Most brands are still making commercials.

Hilton's partnership with McLaren and Lando Norris was producing short brand films, and the audience data pointed somewhere interesting: viewers who found this content were staying well past the point the format gave them anything more to watch.

I made the case internally for scaling the format up rather than down, arguing that YouTube's real competition for that viewer is streaming television, not mobile short-form. That argument moved a partnership from short films into progressively longer work, and eventually into a sustained program of behind-the-scenes and day-in-the-life content. The films earned millions of organic views and over a million watch hours from a highly engaged audience.

I rebuilt the channel as a discovery engine. Finding an audience has always meant understanding the system that surfaces you, and that system keeps moving. Keywords gave way to watch time and satisfaction signals, and in 2026 audiences began using AI assistants. I've worked through each of those shifts and strategize for all of them, through 2027 and whatever follows.

The work centered on programming. Adjusting the slate against how audiences behave is what earned consistent wins in the Shorts feed and in recommended, with playlist and channel architecture doing the origination work underneath it, including for LLM-driven discovery. Watch time grew substantially against flat publishing volume. The same slate worked harder, and the audience kept coming back.

I came up at CNET as a social-first editor, cutting for Facebook Watch, then IGTV, then Twitter Video. Building for platforms that rose and fell taught me not to get attached to any one of them, and to read what an audience is doing rather than what a platform is promising.

From there I moved into news production, where speed was the whole game. Tech news is crowded, and being first only matters if you also earn the top result. I learned storytelling, hook construction, and journalistic rigor from people who were very good at all three, then carried it into long-form YouTube, where retention became the skill that mattered. That's where I started working alongside our SEO teams on search strategy and owning the metadata calls, flagging titles that needed to change to stay competitive.

By the time I left I had moved off the edit entirely and was leading shows. I supported my director on programming strategy and staffing: who hosts what, who edits what, who produces what. Much of that stretch was developing a younger host pool, giving growth notes to people early in their careers using what I'd learned working under senior hosts on shows that worked. The other half of it is reading a team honestly. One person is fast, another is a stronger storyteller, and casting to that is what makes a slate work.