Hasta La Creative!

Marketers are used to holding all the power, while media owners scramble for dollars amid all kinds of disruption. But the smartest brands actually need to study their media partners and in many cases follow their lead.

Media brands operate in arguably the most competitive marketing arena. A cable network competes with 250 other brands for attention. Digital-media brands like Yahoo, Hulu and Facebook — once upstarts and disrupters themselves — are seeing shiny, newer upstarts invade their hard-won turf. Consumers switch brands at the click of a remote control or mouse. As businesses, their market share is tracked and measured in a matter of hours, rather than months.

But even with limited marketing budgets, media brands are improvising and making the most of their unpaid media options first. Here are some lessons we can draw from media brands:

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