By Jay Storey

For the last two decades, the prevailing playbook in media has centered on scale: Build larger entertainment ecosystems capable of serving as many viewers as possible. One of the loudest critiques is that brand has become meaningless among the largest media companies — because those companies have let business strategy dictate brand strategy.

Great American Media spent the last five years testing the opposite premise: Holding resolute focus on a strong brand and a relatively narrow audience and letting that brand shape its business strategy.

Since launching in 2021, the company’s distribution footprint has grown considerably: — expanding across linear television, streaming, FAST channels, digital products and direct-to-consumer experiences. But its core brand — and the audience it was built to serve — has remained remarkably consistent.

Whether that philosophy represents a blueprint for other media companies is another debate entirely. But five years in, it raises an interesting question: What happens when a media company treats its brand not as something that evolves to support growth, but as the foundation that determines where — and how — it grows?

To mark Great American Media’s fifth anniversary, Cynopsis spoke with President & CEO Bill Abbott about why the company made that strategic choice, how it has influenced the company’s evolution, and why he believes it will continue to shape Great American Media’s next chapter.

Cynopsis: Looking back over the past five years, what surprised you most about building Great American Media?

Bill Abbott: The biggest surprise was how quickly the industry changed around us.
We started the business right as the acceleration of the decline in linear really began. At the same time, the industry was dealing with audience measurement challenges, and the combination of those two things changed our forecast right out of the gate.

That was challenging, but it also reinforced something we believed from the beginning: Viewing habits are going to change and platforms will have to change in response. But if people know what your brand stands for, you’ve got something durable to build around.
Every decade the industry mistakes distribution for strategy. First, it was cable, then streaming, now AI. Distribution will always evolve. What doesn’t change is that audiences reward companies that know exactly who they are. Technology changes much faster than human behavior.

Cynopsis: One of the interesting things about Great American Media is that you’ve expanded the business without really changing the brand. Was that intentional from the beginning?

Abbott: Absolutely. We’re big believers in brand, and brands drive loyalty — which is more important than ever in this fragmented environment of endless choice.
Our philosophy has always been to serve what we believe is an underserved audience. Everything else really starts there.

Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t trade-offs. The minute you target one part of the audience, your addressable market gets smaller. You must be very careful with your marketing dollars. You must be very careful with your programming. And you must protect the audience you’ve already built.

The temptation is always there to say, “Let’s go a little younger,” or “Let’s broaden the brand,” or “Let’s become something we’re not.” One of the biggest mistakes companies make is confusing reach with relevance. You can reach millions of people and matter to very few of them. In our experience, growth comes by being more distinctive. The clearer you are about who you serve, the more valuable your brand becomes.

Cynopsis: The business today is much bigger than it was five years ago. Did you always envision building this kind of multi-platform ecosystem?

Abbott: No chance I would’ve predicted this when we started. Because five years ago, the delivery mechanisms just weren’t there the way they are today. I don’t think anybody could have envisioned exactly what this business would become. But as those opportunities emerged, we saw new ways to monetize our content and new ways to serve our audience. That’s how the ecosystem evolved.

Today, we are producing more original content than ever before. We’ve got linear television, streaming, FAST channels, digital products and direct-to-consumer experiences. But brand is still what ties it all together for us. Whether someone arrives through streaming, FAST or linear, they know they’re going to get family-friendly content with a certain sensibility to it.

Consumers don’t think in terms of linear, FAST, streaming, or apps. They think in terms of brands they trust. The future belongs to companies that can adapt to every platform by making it feel like the same promise rather than a different business.

Cynopsis: How do you make sure business opportunities don’t start pulling the brand in different directions?

Abbott: That’s the most important question, right? And if you look at other platforms, they approach that very differently: Some monetize content much better through advertising. Others have subscription models. There’s not a single proven approach among those, so every platform is trying to figure out what the best business strategy looks like for them.

For us, we’ve always thought that if your brand is your North Star, and you’re always looking to serve your brand and your viewer, you’re generally going to make the right decision. It’s when you’re just searching for the dollar that you sometimes make the wrong decisions.

Cynopsis: You’ve talked a lot about loyalty. What do you think media companies misunderstand about what drives it?

Abbott: I think we can look at the decline of linear television as a good lesson in the danger of not staying true to what made your brand successful in the first place. Over time, a lot of networks lost their identity. They felt pressure to scale audiences, so they created and acquired a lot of the same genres of content (and, actually, a lot of the same exact content). Then there was so much content to manage that it became very tempting to spread it everywhere, so they expanded into every possible distribution channel.

I think it’s clear that people still want destination programming, and that starts with brand: people want to know that a brand will deliver a reliable experience worth seeking out. For us, it’s why one of our key focuses is creating destinations that viewers know they can come back to year after year.

