But when companies do acquire and own their own media, he pointed to one common mistake they make.. “The instinct is, OK, I’m acquiring this media asset now, it’s going to become a megaphone for my product.”

HubSpot’s strategy is the opposite—the company actually preserves the assets it acquires. “What we see whenever we’re building out media assets or acquiring media assets is that you’re acquiring the trust in the audience,” Hunt said. “The very worst thing you could do is erode that, because then why did you buy it in the first place?”

Each HubSpot media asset is completely editorially independent, he said. “They’re focused on a specific customer profile that maps back to a product within the HubSpot portfolio, but we let our video producers, writers, editors, podcast producers, and creators take those insights and then translate that into what they feel like is most resonant with their audience.”

Still, owning the channel is only half the battle—marketers also need a new approach to what they put on it.

Using AI to improve human creativity

This new model requires collaboration between AI and humans.

Humans remain vital to HubSpot’s content-first approach. Readers are “going to people because people inherently trust people,” Hunt said. This insight drives HubSpot’s focus on video and creators. “Video as a format, it’s the currency of every single channel.”

When it comes to AI, instead of fighting it, optimize for it, particularly in search.

“What we were finding is that while LLM traffic is still just a drop in the bucket relative to referral traffic from Google, the intent is a lot higher,” explained Hunt. “The value of a click back from an LLM like ChatGPT is 3X higher than what we were seeing on search.”

The framework is simple: “How we think about it is everything has to be human-driven, AI-assisted,” said Hunt.