Why Franchises Are The Editorial Power-Up A Brand Needs To Grab An Audience For Keeps
Opinion → David Morton – 16th July 2025
Owned editorial is the next frontier for brands at the vanguard of fitness, wellbeing and health. But focussing that adventure into the New World of content solely upon individual campaigns or product launches makes hard work of it. More than that, it means that the editorial tap is only turned on a few times a year at the very most.
To become an editorial destination in your own right, you need to create franchises – regular, recurring content vehicles around which you can quickly build an editorial programme. It’s the power-up a brand needs to go from consumer-centric to audience-led. That is why we’ve launched well.being and filled it with repeated formats that tell the stories of fittest. and the brands with whom we work.
The right franchise can make you a source of information, education and awareness that is of continued interest to your target demographic. A consistent cadence of publishing builds habit in the minds of your audience and it becomes something that they look forward to. Something they tell their friends about.
Over time, they feel like they’re on the inside. That is the emotional connection that you want and editorial franchises are the easiest way to foster it. Rather than reinventing the wheel every time, you have a few wheels with much better bearings. Wheels that will spin on and on from a single push.
Let’s look at R.A.D. as an example. As a skate-inspired fitness shoe and apparel brand, they have a YouTube franchise called R.A.D. Tapes, which takes us inside the lives of their sponsored athletes as they train and compete. The visual stings and music leans heavily on a 90s skateboard video aesthetic, riffing on the brand ethos in a fun way. To date there are 18 of them.
Cult US running clothing brand Satisfy understands very well that the running community is obsessed with the sport in all its iterations. As a vein of good editorial, niche interest can be incredibly rich. Satisfy’s digital magazine Possessed is a franchise full of franchises, covering running culture, ultra athlete interviews, and myriad left field takes on the truths that all runners can recognise.
Over in the saturated world of podcasts, there are some notable producers who have graduated from a singular to a franchised model. The hugely successful High Performance podcast, for example, has added two new franchises to their offering, which covers their core theme of success stories and advice from super achievers in business and sport but in fresh ways. The Room Where It Happened keys in on the pivotal moment in an interviewee’s development arc, while Untapped speaks to the fulfilment of their potential.
The channel or medium isn’t important. It could be a newsletter or a podcast, a digital magazine or a YouTube series. Even [gasp] a printed newspaper or coffee table book.
In fact, a well-considered brand editorial franchise could be expressed across all of those and more in the manner that is best suited to each channel.
With all the algorithms at play, very few people are going to see all the versions of a brand. If they do, it gives them the sense of being on the inside and having their finger on the pulse of the brand, its ethos and its stories.
That’s a cool feeling. They’re not just expressing a passing interest for a campaign with a double-tap on social. But they are feeling a deeper affinity with a brand they have come to rely upon for so much more than the product.