Great American Christmas and Great American Christmas in July are good examples: Those become staples that are good for the business, but they’re also good for the viewer because they know exactly what they’re going to get.

Loyalty isn’t built by asking viewers to watch this or that. It is built by reducing decision fatigue. When your values are uncompromising, viewers are predisposed to love what you put in front of them.

Cynopsis: Speaking of tentpole programming, why do you think that kind of content still works in linear television today?

Abbott: I think there are really three survivors in the linear landscape: live sports, news, and franchises or tentpoles.

The longer those franchises run, the more they become experiences. That’s what creates stickiness and keeps people watching linear television.

One important difference is that streaming is usually about picking one title. Linear is different because you’re picking not only the movie or the show, but everything around it — the ads, what comes before, what comes on after. Linear viewers want a reliable experience so they can put it on and leave it on.

I think that’s why our brand — and specifically a franchise like Christmas in July — still has real value in linear.

Cynopsis: What does your brand-first strategy mean as an independent media company competing against much larger players?

Abbott: We have to be very efficient with our content spend because we’re never going to have 40 million subscribers. But that kind of scale has never been our goal. Our opportunity is to provide something that’s not already in the marketplace — to fill a void.

If you’re trying to become all things to all people, you’re competing against companies with enormous scale and enormous content budgets. As an independent, we’d much rather know exactly who we’re serving and execute incredibly well for that audience.

Independent companies can’t outspend conglomerates, but they can ‘out-focus’ them. Focus is one of the few competitive advantages that becomes stronger as the marketplace becomes more crowded.

Cynopsis: Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunity over the next five years?

Abbott: First of all, awareness.

I said scale has never been our goal, but in terms of filling a void for our very specific audience, we’re still only scratching the surface in terms of how many of those people know what we do. We’ve only really been in streaming for about three years, and we’ve only existed for five. The reality is, when people find us, they love what we do.

The second piece is content creation. Every dollar we make goes back on the screen to create what we believe is high-quality storytelling. As awareness grows, that becomes the flywheel. Better content creates more awareness. More awareness lets us invest in more content. Once that flywheel starts spinning, it becomes a virtuous and victorious cycle.

Cynopsis: AI is dominating media conversations right now — between declarations that AI will change (or ruin) all of media, and skepticism that the technology won’t live up to the hype. Where do you think AI will make the biggest difference in media?

Abbott: There are certain things you can do with AI where you really don’t know the difference in terms of production. More power to the people who figure that out quickly and can reduce their costs.

I also think it’s going to make the back room a lot more efficient and effective, and that allows companies to put more money on the screen.

Creatively, though, you have to be careful. As smart as AI gets, it’s never going to have human sensibility. There’s still a fundamental and visceral need for people to see other people in content. Humans want to experience real, authentic human stories. And at the end of the day, if your content isn’t good — if your stories don’t deliver the experience your audience wants — you don’t have a business.

Cynopsis: Five years in, are you even more convinced that starting with the brand was the right decision?

Abbott: Yeah, I am.

Everything has been harder in some ways than I expected, but it’s also been more fun in nearly every way than I expected.

Almost nothing happens the way you put it on the roadmap. Most surprises present challenges. But if you’ve got a good team with you — people who are at the top of their game — and you’ve got the perseverance to push through, you’re in a good position.
I believe the next five years belong to companies with the clearest identities. Consumers increasingly organize their entertainment around trust, rather than abundance.

Cynopsis: Are you staying the course with your brand-first approach?

Abbott: Absolutely. If anything, the last five years have reinforced it. We started the company thinking there was an underserved audience looking for this kind of content. Five years later, I think we’ve validated that belief.

The business has evolved in ways I never would have predicted. We’ve expanded into platforms that didn’t even exist in our original thinking. But what’s interesting is that none of that required us to rethink who we are.

We could not feel better about what we’re building. We have the patience of Job and the perseverance of a happy warrior to see this through. We’re proud of what we’ve built over the first five years, but we’re even more excited about the next five.

Cynopsis: Finally, if you could go back and talk to yourself five years ago, what advice would you give?

Abbott: I’d tell myself it’s going to be harder than you think — and more rewarding than you think.

Every challenge forces you to adapt. The biggest lesson is to stay committed to what you’re building. Businesses don’t succeed by avoiding adversity. They succeed when they remain recognizable through adversity. Strategy matters most when circumstances change.

Lastly, in addition to building brands, I’ve learned a great deal about the importance of emotional connection in storytelling. Technology and algorithms continue to personalize entertainment, but they can’t replace the moments that bring people together. Whether it’s Christmas, a beloved mystery franchise, or a series rooted in faith and family, audiences are looking for stories they can share across generations. Those shared experiences build tradition, strengthen relationships, and create lasting memories.

That’s not nostalgia – it’s one of the most enduring truths about human nature, and it’s why great storytelling will always matter.