which for some Donut videos exceeds 15 minutes—Recurrent gets a true signal of what connects. This data then creates a feedback loop that isn’t prescriptive, but informative. It’s not about telling the creative team what to make next, but about understanding the audience on a deeper level so the team can serve them better. For leaders, this means hiring for passion and creativity, providing strategic guardrails, and then getting out of the way.
The path forward for established brands is not to abandon their heritage or authority, but to infuse it with the dynamism and authenticity of the creator world. It’s about recognizing that your brand is no longer just a purveyor of goods or services; it is a media entity, whether you’ve consciously embraced that role or not. The challenge, then, is to become a very good one. This requires building a “360-degree” ecosystem where content, community, and commerce are interwoven, creating a brand experience that is cohesive and compelling across every touchpoint.
As Andrew Perlman’s experience at Recurrent demonstrates, the key is to build on a foundation of trust—trust in your legacy brands, trust in the passion of your creative teams, and trust that your audience will reward genuine connection with their most valuable asset: their time. In a landscape that is constantly shifting, where platforms rise and fall and consumer behavior evolves at an accelerating pace, the only sustainable strategy is agility. You may not be able to predict what 2030 looks like, but you can build an organization that is nimble enough to be wherever its audience is, ready to engage them with stories that matter. That is the new benchmark for marketing leadership.
