How Morning Brew maintains authenticity at scale on social

Miles Brickley, Growth Lead at Kettle, and Ryan Aspell, VP of Brand Strategy at Morning Brew, sat down in the Sport Beach Content Studio at Cannes Lions 2026 to discuss how media brands can scale without sacrificing authenticity, audience trust, or editorial integrity in the age of AI and algorithms.

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Miles: Hi everybody. I'm Miles Brickley. I'm the Senior Director of Growth at Kettle, part of the code and theory network and I'm sitting here with…

Ryan: Hi, I'm Ryan Aspell, I'm the VP of Brand Strategy at Morning Brew Inc. For those that are not aware, Morning Brew, Inc, a Business Media company over 20 plus brands, really focused on engaging the next generation of leaders with business content that they like, that is approachable and maybe a little fun.

Miles: That's what it's all about. And that actually tees up the very first question, which is that I feel like Morning Brew has developed a very authentic voice that is fun and that makes editorial business content actually interesting to engage with. And so as you've expanded across podcasts, newsletters, social and video, how do you preserve that voice without it feeling inauthentic over at scale?

Ryan: It certainly gets harder as you scale. It's a problem that I grapple with all of the time. And I think the sort of like 2 tenants we have here are first about maintaining focus. We are a Business Media company, and so that means we cover the world of business and the business of the world. And so we have pretty clear pillars of the types of content that we want to tell, the stories that we want to share. And like, the focus then is on staying within the lanes that we feel like we can own and that our audience expects us to be in, which gives us a way to just be hyper visional about what we do and how we do it. My boss talks a lot about avoiding the trap of generality, right? Like you as a Business Media company, once you achieve some scale, there is a risk and maybe like an appetite, A nefarious one to like continue to scale even faster and even more quickly. And to do that sort of like start to color outside your lines.

And so a great example for us would be, you know, we publish a story about politics or a story about sports and it pops off like the audience really loves it. And so we look at this on paper and say, like, wow, everything's going up and to the right. Like maybe we should be leaning into politics and sports that sit outside of the realm of Business Media. And so what we have been tasked to do and what my team is really focused on is avoiding moving outside of the spaces that our audience expects us to be, not chasing politics and sports story because we are going to attract traffic that doesn't value our brand and doesn't sort of value the mission that we have. And so they'll come for that story, but they won't necessarily stay. And then we'll be publishing content that our core audience doesn't want from us. And so in a year, 2 years time, the audience that just came for those stories is going to fall away, and we’ll have lost the sort of loyal audience that we built over the last 11 years. And so I think making sure that we stay focused on that focus is incredibly important.

Miles: It creates a real sense of consistency. Because I know one of the things that that we're seeing a lot with our clients too, is the this idea of strategy soup on social where it's just whatever you throw at the wall that will stick, whatever drives engagement, whatever just feels like it's going to, like you said, pop off in a feed. But at what cost and to what extent are you losing your core audience in the attempt to gain a net new engagement factor and that new audience. 

Ryan: 100%. And I mean we're seeing it a lot here. Like people are talking about being community centric, being audience centric, love the conversation. I think it is about walking the walk and talking the talk. Like as we expand, we do that very much in partnership with our audience. Like we are, we feel like we're de risking any expansion bet that we make because it starts with asking our audience quite candidly, like, is this content you want? Are you being underserved by the morning brewing universe?

And so we read those signals, are able to sort of determine signals from noise and then make educated bets about where we go next. Founder Brew, which is the latest brew. It's a great example of that. Like we saw within our network, there were approximately 50,000 founders or small business owners that just like, needed to understand how to grow their business and needed to get it in a way that like, avoided the jargon and like told real, actionable, insightful stories that brought the founder perspective more to the fore. And so in learning that we then made the call to start Founder Brew and not the other way around. So it becomes a vehicle for continuing to serve the audience better.

