𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐚 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲, 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐚 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧

For the last year, most of what I’ve written has been about how companies are struggling with narrative. Meta cloning Zuckerberg into an AI nobody can shut off. Microsoft bolting Copilot onto its products, and then bolting a narrative onto Copilot to match. Big tech thought leadership that says nothing in three thousand words. AI rollouts that stall because the engineering shipped but the story didn’t.

One pattern keeps surfacing inside all of it: companies look at consumer brand giants, pick up the wrong lessons, and apply them in places those lessons don’t fit. The case study gets framed. The headline gets repeated. The slogan version of the lesson spreads. And the underlying reality of what the company actually built gets lost in the retelling.

The Golden State Warriors are one of those examples right now.

In 2022, the team launched Golden State Entertainment – a content company that produces documentaries, signs musical artists, and stages live events. Three years in, GSE has released an album featuring E-40, Too $hort, Saweetie, and Larry June; been part of an Emmy-winning short film about Jeremy Lin; and produced documentaries about figures like Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. It gets cited often in marketing circles as a storytelling success story – proof that companies should invest in narrative infrastructure, build community, treat content as a strategic priority.

Some of that is true. But it misses what GSE actually is.

Listen to how David Kelly, the franchise’s Chief Business Officer who runs GSE, describes the venture in his own words:

“We want to leverage the team’s brand outside of sports, telling the stories of people that shape culture and move culture.”

“We want to tell some Warriors stories... but we’re not limiting ourselves to Warriors stories.”

“This is an opportunity for musicians, entertainers, creatives, and brands to partner with the Golden State Warriors to bring their projects to life.”

That’s not a sports franchise telling its own story better. That’s a media company that happens to be owned by a basketball team, using the Warriors brand as gravitational pull to attract creators who want to be associated with it. The stories being told are mostly not Warriors stories. The artists being signed are not Warriors artists. The documentaries are not Warriors documentaries. The team’s brand is the platform; other people’s work is what runs on it.

Imagine if Adobe spun up a record label, signed Bay Area musicians, and produced a slate of indie documentaries. Nobody would frame it as a marketing lesson for the SaaS industry. We’d say: Adobe is in the media business now. We’d be curious about the strategy. But we wouldn’t pretend it teaches the average B2B software company how to tell its own story better.

That’s the move GSE represents. And it’s a move that requires something most companies don’t have: cultural gravity. A brand that creators actively want to be attached to. Decades of accumulated equity. A built-in venue, audience, and pipeline. The Warriors aren’t telling stories better than everyone else. They built a media platform that lets other people tell stories under their flag, because the flag has enough pull to make it work.

This is the part that matters for most companies looking at GSE and trying to extract a storytelling lesson: they’re looking at the wrong category. The lesson isn’t “build narrative infrastructure” or “treat content as strategy.” It’s “decide whether you have enough cultural pull to be a platform – and if you don’t, which is most companies, your job is still the harder one.” Which is telling your own story, well, about your own work, to people who need to understand it. No record label is going to save you from that.

Which brings me back to the work I’ve been writing about all year. The companies struggling with narrative right now aren’t struggling because they need a record label. They’re struggling because they treat their own story as a deliverable instead of a strategy – something produced after the engineering is done, by the team three floors down. The fix isn’t to mimic the Warriors. The fix is to do the thing the Warriors are also doing, just at a different scale: name storytelling as central to what the company is, and resource it like you mean it.

Build a media company if you want one. Just don’t confuse it with the work of telling your own story.

#Artwell #AIStrategy #SoloFounder

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