Future of TV Briefing: Why Aéropostale is investing in creator-led episodic shows

Q&A

Brands are increasingly trying to make entertainment, not just ads. They’re enlisting creators and producing episodic series, sometimes simultaneously.

Case in point: Aéropostale. The clothing brand recently released the six-episode second season of its docu-series-style show “The Intern Diaries” on YouTube and TikTok. The show starred TikTok creator Deja Clark and promoted a clothing collection collaboration between the creator and brand. 

Digiday spoke with Marisa Thalberg, evp and chief customer and marketing officer of Catalyst Brands, which licenses the Aéropostale brand from Authentic Brands Group, about the show, including the thinking behind its cross-platform strategy, its paid media approach and its budget.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Season two of “The Intern Diaries” just wrapped a little over a week ago. Given that this was the show’s second season, was there anything you had looked to test or try differently with this season?

The biggest change I feel we made was turning it from something that felt serialized but very much through the lens of more just social media content creation to something we really produced with more of an entertainment lens. A little bit more of a mix of scripted and unscripted, but well-produced. We hired a real director. We had a whole graphic title sequence for it. It really feels like a little show. And for me, that was really exciting to be very, very clear in our intent and in the actual content that this was meant to be entertaining and watched over the course of its six-episode arc.

The show was produced for YouTube and filmed horizontally, but episodes were also posted in full and horizontally on TikTok. Why film horizontally? I imagine the suspicion would have been that a majority of the views would come on TikTok since that’s where Deja has her biggest following. So why not do this as a purely vertical series?

I think we really could have done it either way. But I think the feeling was that YouTube is sort of a home base for where this kind of serialized content could live and sit as a video-led channel. So really, it was about maximizing multiple video channels with this kind of content, each knowing it was going to be received a little differently. YouTube, for example, was our strongest platform retention-wise. TikTok’s where we’ve seen the highest engagement. On Instagram, we saw two times the engagement on “Intern Diaries” content versus our regular content that we program. So each channel has served a little bit of a different role, and so we just decided to be playful with the format.

Who on the brand side is responsible for overseeing this series, and have you needed to create any new roles or hire anyone to run a program like this?

We have a pretty lean team. It’s one team under me. Our integrated marketing, creative and social teams all collaborated on it, and we partnered with Authentic Studios, which is a part of Authentic Brands Group. They’ve been great production partners to us in this, and they did the production end in this case.

The show is designed to promote a collection created with Deja Clark that was released during the season. How have the sales of that collection performed compared to the collection that was released with last year’s season of the show?

Yeah, really well. I mean, we just launched it, so we’re just underway with it now. But we’re very pleased. I mean, first of all, it’s about selling the collection for sure, but it’s also about just getting people excited about Aéropostale and driving them at this very critical for a teen audience back-to-school period. So seeing really great receptivity to the line and really good results.

With last year’s season of the show, one of the performance indicators was — because the collection was initially released exclusively in the app — the app made the top five of the Apple App Store. Did that happen again this year?

It was kind of a hard benchmark because the app was so new at that point that getting people to download the app to have exclusive access was a first for everyone. So at this point, our biggest fans already had the app. But it absolutely wound up driving to – definitely not top five, but probably top 30 or 40 of apps in the two days that we were exclusively selling the Deja collection through the app.

Being able to have business performance tied to this obviously helps to justify this as a marketing expense. What was the budget for this show, and what bucket of the broader marketing budget does the budget for this program come from?

I really don’t like to reveal budgets. I will say, when you think about what traditional commercial content could cost, we did this very affordably, like really low six figures.

Six figures overall? Because sometimes reality shows can be six figures per episode.

Not per episode. Overall.

I saw a YouTube comment on the first episode where a person asked if anyone else came to the episode from a TikTok ad. What was the paid media strategy behind the series?

That’s so funny. I mean, when you do something like this, you’re obviously doing it from the standpoint of what’s the first way you expect people to find it. You want it to feel organic and be organically led, but we will boost to amplify through paid just to make sure it gets that extended reach to get people’s curiosity. And then of course you’re looking for other metrics, like I think we picked up at least another 50,000 followers of our TikTok as a result of that. We use paid to boost just to make sure it got the exposure to prospective audiences, and then it becomes a kind of fun way to drive acquisition. 

And also when you’re working with an influencer, of course, Deja is an influencer, and her parents are too. The bonus part of this is we got the whole Clark family in on it. And of course you partner because you want the extended reach of their own fan bases to get intrigued and to discover Aéropostale, perhaps for the first time or certainly in a new way.

Now that the season is done, I don’t know if there’s going to be a third season, but I imagine at least there’s going to be more of this branded entertainment coming out of the brand. Is there anything you would do differently or not do next time?

