Run-A-Muck, a media startup co-founded by a traditional-media veteran from Manhattan and two longtime Hollywood creatives, is getting into short stories, The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Katie Deighton writes today.

The stories will run in Drafting, the company’s ad-supported Substack about culture and fashion, but the bigger plan is to build those that resonate into the backbone of other money-making projects. They might lead to full-length novels, podcasts, TV shows, immersive events, digital shorts or microdramas and other vertical-video formats, Run-A-Muck says.

“Rather than starting with a medium and searching for an audience, we start with the story we want to tell and then determine the format that best serves that story,” said Run-A-Muck Co-Founder and CEO Pamela Drucker Mann, who previously held posts including CMO and global chief revenue officer over nearly two decades at Vogue publisher Condé Nast.

Run-A-Muck has also raised $10 million in a seed round led by Atreides Management, the investment firm founded by early SpaceX backer Gavin Baker, at a valuation of $80 million.

I asked Katie why this startup’s approach should interest marketers and media companies.

Katie: Run-A-Muck’s CEO doesn’t come from Hollywood. She’s been at the coalface of digital for decades, joining Condé Nast just as the internet started to eclipse the power of magazines. She has seen firsthand how brands and consumers expect content to appear faster than they ever did before, and I think that impatience with the old media world—and particularly the studio system—has created a company predicated on speed.

Her connections in the industry and her reputation for getting things done certainly doesn’t hurt; in that regard, Run-A-Muck weirdly reminds me of Ryan Reynolds’s Maximum Effort.

Are short stories the content that brands and people want fast, though?

Katie: Potentially! The romantasy craze and an overarching sense that books and whimsy are cool again (see: Coach’s latest “Explore Your Story” campaign this year) indicate that young people in particular are in the market for fiction.

Trade title the Bookseller last year also reported that publishers were noting a shift in young people’s interest in the genre, with Samanta Schweblin’s first collection of short stories in 10 years going to 12-way auction. Brands, of course, tend to follow where young people go.

Olipop has helped spawn a whole new category of functional sodas since hitting shelves in 2018, inspiring prebiotic products from Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the process.

So why is it now changing its packaging, introducing a big new ad campaign and adopting a new tagline—“the feel good soda”?

Olipop has historically been a “pull” brand that relied on its taste, its brand architecture and its packaging to convey its central consumer proposition, that feeling good on the inside improves people’s lives “outside,” co-founder and CEO Ben Goodwin said at this week’s WSJ Global Food Forum.

But that’s gotten tougher as sales grew and success inspired imitation.

“Most of our competitors effectively copied our name architecture and copied our brand architecture, so you know, seven years in, it’s a little less breakout,” Goodwin said. “Hence the new brand rules.”

The new ads will pitch Olipop as a good time, the way consumers experienced soda when they first encountered it, not harm reduction.

“Being able to meet customers there and meet them where their identities are instead of challenging them or shaming them has been a really important part of our platform,” the CEO said. 

It has been difficult over the years to develop a marketing message that felt “like it translated our ethos accurately,” according to Goodwin. “And so I have just been an enormous pain in the ass, which is not atypical, but I’ve been a huge pain in the ass with the marketing team for a long time.”

The work that is now emerging finally resonates with Goodwin as a founder, he said, predicting that it will “crush” with consumers. “I feel it in my bones,” he said.

The company nonetheless plans to do a lot of testing and refining as the campaign picks up.

“We’re going to do some ramped-up spending through this year,” Goodwin said, “but then we’re going to really go hell for leather in 2027.”

Watch: Ben Goodwin, co-founder and CEO of Olipop, discusses why “functional soda” has gained so much popularity, the demographic of the consumers driving its popularity, and what’s next for the industry. [WSJ Video]

Meta Platforms has introduced an AI agent for businesses on its WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger services that it says can answer customer questions, book appointments and close sales, Meghan Bobrowsky writes for The Journal.

What’s more, Meta says future capabilities will include conducting market research, providing competitive intelligence and connecting with tools to manage businesses’ calendars.

“As our models advance, your agent will take on more and eventually help you run your whole business,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

The agent is free for now, but Meta aims to make it a subscription service.

At the same time: Meta has repeatedly delayed releasing its latest AI model to developers via an API, raising questions about another key avenue for potential turning the company’s huge AI spending into revenue.

OpenAI and Anthropic make money in part by selling access to their APIs, which developers use to embed their AI into custom projects and tools without having to build their own models from scratch.

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