A media production function, built from the ground up at Anthropic. In six months’ time, we went from supporting a few small webinars a month to shooting three to six pieces a week: podcasts, webinars, interviews, livestreams, model launch content, voiceovers, etc. Productions supporting shows including CNN, CBS News, CNBC, BBC, ABC News Australia, Axios, Lenny’s Podcast, Every and Google Cloud Tech.
Case study
Media Production Campaign
The story
The Context
In 2025, Anthropic had no in-house media production function. I had a gut feeling one was needed before there was data to show it, so I started building with the simplest thing that would work and upgraded as the function proved itself.
The Challenge
Find a simple setup that enables Anthropic to create media content in-house. Turn that into the infrastructure behind everything the company put out — podcasts, webinars, interviews, livestreams, voiceovers, executive announcements — while the scale and demand for it grew each month.
What Went Wrong
Issue #1:
Early on, Cody and I didn’t know Anthropic’s visual identity well enough. We found out when a couple of shoots came back with lighting and color grading that didn’t sit with what Brand Creative was doing at a larger scale, and they flagged it.
What I learned from it:
How to produce the look and feel of a distinct visual identity with clear creative direction, exact technical specs, and a quick turnaround time.
Issue #2:
Media production wasn’t an official department, so it had none of the operational infrastructure internal event support had, and the standard intake process didn’t fit it. For months the asks came in as unofficial Slack messages. Media work can be last-minute by nature, so that often meant a few hours to a couple of days of lead time.
What I did about it:
I made a media support Slack channel to funnel every request into one place, and we folded those into the Event support triage process, until we could demarcate media production as a separate thing.
The Outcome
A highly-adaptable function able to support small-to-large-scale media production efforts at one of the fastest-growing AI companies in tech with live audience engagement of 15,000+ and national media pieces with 2M+ views.
Credit
Cody Young
Video engineer and technical director.
I had the vision before he was hired, but I couldn’t implement it as a one-person team. Cody was the person that helped me take it from an idea to a clean, polished, scalable production process over the course of six months. I laid the plans and bought the gear, we tested and landed on a lot of the solutions together.