Miles: Imagine that, listening to your audience leads to the best, most authentic launches that can actually expand and find new ways to connect and new ways to build authenticity and trust. And so kind of along those lines, there's been a version of that of, of brands that come to Morning Brew because the audience trusts that voice. But every time you enter into branded content space, there's always a risk that you lose that trust.

How does Morning Brew really approach that in a way that maintains the trust with the audience and still allows brands to have that voice and find that rhythm within your feeds?

Ryan: We have set up a rather unique model, I think, which is to say to your point, they come to morning brew for the editorial voice and tone. And so we actually call it sort of renting out our trust, like we rent out the trust that our creators and our people have built with the communities and the audiences that they serve. And so our editorial talent is actually the talent that makes the branded content in a lot of business.

And so that creates its own challenges, but I think that that model enables us to really tap into what has made this brand connect with so many millions over the last 11 years and be able to say to a brand that you are leveraging the same talent, voices, minds, like perspectives like that trusted gut that these people have from being in the community, from engaging with the audiences that they've grown over, you know, 2,5, 11 years, depending on the brand that you're talking about. And so being able to provide that direct connection between creator and brand in the branded content space, I think it has sort of changed the dynamic of how we go to market and how we create branded content that sits as you were sort of talking about really squarely in the middle of the Venn diagram between the messages that you want to tell as a brand and the editorial voice that you came to morning before.

It has changed the dynamic of our go to market like and our sales team has to have longer potentially more challenging conversations with a brand that says, but we want it said like this and we need to say like this. I think it's a much more interesting one to sort of be able to show up to a client and say you didn't hire us to make a commercial. You hired us to help you understand how your brand is perceived and tell the best story that's going to resonate with this audience that we have. And I think it's made for longer, more lasting partnerships versus more sort of one off campaign vendor based relationships.

Miles: And it really brings that sense of craft to it as well. You know, you're extending that voice and that benefit of craft to the brands that participate in the morning brew ecosystem. And I think that's the value, that's the standard that needs to be kept in order to make sure that everyone's benefiting from these, from these engagements and these partnerships.

Ryan: And they are learning more about their brand and their business, creating branded contact with us and seeing how our audience responds to that branded content. So it becomes like a business intelligence layer as well.

Miles: And we couldn't be at Cannes, we couldn't be at Sport Beach this year without talking about algorithms and AI. It is all over La Croisette. It is all over every billboard from the airport to here.

And so especially as we think about creating that content in in a truly algorithm and LLM driven environment, how are we still, how are you at Morning Brew maintaining that balance between building for the algorithm, building for the LLMS, and again, still maintaining that sense that this is editorial, this is content that people want to interact with while making sure that it's still discoverable to new audiences through these new ways of search.

Ryan: It's certainly something that we are grappling with as a company that started as an e-mail. We really don't have to worry about an algorithm, right? We're going directly to the inbox. And so as we have grown to use every format under the sun, we've definitely had to be more aware of that on the back end and have built systems and tools and processes to ensure that our content is getting to our audience as it always has been.

That said on the front end, like we are prioritizing metrics that tell us that these audiences still come to us every day and are seeking out the content because we're creating best in class for the format that we are delivering the story on. And so like we look at the audience coming to this newsletter as an example, opening it every day, how far are they going? Are they spending time with the content? And so like it's, I think it's transformed the metrics that we start to pay attention to always in service of delivering wherever we are best in class for that particular platform and for that particular format. But like the goal for me, sort of being the brand strategy field is to make sure that the audience never feels like we are serving the algorithm, like we are always on their side, like we always need to be creating content that brings value to their day. And if they tell us that by continuing to show up where we show up and continue to choose us and spend time with us every day, the algorithm stuff on the back end will be able to get right so long as we don't break the trust that we have with our audience.

Miles: Exactly. Audiences need more allies in their feeds instead of people, like I said, throwing strategy soup at them. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you for sitting down with me.

Ryan: Thank you. This was lovely.

Miles: Cheers.