Commissioning budgets are shrinking and brand money is moving into entertainment, but most producers still pitch brands the way they pitch commissioners. Charlie Read, who has spent two decades on both sides of that divide, argues the fix starts with five uncomfortable lessons.
Read knows the territory better than most. He helped set up 4Creative, Channel 4’s in-house agency, where he oversaw around 60 per cent of its revenue coming from external brands, then co-founded The Outfit, a creative agency he ran for 15 years before selling it to a social agency last year. His new venture, Upstream, exists to help production companies diversify revenue by working with brands, and speaking to TellyCast host Justin Crosby in September 2025 he set out a playbook for doing it properly.
The context is a market under strain on both sides. Read points to a 2023 Kantar report finding that, by his recollection, more than 80 per cent of audiences say they actively avoid advertising. “Marketing departments are going through a seismic change as well,” he says. “How do they get attention, how do they command attention in a really busy market?” That shared problem, he argues, is precisely the opening producers should walk through.
Brands do not fund shows, they fund business outcomes
Read’s first lesson dismantles the old advertiser funded programming model. Ten to twenty years ago, he says, AFP worked as a funding top-up: a commissioning editor wanted a programme to fill a schedule, a producer wanted to plug a budget gap, and a brand wrote a cheque. Having interviewed marketers about their AFP experience over the past year and a half, he found it “has always been an uncomfortable relationship, because from a brand perspective it’s advertising cash, and when it’s advertising cash it has to do something for the marketing department”.
That means understanding what brands actually want. “It’s not that they want to make programming,” Read says. “They don’t wake up in the morning and go, I’d love to create something on ITV. They wake up and they need to either sell something or they need to do something which enhances brand reputation.” Crosby has argued on previous episodes that brands are the new commissioning editors, and Read builds on that framing: producers must translate what mattered to a commissioner into what matters to a brand, which means return on investment and business objectives rather than slots and overnights.
Even the industry’s default job title works against it. “The word production company, from a brand perspective, implies that you’re at the end of the supply chain, that you’re execution rather than helping brands solve strategic problems,” Read says. His prescription is to “reframe themselves as audience businesses”, because connecting with audiences through engaging content is exactly what brands are trying, and often failing, to do.
Producers already know audiences better than most brands
Lesson two is the encouraging one. Most production companies have a genre in their DNA, Read argues, and years of evidence about what connects. The gap is that they rarely interrogate where their work shows up, which brands buy advertising around it, and what that says about the audience they command. Close that gap and the pitch changes: we make this type of content, it reaches this demographic, and we have been doing it for years.
That knowledge is scarcer on the brand side than producers assume. “Marketers often don’t know their audience, and they certainly don’t know the types of content which is going to connect with those people,” Read says. “As a production company, if you know the type of content people want to watch, you also know how to make it. That’s a very powerful tool.”
The insight itself is closer than many producers think. “I would ask the commissioning editor to introduce you to the sales team at the broadcaster, because that’s where the insight is,” Read advises. Sales and scheduling teams hold exactly the audience data broadcasters sell to brands, partnership teams at Channel 4 and ITV already talk to producers, and social listening tools plus a company’s own channels fill in the rest. Some of it costs money, much of it is free, and all of it turns a producer’s instinct into an argument a marketer can buy.
Start with the brand’s problem and build IP together
The traditional AFP route, an idea hawked through a media agency in search of a brand and a slot, still exists, but Read describes it as slow and fragile, with deals increasingly falling down along the way. Crosby is blunter about the politics, noting that individuals inside media agencies can have their own motives for which producers get through the door. Read’s diagnosis is structural: media agencies are often still building their own relationship with the brand, the ad agency is usually the real custodian, and the production company sits at the bottom of the supply chain waiting for something to happen.
His alternative flips the sequence. Start with the brand’s strategy, build a brief around what the brand needs, and develop the idea from there, even if a commissioner and a slot come later. “It’s not about the idea, it’s about solving a business problem for a brand,” he says. “If you turn up not just with an idea but you’re really clear about the problem it solves, you’re going to move your idea further up that value chain.”
Access is easier than it was, because the agency world is in upheaval. Read points to the well-documented troubles at holding groups such as WPP and Dentsu, and estimates that “something like 80 per cent of brands have some sort of in-house agency now”, whether PR, social or full creative services. That creates multiple new doors into a brand. It also demands that producers market themselves, because in his view “all production companies look like they do the same thing” to a marketer, and “if you just wait for someone else to come to you, you’ll be waiting a long time”.
Brands speak a different language, and producers must learn it
Lesson four is about translation. A brand hearing a pitch wants to know whether this is an awareness job, a reputation piece, a product launch or an attempt to reach an audience the brand cannot currently touch. Read’s advice is to keep the treatment and the craft but change the frame, using the language of business results without being heavy-handed about it.
He is vivid about how the wrong pitch lands. Open with “here’s an idea, would you like to buy it”, and the brand’s response will be “lovely idea, but what’s it going to do?” The right version answers that question first: this will reach Gen Z, or millennials, because half of our content already connects with that audience, and we can co-create something your advertising cannot deliver. Volume is not the issue, since Read cites an estimate, from a CMO he spoke to, that beyond four or five TV ads a year brands now need 2,000 to 2,500 further assets to fill their funnel. But he is equally clear that AI-generated volume is not the answer either: “We’re aware of AI slop, and it’s all very well that we can turn out more and more of this stuff, but they still need to create work which connects.”
From interruption to engagement
The final lesson is the strategic one. “Buying reach is actually becoming less and less effective and it’s getting incredibly expensive,” Read says. “You buy these eyeballs and then the content you’re creating doesn’t connect with the audience.” The growth model, visible first in sport and fandom, is brands building and keeping audiences rather than renting them.
His exhibits are British retailers. FootAsylum, he says, “is a really clever model in the market, where I talk about TV to the till quite a lot”: creator-led entertainment on YouTube sitting one click from buying a pair of trainers. Waitrose’s Dish has grown from a branded podcast IP into TV, events and in-store activity, exactly the content ecosystem Read wants producers to design, and he rates M&S in the same bracket, while Crosby adds Currys’ social reinvention. The destination, Read argues, is brands behaving like media owners: “Start thinking about, as a brand, how do I attract audiences, how do I engage with them, and how do I keep them coming back, rather than churning through eyeballs.”
For senior executives the direction of travel is clear enough. Brand budgets will keep flowing towards entertainment that does a measurable business job, and the winners will be producers who show up as audience businesses with a brand’s problem already diagnosed, in the places marketers actually look. Read’s parting advice is characteristically practical: skip the echo chamber of Broadcast and Campaign and advertise in The Grocer, “the biggest retail publication, which any marketer in retail reads”, where no one from the creative services space ever shows up. The losers will be the companies still treating brands as the last stop before a project dies. “Brands are open for business,” Read says. “They don’t quite know how to talk to production companies, but if you help them, you’re going to make that door just open a bit more.”
Watch the full interview on TellyCast.
Also check out Dish from Waitrose producer Mark Rivers interview in our recent show.
