Last updated: October 16, 2026
Entertainment marketing is the work of selling films, series, music, and live events to audiences, and selling those audiences to brands. Studios and streamers now run more of that second job themselves, so they’re hiring agency-trained people, from brand partnerships leads and branded content producers to creative directors and account leaders who know how to sell.
By Samantha Litman, Executive Search, Marketing, Creative & Media, KORE1
For most of my career, my client list split cleanly in two. The two halves didn’t do each other’s jobs.
Entertainment companies made the show. Agencies sold it. A studio hired one agency for the trailer, the key art, and the media plan, and a soda brand hired a different agency to get its can into that same show. Everybody knew which side of the table they sat on, and honestly, so did I. I knew exactly which candidates to call for which side.
Not anymore.
When clients ask me what’s changed, this is what I tell them. In the past, there was always a divide. Now the lines have blurred. Entertainment companies are going after business that advertising agencies held for years, and most of them are doing it without building whole new departments. They stretch the teams they already have. Which means they need people who can do agency work from the inside, people who can pitch a brand on Monday, produce the piece by the end of the month, and still be on good terms with the show’s producers afterward.
That’s a hiring problem before it’s anything else.
I’ve recruited marketing, creative, and media people for more than 25 years, and I do it now as one of KORE1’s marketing and creative recruiters. So this post is about people. Who gets these jobs, who struggles in them, and what I’d ask before you hire for one. The searches themselves have their own home on our entertainment marketing recruiters page.
What Is Entertainment Marketing, Really?
Entertainment marketing is the business of promoting entertainment, like films, series, games, music, and live events, and of connecting brands to it through sponsorships, product integrations, and branded content. It has two customers. The audience, who has to show up, and the advertiser, who pays to be there when they do.
Most of the definitions you’ll find online stop at product placement and celebrity endorsements, which is a bit like describing the restaurant business as ketchup packets and the people who hand them out. That’s the old version. It’s also the small one.
For a hiring manager, I think it helps to see it as two jobs. Selling the title. Selling the audience. The first one has always lived at the studio, with a marketing team that works alongside outside shops for trailers, posters, social, and paid media. The second one mostly lived at agencies, the brand’s agency on one end and sometimes a specialist integration shop in the middle, brokering the deal with the network. The network sold the airtime and let everyone else do the creative.
That second job is where the line moved.
One housekeeping note before I go on. If you’re hiring the engineers who build a streaming platform, that’s a different search, and it belongs with our media and entertainment IT staffing team. Everything below is the marketing side.
Where Did the Agency Work Go?
Inside the networks and streamers, mostly. They didn’t hide it, either.
On June 22, 2026, at Cannes, NBCUniversal unveiled Rock Studios, which it calls the evolution of its in-house creative engine. It sells advertisers four things: integrated sponsorships and experiences, custom creative, talent and creators, and branded entertainment. NBCUniversal says the group worked with more than 400 brand partners in 2025. Read that list again. Every item on it is something I’d have expected an agency to pitch ten years ago.
Disney Advertising runs its own version, Disney CreativeWorks, and describes it as a full-service branded content studio and creative agency working across networks like ABC, FX, Hulu, and National Geographic. An agency. Inside Disney.
Netflix didn’t sell a single ad until late 2022. In May 2026 it told advertisers its ad-supported tier reaches more than 250 million monthly active viewers worldwide, by its own measure, and media buyers told Variety the company has done better with title-level sponsorships, like a State Farm deal tied to the series Running Point, than with selling big blocks of inventory. A title-level sponsorship is a brand partnership. Somebody has to sell it, build it, and keep the client happy afterward. More and more, that somebody works for the platform.
Follow the money and it points the same way. The IAB projected in May 2026 that U.S. digital video ad spend will pass $80 billion this year, up 11%, and that digital will take more than 60% of all TV and video ad spend for the first time. The viewers moved to streaming. The ad dollars followed. My read, from the hiring side, is that the streamers would like to keep the creative fee along with the media fee, and they’re staffing up to do it.
Agencies are getting squeezed from the other end too. The Association of National Advertisers found in its 2023 in-house agency study that 82% of its members had an in-house agency, up from 42% in 2008. Members who still used outside agencies did an average of 61% of the work in-house anyway. And 65% of respondents had moved some established work away from their agencies in the previous three years. So the brand pulled some work in. The network is offering to do the rest.