The approach I take with anything, especially when you have a vision that it could be something recurring, is you just want to keep learning forward and figure out how to make it bigger and better. We’ve all already been having discussions on season three: What could it be? How do we do it? How do we make it better? 

But really, what to me made it special is just the realization that we have something here that makes for good storytelling. The idea that we have a genuine internship program that we had last year with Demetra [Dias] participating in our internship program – that’s unique than just being able to have, like, here’s a piece of creator content for a brand, but they might be doing something else for the brand tomorrow. And it proves out that there is a curiosity factor with what’s it like behind the scenes for young people to have a chance to work and intern for a hot apparel brand in New York. 

I’d say what we changed the most from last year’s version to this version is it was a little cheekier, it was a little bit more entertainment driven, a little less docu-series, a little bit more concept-y. And I think that was fun. Will we do it a little differently next year? Tune in and see.

What we’ve heard

“Smaller creators producing offshoots can keep a world culturally active, deepen the lore and introduce new audiences. They can also create confusion around canon, quality and commercial rights.”

— Open Influence’s Maggie Reznikoff

The creator economy’s programmatic problem

Digiday has been doing a lot of reporting about brands like Unilever and L’Oreal working with hundreds of thousands of creators and companies such as Beast Industries and Dentsu creating platforms to make it easier for marketers to work with hordes of influencers. All of which reminded me of the early programmatic advertising era for publishers — which may be a cautionary tale for creators today. Anyway, I go over all that in this short video essay.

Numbers to know

$2.5 million: How much advertisers paid for a 30- to 45-second sponsored segment in a MrBeast video in 2024.

53%: Percentage share of Netflix subscriptions driven by licensed shows in the first quarter of 2026.

$200 million: How much Netflix will pay to stream the 2027 Women’s World Cup.

50%: Percentage increase in price for Roku’s Ultra CTV device, driven by AI-related hardware cost increases.

>$1 billion: How much Hearst will reportedly pay Disney to acquire the latter’s 50% stake in A+E Global Media.

54%: Percentage share of U.S. smart TV OS usage represented by Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV.

$180 million: AMC Global Media’s streaming revenue in the second quarter of 2026.

What we’ve covered

As Hollywood studios chase creator culture, ownership gets complicated:

• Creator-led IP has something Hollywood’s usual model doesn’t: a long tail, built by a steady drip of content and reinvention from smaller creators.
• Acquiring IP that has been planted, cultivated, and propagated online calls into question the nature of its ownership.

Read more about creator-driven IP here.

Who owns the creative brief? Brands and creators are renegotiating the relationship:

• Brands are prodding creators to help them shape concepts, influence products and pressure test ideas.
• At HYPD, clients are increasingly requesting feedback sessions to hear directly from the creators they work with.

Read more about the brand-creator brief here.

Marketers navigate a changing CTV landscape:

• YouTube came out on top for the fourth year in a row as the ad-supported streaming service that received the largest portion of both survey respondents’ ad placements and ad budgets.
• Seventy-five percent of brand and agency respondents said they currently place ads on YouTube as of Q1 2026, followed by Amazon’s Prime Video at 47% and Hulu and Paramount+ tied at 43%.

Read more about marketers’ CTV platform mix here.

How a fitness creator built her own global wellness platform:

• Gabby George used her followings on TikTok and YouTube to create her own online fitness platform, GGStudio.
• GGStudio now counts more than 30,000 members across 93 countries after launching in August 2025.

Read more about creator subscription platforms here.

What Unilever’s 300,000-creator network actually looks like:

• Digiday spoke with Unilever as well as several agency execs to demystify the company’s creator push, breaking down the logistics of it and interrogating its limitations.
• Unilever told Digiday that its massive creator program is managed through a combination of in-house teams, agency partnerships, and experiential programs, but didn’t provide details beyond that.

Read more about Unilever’s creator network here.

What we’re reading

Disney+’s planned overhaul:

Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro has pegged tech upgrades for Disney+ in hopes of reigniting subscriber growth for the company’s flagship streamer, according to Bloomberg.

Netflix’s brand-creator demand:

As Netflix adds videos from top YouTube channels, it’s asking creators to remove sponsored segments, which could cause issues for creators with brands, according to Bloomberg.

David Ellison’s WBD setback response:

Paramount’s owner is trying to game out how to get its WBD over the line, including determining potential concessions and trying to position the deal’s collapse as a hit to Hollywood employment levels, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Fox and iSpot’s outcomes push:

Fox will use iSpot’s outcomes measurement to share ad-related business results for big and small advertisers across traditional TV and streaming, according to Variety.