When Angela Matusik joined HP to build out its brand publishing operation, leadership hadn’t put much thought into how they would measure its success. Which metrics was her work judged by? “Honestly, hardly any,” Matusik said.
The C-suite checked in about once a month, mostly on impressions — a count of how many people saw a piece, not whether the content was building the brand’s reputation and influence. That absence of a yardstick is dangerous, due to a well-documented pattern: the easier a metric is to count, the more budget it’s allocated, until a company funds only what it can measure.
It’s a problem every brand publisher faces: the mandate takes years; the budget is reviewed in quarters. The work has to be sold to leadership not once, at the pitch, but in every cycle that follows.
And that sell is getting harder. According to 2026 data from NIQ, the share of marketing chiefs who say their C-suite believes in long-term brand building has fallen to 69%, from 80% a year earlier. In the same survey, 84% said return on investment is now their primary measure for deciding what to fund. A brand publication, slow by design and hard to tie to quarterly revenue, can be among the first line items on the chopping block. Here’s how to make the case for it — in language the C-suite understands.
Build the scorecard yourself
Matusik, who now advises companies on the kind of brand publishing she led at HP, started by deciding what to measure. Her work was aimed at the top of the funnel, where the returns are brand affinity, loyalty, and reputation. “They’re not as easy to measure, but you see the lift everywhere,” she said. To track day-to-day performance, she brought in a content intelligence platform called Knotch, which provides the kind of live, audience-level read she had relied on while working at journalistic publications like InStyle and People.
Locke Hughes, a former health journalist who is now head of health content at Oura, settled the same question differently. She tracks conversions and click-throughs, but she doesn’t let those numbers stand as the primary measure of the work. Instead, she focuses on whether existing users are engaging with the content and learning how to get more out of their smart rings because of it. In that sense, the brand’s journalism is not simply promoting the product — it’s a part of it.
Earn patience with a quick win
Making the case for long-term brand investment is easier once you have an early win or two to point to. Matusik’s came from a newsletter buried inside HP’s marketing department, a list of 1.5 million people being fed conventional marketing copy and unsubscribing in droves.
Her team tore it down and rebuilt it around the journalism they were already producing. The exodus stopped. Open rates went from under 15% to over 45%. A number like that buys an editor room to argue for the slower work a dashboard often misses.
Sell the brand journalism as insurance
The most persuasive case for brand publishing in 2026 is that the old ways of reaching an audience are failing. Matusik and Hughes both say the ground under brand visibility is shifting fast. Matusik puts it starkly: “SEO is basically dead.” A company that does not own its own story, she argues, will find it harder to reach its audience as AI changes how people find information online.
Incidentally, GEO rewards the kind of work brand publishing produces. In a Muck Rack study of the sources AI tools cite, more than 95% came from non-paid media, and 85% of those were earned media: news coverage, journalism, and reported content, rather than advertising.
LLM visibility pays off in measurable ways. When people know a brand, they stop searching for “best printer” and start searching for the company itself. A recent study from Google and Tracksuit found that growth in brand searches predicts rising sales six to 12 months in advance.
Hughes is already working in that landscape. She reports and publishes with AI in mind, and it pays off: Oura holds the highest share of voice against its competitors. For an editor making the case to leadership, the argument is simple: owning your content is becoming the only reliable way to be found.
Build content as infrastructure
Another strategy is to make the brand publishing useful across the company, not simply for external readers.
Good editorial should never be used only once. A reported story, a documentary, or an original photograph becomes, in Matusik’s words, “a pipeline of assets” that sales decks, executive presentations, events, and internal newsletters all draw from. One feature can do the work of a dozen marketing briefs. Reframed that way, a publication looks less like a cost and more like shared infrastructure, which is much harder for a nervous CFO to cut.
Own a narrow audience
CMOs and in-house editors are often tempted to build a brand publication for the largest audience possible. A wider net seems to promise bigger readership, broader reach, and better odds of converting. Matusik has found the opposite to be true. At Lenovo, she built her brand publishing strategy around a single, narrow group — Gen Z creators — and it paid off precisely because the content made them feel “seen and understood.” Reporting that takes an overlooked audience seriously earns loyalty no broad campaign can buy.
Niche, specialist audiences are also easier to win outright: fewer rivals compete for their attention, and the cost of reaching them is a fraction of what a mass campaign demands.
The case gets easier still when a company’s readers and its customers are one and the same. Hughes has never had to defend the health content at Oura, whose chief executive, she notes, calls it “a health education company at its core.” A publication whose purpose is clear is far easier to defend.
Decide what the publication is for
Oura is the rare case where that purpose was settled from the start. More often, the company’s goals for its journalism are never decided at all, and that’s what dooms it before a single word is published. A publication built to generate sales leads is not the same as one built to earn authority, and a C-suite that has not chosen between them cannot tell whether the work is succeeding. Matusik’s rule is plain: “You shouldn’t create content just for the sake of creating content. It should always have a goal in mind.”
A brand publication builds credibility and influence. In any given quarter, 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market for what a company sells. When they are, they turn to the one they’ve come to trust. That trust, built over years, is what an editor is really selling the C-suite.
