As INMA’s Berlin World Congress of News Media was coming to a close, chief executive Earl Wilkinson had a message for parting delegates.
“Brand has evolved from a marketing layer into the core operating system of news organisations, and may now be the news industry’s last durable competitive advantage as AI and platform shifts erode traditional business models,“ he said.
He urged publishers to treat brand as an operating system – not a marketing function – built on identity, trust, and human distinctiveness.
Brand has evolved from a marketing layer into the core operating system of news organisations – and may now be the news industry’s last durable competitive advantage.
In a keynote built around “five movements and one argument,” Wilkinson outlined how the forces reshaping media – platform dominance, AI acceleration, and the collapse of traditional business moats – have left brand as the defining differentiator.
“We build businesses around things that are scarce,” Wilkinson told a record more-than-750 delegates from 38 countries attending this year’s World Congress. “You’re not going to be investing in abundance where the margins are disappearing.”
Wilkinson traced the erosion of the industry’s historic advantages. Where once infrastructure, distribution, editorial capacity, and attention created defensible “moats,” each has been dismantled in the digital era:
“The Internet ate the trucks. Advertising got unbundled and became auction-based. Production was democratised. Attention was fragmented.”
AI has accelerated that collapse, creating what he described as a “swamp of sameness,” where differentiation disappears and content becomes interchangeable.
“We’re losing our voice, our perspective. We’re being intermediated, homogenised, de-branded, becoming voiceless,” Wilkinson said.
The scale of disruption is stark: 90 per cent of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years, while human-authored web content has fallen sharply and is projected to drop below 1% within a decade.
As content becomes abundant and cheap, value shifts to what cannot be easily replicated: human journalism.
“We’re shifting from ‘is this true’ to ‘who made this and can I verify this?’” Wilkinson said. He pointed to five emerging scarce assets: verified human authorship, first-hand reporting, source relationships, editorial judgment, and institutional accountability.
Wilkinson argued that “verified human journalism will become a premium category,” comparing it to organic food — a differentiated product that commands higher value.
At the centre of this shift is a redefinition of brand itself. “Brand isn’t the wrapper anymore,” Wilkinson said. “Brand is the operating system.”
Rather than sitting on top of the business, brand now shapes core decisions across the organisation. “The brand is determining which stories you run, which ones you don’t. Who you hire, who you don’t. What the product feels like, what the paywall looks like,” he said.
This represents a structural shift from brand as campaign to brand as strategy – owned not by marketing but by leadership across editorial, product, and executive teams.
Six attributes of winning brands: Wilkinson identified six attributes that define successful news brands today:
-Clarity of mission.
-Product consistency across platforms.
-Editorial distinctiveness.
-Emotional connection with audiences.
-Trust within a defined community.
-Courage to stand for something.
“These are not a marketing function,” he said. “They’re owned by the CEO. They’re owned by the editor. They’re owned by the product lead.”
“The winning brands choose to lose some readers in order to keep others more deeply,” Wilkinson said.
From product to relationship: Wilkinson placed this transformation within a broader evolution of how news organisations compete. Over three decades, the industry has shifted from scale and reach, to quality, and now to relationships.
“What’s scarce today is not news,” he said. “It is a reason to come back.”
This is reflected in messaging. Where news organisations once sought to prove they were digital, they now emphasise human qualities.
“What are we trying to prove today? The exact opposite: that we’re human, we’re authentic, we’re personal, we’re trustworthy,” Wilkinson said.
The only asset left
Looking ahead, Wilkinson warned that platforms, AI, and content economics will continue to erode traditional advantages. “It’s not your distribution. It’s not your breaking news. It’s not your scale. It’s not your quality,” he said. “The only thing that is yours is who you are.”
He closed with a challenge to treat brand as a core asset: “We know that no platform can take it. We know that no AI can replicate it. We know no competitor can buy it,” Wilkinson said. “The decade ahead belongs to those who are unmistakably themselves.”
The key takeaway: In a media environment defined by AI-driven abundance and collapsing attention, brand – rooted in identity, trust, and human distinctiveness – is emerging as the news industry’s last sustainable advantage.
INMA/Dawn McMullan, with thanks
Photos Robert Downs Photography