That’s a lot of numbers. Here’s the one that made me sit up.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of marketing managers to grow 7% from 2025 to 2035, while advertising and promotions managers shrink 4%. Same family of jobs, two directions. BLS pins the decline mostly on AI tools and ad blockers, and a ten-year projection is a forecast, not a headcount, so I hold it loosely. But it also lines up with the calls I’ve been getting, where more of the senior marketing seats sit at the companies that make the content and fewer at the shops that used to sell it for them.
Same Skills, New Address
Who am I really hiring? I get that question a lot, and I love it, because it means the client already suspects the title on their posting is wrong. Usually they’re right! A “partnerships manager” at one network is an “integrated marketing lead” at the next and a “client solutions director” at a third. Same person. Three titles. So I stopped arguing about titles and started drawing this instead, from my own searches, one recruiter’s read and not an org chart.
| The agency seat | Where those skills land now | What changes for the person |
|---|---|---|
| Account director | Brand partnerships or integrated sales lead at a network or streamer | They sell their own company’s shows instead of serving a client’s brand, and the job often comes with a revenue number |
| Creative director | Creative lead in an in-house brand studio | Every idea has to use the network’s shows and talent, and survive their approvals |
| Executive producer | Branded entertainment or custom content producer | Same shoots, two bosses, the advertiser and the network |
| Experiential producer | Sponsorships and live experiences lead | Events hang on premieres, finales, and live sports dates that never move |
| Brand strategist | Creative or insights strategist on an ad sales team | The strategy has to justify a price, not just a campaign |
| Media planner or buyer | Mostly still at the agency | Not much. Buying across dozens of networks is still the agency’s job |
Before anyone panics, look at the bottom row. Media buying barely moved. Somebody still has to buy NBC, Hulu, YouTube, a dozen podcasts, and a retail network in one plan, then reconcile all of it in a spreadsheet at nine at night, and no network’s brand studio wants that job. The media agency hiring I do looks a lot like it did five years ago. Selling and making moved. Buying stayed put.
So Who Actually Gets Hired?
People who’ve sat on both sides of a sale. That’s the short answer.
The longer one has a few shapes, and I’ll go through the ones I see most.
The person I can place fastest into a network brand team is usually an agency account or creative lead who has pitched, lost, and pitched again. They can walk into a room with a brand’s CMO, listen for twenty minutes, and sketch an idea on the spot that’s actually good. Studios are full of people who love the shows. They have far fewer who can sell those shows to a fast-food chain at four o’clock on a Tuesday, with the deck half-finished and the client already checking their phone.
Then there’s the reverse. Someone who came up in studio marketing or publicity and knows how a release date really gets set, which talent will do press and which won’t, and how long legal needs before anything goes out the door. Agencies with entertainment clients want those people badly, because the first time a sponsorship idea runs into a talent contract or a release date that moved, somebody on the team needs to have seen it coming. The new brand studios want them too.
And then my favorite. The person nobody would have thought to call.
I always say the best candidate isn’t always the most obvious one. That’s doubly true here, because these jobs sit between industries, and the right person has usually lived in both. I wrote about one search like that, a role that sat right between gaming culture and consumer products, in the post about job descriptions as blueprints. Searching either industry alone would never have found that person.
When I’m reading resumes for these seats, here’s what makes me pick up the phone.
- A brand integration they can walk me through from the first pitch to the recap numbers. Not the reel. The whole thing.
- Agency, then in-house, then agency again. Some clients flinch at that. I don’t.
- Have they ever carried a revenue number? Even a small one?
- Live events with a date that couldn’t slip, like a premiere, a finale, or a game.
- “Worked on the [streamer] account.” Careful with this one. Serving a streamer as a client is not the same as working inside one, and I always ask which it was.
Who struggles? I’d be lying if I said everyone crosses well. Brand-side marketers who have only ever had one boss and one brand often find the pace of a sales team exhausting, because suddenly there are forty advertisers who each think they’re the most important call of the day. And some agency people, the ones who need a brand-new client every quarter to stay interested, get restless on a network team that works the same shows for years. That one surprises people. It shouldn’t. A resume tells you where someone has been, not where they can go, and sometimes where they can go is right back to an agency.
If the seat you’re filling is partnerships-heavy, our brand partnerships recruiters page goes deeper on that side of the deal.
What I Ask Before Someone Crosses Over
I ask every candidate the same basic questions. For a crossover seat, four of them do most of the work.
- What type of leadership are you looking for? An agency creative used to a creative director who decides in the room may hate a network where an idea needs four sign-offs. Better to find that out on my call than in month three.
- What made you successful in your other roles? I’m listening for whether it was the client, the team, or the person themselves. Only one of those travels.
