By Monica Chun President, Acceleration Community of Companies
When Pam Kaufman was named Chief Entertainment Officer at Gap, the reaction was predictable. Headlines framed it as radical. Wall Street called it bold. LinkedIn declared it the future.
But none of this is really new, we just have amnesia.
Long before “brand fandom,” “cultural relevance,” or “entertainment-first marketing” became PowerPoint phrases, companies like Microsoft, Motorola, and General Motors had executives whose sole job was to embed brands into culture through entertainment.
They brokered studio deals. They placed products in film and television.
They worked directly with Hollywood to shape narratives, not just buy impressions. Fun fact: In 2019, GM’s Chevy Suburban even received its own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for its long running presence in TV and films.
Gap didn’t invent a new idea. It gave an old one a better title.
The Channels Changed. The Game Didn’t.
What has changed is where culture lives and how brutally scarce attention has become.
Film and television were once the gravitational center. Now culture fractures across gaming, streaming, social platforms, creators, fandoms, and formats that barely resemble media at all.
Brands are fighting for slices of a fixed pie while the number of competitors for that time keeps multiplying. The average social media user spends roughly two hours and 20 minutes a day across platforms. For kids and teens, gaming worlds are the hangout, accounting for about two-and-a-half hours of their day in the U.S. That’s not just “media,” it’s a social life, a creative platform, and a marketplace rolled into one.
Yet the underlying job hasn’t changed: make the brand matter inside the worlds people already care about.
The difference is how much harder it’s become to execute well. It used to be that brands could achieve reach through strategic TV placements and a few celebrity sightings. Now, Gap has to coordinate across dozens of fragmented communities simultaneously, each with different norms, platforms, and definitions of authenticity.
Gap’s own recent “Better in Denim” work is a useful signal here. It didn’t win attention by explaining product features; it earned attention by functioning like entertainment — something people could watch, share, and remix.
Calling this role “Chief Entertainment Officer” doesn’t mean Gap suddenly became a studio. Leadership just acknowledged something many brands forgot during the performance-marketing era: you can’t optimize relevance like a conversion rate. It has to be earned in culture, then protected.
Brands have organized themselves this way before. In the early 2000s, Motorola installed a dedicated entertainment executive whose job was to embed the brand into film, television, and celebrity culture at scale. The remit was to broker narrative access. Motorola devices appeared everywhere because Hollywood was treated as a strategic partner instead of a media channel.
Microsoft followed a similar playbook, embedding its products into film, gaming, and early digital storytelling well before “content marketing” entered the lexicon. And at Audi, a long-tenured executive role existed specifically to manage entertainment and cultural integration.
Why Pam Kaufman Makes Sense.
Kaufman is interesting because she represents a lost skill set, not some future trend.
At Paramount, she managed franchises. She understood how audiences engage differently with the same IP, and how to extend a narrative across formats without exhausting it. She sharpened her judgement of what to repeat, what to evolve, and what to leave alone.
Consumers love buying clothes, they just need a reason to care. And somewhere in the shift from brick-and-mortar to online commerce, retailers have forgotten the importance of storytelling. Gap doesn’t need someone to “make jeans entertaining,” but rather to rebuild narrative gravity around the brand and keep it consistent across a fragmented culture.
The Real Shift Is Accountability.
Giving this role a C-suite title forces a kind of accountability brands have often avoided. When entertainment sits under marketing, it’s just another tactic and it’s easy to deprioritize when quarterly pressure hits. When it sits at the executive table, it becomes a mandate: Someone owns time spent with the brand, not just impressions bought for the brand.
The risk is that brands will keep mistaking content volume for cultural value. A Chief Entertainment Officer only works if leadership understands that entertainment means showing up consistently in the worlds your customer already inhabits, not just for a single campaign, a one-off collaboration, or a TikTok trend.
So Let’s Stop Pretending This Is a Revolution
Not every brand needs a Chief Entertainment Officer. But every brand already competes with entertainment. Some just haven’t admitted it at the leadership level yet.
If you want a simple gut-check, ask yourself three questions.
- If your marketing budget went to zero tomorrow, would anyone still seek out your brand?
- How much time do people spend with you outside of purchase moments?
- And who is your real competition: the brands in your category, or the entertainment options in your customer’s pocket?
Pam Kaufman’s hire marks the end of pretending this was optional, at least for brands that want to stay culturally present.
