BRIAN HOLLER / THE ARCHIVE
Media, Brands & Culture
Reporting, observations, and practical ideas from business, cannabis, media, culture, and the places they meet.
WWE NXT Set to Clash With AEW Blood and Guts in Return of the Wednesday Night War
Listings show NXT moving to Wednesday November 4 against AEW Blood and Guts. The first head to head Wednesday clash since 2021, explained.
Anthropic Moves Agent Skills Into the Linux Foundation—and Makes Portability the Point
Anthropic donated Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation after the standard reached more than 70 integrated platforms, one million published skills and nearly 280 million installs. The…
What the Skydance Warner Deal Means for Wrestling Media: WWE, AEW and the New Rights Landscape
Wrestling shows why modern media distribution is no longer one deal: live rights, highlights, discovery, archives and direct audience are separate assets that need useful handoffs.
What Should You Measure in Marketing Besides Reach and Impressions?
Measure marketing beyond reach by tracking second actions, audience migration, qualified response, return behavior and the business outcome the campaign is meant to influence.
How Should Companies Use AI Without Losing Their Voice?
A practical company AI workflow: start with proprietary context, separate generation from approval, define real editorial standards and keep accountability human.
The Five Jobs Business Media Should Actually Do
Business media should filter signal, add context, create access, transfer credibility responsibly and reach people capable of acting. Define the job before choosing the KPI.
Teach Before You Sell: How Education Reduces Buying Friction
Education reduces buying friction when it answers uncertainty, teaches people how to evaluate the decision and turns repeated explanations into reusable infrastructure across sales and customer experience.
The Network Is the Moat: How Independent Media Scales Through Collaboration
Independent-media networks become defensible when complementary capabilities are connected through repeatable handoffs, attributable distribution, trusted relationships and clear boundaries.
What Operators Actually Need From Media
Operators need media with a defined job: relevant distribution, useful context, clear paid-versus-earned boundaries, reusable source material and reporting tied to the promise.
AI Can Scale Your Voice. It Can Also Erase It.
AI can scale a person’s voice or flatten it into plausible sameness. The difference is whether the system works from real source material and amplifies judgment instead of…
Restricted Markets Make Better Marketers
Restricted markets expose channel dependence. When easy paid reach is unreliable, partnerships, education, search, direct audience and earned distribution matter more.
The Stoner Parent Stereotype Inverted, and Most of Cannabis Media Missed It
The old stoner-parent stereotype is increasingly disconnected from reality. Brian Holler on normalization, responsible adult cannabis use, parenthood and why culture often changes long before media language and…
Smoke on ESPN’s Set: The Cannabis Double Standard in Sports Media
Cannabis controversies in sports media are often less about the plant than power, context and who has leverage. Brian Holler examines the uneven cultural rules around cannabis, alcohol…
High Five Revisited: What I Got Right, and What I Would Add Now
Brian Holler revisits an earlier High Five profile and grades his own thinking on cannabis, opportunity, newcomers, lessons and legacy. The point is not nostalgia; it is intellectual…
People Do Not Want More Noise. They Want Truth They Can Feel.
When competent content becomes abundant, recognizable human truth becomes more valuable. Specificity, lived context, judgment and an experience that matches the story are harder to fake—and easier to…
Stop Calling Everything Content
Stop treating interviews, reporting, essays, explainers and promotional assets as interchangeable feed inventory. Define the job, preserve the source and build a body of work instead of a…
The Faces of Cannabis Say It Without Saying a Word
The Faces of Cannabis shows why human storytelling works best when it preserves specificity rather than manufacturing authenticity. Real people are not brand decoration; they are the story.
The Best Marketing Starts After the Sale
Marketing continues after the sale because onboarding, delivery, communication and recovery determine whether the promises that won the customer become trust, retention and referrals.
The Truth About Cannabis Media: Paid vs Earned, and Why Engagement Beats Follower Count
Paid and earned cannabis media can coexist, but the audience should be able to see the difference. Evaluate media partners by audience fit, editorial quality, disclosure, return behavior,…
Constraints Are Creative Direction
Useful constraints sharpen the brief by forcing real tradeoffs. Bad constraints should be removed when possible; unavoidable ones should become inputs to the design.
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