This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →Bose Studios launched last month. But the music company’s entertainment division is the culmination of a strategic shift that has been years in the making.It already accounts for one-third to 40% of the brand’s marketing, CMO Jim Mollica told Digiday at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity last week. He expects that to reach 60-65% by the end of this year or next. The reason, he said, comes down to one question: when was the last great TV ad you saw?
It’s rhetorical because genuinely great TV ads are rare, and even when they exist, the conditions to make them land no longer do. Ad skipping is rampant, audiences pay premiums to avoid advertising, and AI is accelerating content consumption in ways that reward authority over interruption. Renting audiences, Mollica argued, is no longer sustainable — and it’s only getting more expensive.
“For all of these reasons, renting an audience seemed to be not a long-term proposition that you could sustain,” said Mollica.
Bose Studios is a response to that. It’s an entertainment unit that spans music, film, TV, digital and live events. Its opening slate includes a documentary series on creativity and artistic expression developed with Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh, a docuseries following influential artists, and a YouTube series bridging music and community through intimate performances. The first episode, dropping this fall, centers on British singer-songwriter Sienna Spiro.