- And what kind of working environment do you do your best work in? Pace, structure, how much quiet. Big entertainment companies and small agencies feel nothing alike on a Wednesday.
- Why would you be a good fit here? I want to hear them connect their own strengths to what the company actually needs. If they can’t, I can’t sell them either.
None of these are trick questions, and most candidates relax once they realize I’m not testing them, which is exactly when they tell me the thing that decides whether the move will work.
How Long Does an Entertainment Marketing Search Take?
Two to three weeks, if it’s a new seat and the people interviewing actually answer their email. That’s been my experience on recent searches. If the seat has been open since spring, or somebody internal already tried it and it didn’t work, plan on a month or two, because now we’re also untangling why it didn’t.
Is talent scarce? Not really. I can almost always find great people. What I can’t control is whether they’ll jump right now, with half of Hollywood still jumpy after the last few years, and the ones with an agency and a studio both on their resume are exactly who the platforms are calling too. I’ve lost finalists to a faster offer more than once. It was almost never because the other company paid more. They just called first.
Money’s tighter this year. More of my clients want contract-to-hire for campaign and production seats, so they can watch someone work through a launch before they commit to a full-time salary. I get it. For leadership I still push for a direct hire search, because nobody good leaves a steady job to be a VP on a trial basis.
If You Run an Agency, This Isn’t the End of the Story
Please don’t read this as a eulogy. It isn’t.
The same ANA study found 92% of respondents still work with outside agencies. Entertainment companies still hand out big accounts, too. Before I joined KORE1, I worked with a media agency that had just won a major entertainment account and suddenly needed more than 20 people. That turned into about five years and 20+ placements across analytics, strategy, media, ad operations, and senior leadership, and a lot of those people were later promoted. When an entertainment account lands, agency hiring doesn’t trickle. It all happens at once.
What’s changed is who you’re competing with for talent. Your best producer is probably getting calls from a network brand studio now, not just from the agency down the street, and that studio can usually offer a steadier calendar and a bigger production budget than you can. So the agencies I see doing well are hiring the crossover people too. Producers who’ve done live activations (our experiential marketing recruiters spend their days on those), strategists who’ve sat with an ad sales team, and creative leads who know how a studio thinks. Our advertising agency recruiters page covers how we run those searches.
Things Clients Ask Me About This Shift
These come up on almost every intake call lately. Some weeks, all of them in one call.
So what is entertainment marketing, in plain words?
Entertainment marketing means getting people to watch, listen, or show up for a film, show, game, or event, and selling brands a place next to them when they do. A movie trailer is entertainment marketing. So is a soda can sitting on a reality show’s kitchen counter. Same industry, two very different hires.
Are studios and streamers really replacing ad agencies?
For branded content and brand partnerships, partly, since NBCUniversal, Disney, and Netflix now sell custom creative and title sponsorships straight to brands. Media buying hasn’t moved much. Most brand campaigns still start at an agency, too. Ask me again in five years.
Can an agency creative director succeed at a streamer?
Plenty do, as long as they can live with more approvals and the same shows year after year instead of a new client every quarter. The question I lean on is what kind of leader they want above them, because a creative used to deciding in the room can feel boxed in when legal, talent, and a showrunner’s team all get a vote. The ones who thrive tend to love the IP. Not just the pitch.
Which entertainment marketing jobs are growing right now?
Brand partnerships, branded content production, experiential, and sponsorship roles are where I’m seeing the most new seats. BLS also projects employment of marketing managers to grow 7% from 2025 to 2035, while advertising and promotions managers decline 4%.
Agency people or studio people, which should we hire?
Hire for whichever skill your team is missing, because most teams have one and not the other. A studio brand team usually lacks selling. An agency entertainment practice usually lacks someone who knows how release dates, talent, and legal really work. Start there.
Realistically, how fast can one of these searches close?
Two to three weeks for a new seat when the hiring managers respond quickly, going by my recent searches. A seat that has been open a while or already failed once tends to take a month or two.
Which Side of the Line Are You Hiring On?
Maybe both. More and more of my clients are.
Here’s what I’d do this week. Pull up the job description for your next marketing seat and ask whether it describes the work your company does now, or the work it did before the line moved. If it still says “agency experience required,” ask which kind. Selling? Making? Serving a client? Those are three different people.
KORE1 has been recruiting since 2005, and 92% of the people the firm places are still in the seat a year later. That’s the number I care about. A hire who still fits after the market moves again.
Tell me about the seat, and which side of the line you think it sits on. I’ll tell you if I agree. Let’s talk, or send me a note on LinkedIn if that’s easier.
