About State of Brand
State of Brand is a trade publication covering brand strategy and category positioning for CMOs, brand strategists and marketing leaders. It is an owned media property published by Outlever, a company that builds and runs owned media for mid-market and enterprise organizations. There is no fee to participate in an interview.
What is State of Brand?
We report on the ideas, people and developments shaping brand strategy, category positioning, and how brands hold meaning as media fragments. Most of our coverage comes from the executives, operators and subject matter experts doing the work firsthand.
A lot of that coverage ends up being about the job itself. The marketing function keeps getting redrawn. Work that used to sit somewhere else, like pricing, product marketing, category creation, community and parts of sales enablement, now lands on the same desk. Some companies have retitled the role or folded it into a revenue org. Tenure in the seat is shorter than almost anywhere else in the C-suite.
Several pressures sit underneath that. Performance channels hit diminishing returns, so brand is back on the agenda, but it has to be argued for in the language of revenue. Attribution rewards the channels with the least influence over how a buyer actually makes up their mind. AI collapsed the cost of producing creative, which pushes whatever advantage is left further upstream into positioning and judgment. A CMO today is asked to own the company's standing in rooms where nothing can be bought, and that is a different job than the one the title used to describe.
Our readership is global and includes professionals at Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations across brand and marketing. We write for practitioners. Our readers usually know what a campaign looked like from the outside. What they want is how it got approved, what it cost, and what the person running it would do differently.
Why does State of Brand exist?
Most of what happens inside an industry never gets written down anywhere useful.
The general business press covers the biggest brands and the loudest campaigns. Trade coverage has thinned out as publications consolidated and staff writers left the beat. That leaves a lot of ground uncovered.
Meanwhile the people doing the work have knowledge their peers would pay for and nowhere durable to put it. Someone rebuilt a brand system after a merger and learned things in the process that were never recorded. Someone else defended a category position against a better-funded competitor, and the only account of how it went lives in their head.
That is the material we go after. We report on the parts of this industry nobody else is filing, and we get it from the people who lived them instead of from press releases and analyst notes.
What is owned media?
Owned media is a publication that a company owns and runs itself, built to serve a readership instead of a funnel.
The difference is editorial. Most branded content is about the company publishing it, its product, its customers, its case for why you should buy. Owned media is about the industry that company sells into. It reports, it interviews, it covers developments the way a trade publication does, and it has to earn an audience the same way, by being worth reading on its own.
A few things follow from that.
- You own it. Ad prices can rise and a platform can change its algorithm without taking your audience with it.
- It gets more valuable over time. An archive of original interviews is worth more in its third year than its first. A campaign stops working the day you stop paying for it.
- People cite it. Original reporting gets quoted, linked and forwarded. Promotional content mostly does not.
Who publishes State of Brand?
Outlever. We build and run owned media for mid-market and enterprise companies, which covers the publication itself, the editorial operation behind it, and the go-to-market strategy it fits into.
State of Brand is one of our own properties. We publish it ourselves, not on behalf of an outside sponsor, and we would rather say that up front than bury it. It is also the same thing we build for clients. We run one so we know what we are asking them to do.
Why does owned media matter now?
Go-to-market changed, in two ways that feed each other.
How buyers find information. Buying decisions now take shape long before anyone contacts a vendor. Buyers educate themselves through peers, newsletters, podcasts, private communities and search, and by the time a sales conversation starts the shortlist is usually set. Whatever influence is still available to you sits upstream of your pipeline, which means earning it in the places buyers go to learn, well before they are ready to talk to anyone.
How information gets distributed. Search increasingly returns an answer instead of a list. AI assistants and answer engines read sources and hand back a conclusion, so what matters is whether your material is the kind of thing that gets read and attributed. In practice that means original reporting, interviews and firsthand perspective. At the same time, social feeds reward what people want to forward, paid channels cost more per unit of trust than they did five years ago, and much of the trade press that used to carry these conversations has consolidated.
Both problems land in the same place. The channels you rent keep getting more expensive and less effective, and the ones that still work need something worth citing. Running a publication produces that material as a byproduct of doing the work.
This is why we treat owned media as a required part of a content and go-to-market strategy, not an optional thing sitting next to content marketing.
How is this different from content marketing?
Content marketing is written for the funnel and it is about the company doing the writing. Owned media is written for a reader and it is about the industry.
The consequences show up everywhere else. Content marketing gets measured on conversion and loses its value quickly. Owned media gets measured on readership and citation, and it holds value for years.
It also changes who agrees to talk to you. Senior operators turn down requests to appear in vendor content all the time. They say yes to publications that will represent them accurately. We take that seriously, because the invitation only works if we do.
What do you cover?
We publish in three sections.
Who do you interview, and why was I invited?
We regularly speak with senior executives, operators, practitioners, researchers and other subject matter experts whose experience is relevant to the topics we cover.
Our editorial team proactively identifies potential contributors based on their expertise, experience and perspective. You do not need to be a customer of, partner to, or otherwise affiliated with any company to participate.
Interviews are meant to surface useful firsthand perspective. They are not product or company promotion. For the people we talk to, an interview is a chance to contribute to the conversation in their field, share what they learned from their work, and build a published body of thought leadership around the subjects they know best.
Does it cost anything to be interviewed or featured?
No. There is no fee to participate in an interview or to be featured in State of Brand.
We do not charge executives, subject matter experts, or their companies for editorial coverage. There are no placement fees, participation fees, required subscriptions, or other payments associated with being interviewed or included in an editorial feature.
Participation also does not require you or your organization to purchase anything from, become a customer of, or enter into a commercial relationship with anyone.
What should I expect if I agree to an interview?
The process is intentionally straightforward.
A member of the State of Brand editorial team will have a short conversation with you, typically around 20 minutes, focused on the subject where your experience is most relevant. We then develop that conversation into an editorial feature.
Before publication, participants get an opportunity to review the article and flag factual inaccuracies, quotation issues, or important context that should be clarified. We want to represent your perspective accurately and keep the process light for people who are busy.
Selected interviews
- Emma Lovewell Is the Drake of Fitness: interview with Founder at Live Learn Lovewell.
- Niche Newsletters Turn A Few Thousand Decision Makers Into Premium Ad Inventory: interview with Co-Founder at Appeared.in.
- Anthropic Is Watermarking Claude's Output: interview with Founder and CTO at Search Atlas.