When Brands Stop Interrupting and Start Commissioning.
Annie Krukowska is a Media Economist, strategist, advisor and founder of annimoIQ. Her channel, Media Unscriptedis a conversation about the new economics of television, where value is moving, who captures it, and what happens when the old models stop expanding the market. In this episode, Andrew Canter, Global Chairman of the BCMA, unpacked why branded entertainment has moved from marketing experiment to structural force in the media economy.
There’s something quietly disarming about an expert and branded content pioneer who has spent thirty years inside the industry telling you, without any hedging, that brands are no longer just the client. Increasingly, they are the commissioner.
Everyone talks partnership now. Andrew Canter means it.
As Global Chairman of the BCMA, the organisation he co-founded in 2003 precisely because brands and creators had no forum to talk to each other directly, he’s spent two decades watching that old client relationship dissolve, and he talks about what’s replacing it with the kind of sharpness and warmth that makes you sit up.
The new commissioners
Andrew’s starting point is an economic one, not a creative one. Traditional ad revenue, he told me, “is only going one way. It’s only gonna decline.” That’s not a controversial claim on its own. What’s sharper is where he takes it: as ad spend shrinks, the money that used to sit in media buying is migrating into production budgets. Brands aren’t spending less on content. They’re spending it differently, further upstream, closer to where the actual creative decisions get made.
“Brands really are the new commissioners,” he said. “They are the ones that have the investment, they’re the ones with the money.”
It’s a small sentence that reframes a lot. Commissioners don’t just fund things, they decide what gets made. Which means the question is no longer whether brands can sit beside entertainment. It is whether the entertainment industry is willing to treat brand money as commissioning capital rather than campaign budget.
If that role is genuinely migrating from broadcasters to brands, then the entire structure of who greenlights entertainment is shifting, quietly, underneath an industry that’s still mostly organised as if commissioning happens the way it did twenty years ago.
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