He spent twenty years teaching Fortune 500 brands to think like media companies. Now Eli Pakier rents that playbook by the fraction - to socks startups, boutique agencies, and anyone tired of paying enterprise prices for enterprise thinking.
Most marketing tag lines are wishful thinking dressed up as strategy. Eli Pakier's is four words long and he has spent two decades keeping his side of the bargain: turning brands into media companies. It sounds like a slide. In his hands it has been a way of working across nearly every category a consumer touches, from the card in your wallet to the socks on your feet.
Pakier is a brand strategist and marketer. That title covers a lot of ground, and in his case it should. His career has run down the three main roads of the industry without staying long enough on any one to get comfortable. He has worked the agency side at Saatchi & Saatchi and TBWA\Chiat\Day. He has worked the media side at Bloomberg, The Atlantic and Vice. He has worked the brand side, sitting in the chair where the marketing budget actually lives. Most people pick a lane. Pakier collected all of them, and the collecting turned out to be the point.
The phrase on the front of his portfolio - "turning brands into media companies" - is easy to nod along to and hard to actually do. It means a brand should stop interrupting the good stuff and start being the good stuff. Fewer ads shouting over the show, more shows worth watching. It is the logic behind the campaigns he has shaped for Netflix and Hulu, for Visa across the NFL and the Olympics, for Skittles and Olay in China, for Nissan's GT-R. The common thread is not a product feature. It is a story someone chose to spend time with.
He learned the discipline in the places that invented it. A degree in psychology and zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is an unusual on-ramp to advertising, but it explains something about how he works: watch the behavior, then figure out the story that moves it. From there came the agency years, the media years, and eventually the moment where the theory got its biggest test.
At Bloomberg, Pakier built and led an in-house brand consultancy, and then he launched the inaugural Bloomberg New Economy Forum - a global summit and media platform built to wrestle with real socio-economic problems. As managing director on the marketing side, his job had a strange and specific shape. Ten founding partners, names like 3M, Microsoft, Mastercard and Hyundai, each with its own business priority. One newsroom with its own editorial standards. His task was to find the exact spot where a company's agenda and genuine journalism overlapped, and to do it ten times over without letting either side swallow the other.
The numbers travelled. Roughly four trillion dollars of market capitalization represented among participants. Some 3.7 billion impressions across the coverage. Brand tracking that showed double-digit lifts - on the order of 10 to 20 percent - in familiarity, buzz, consideration and advocacy for the partner brands, and the strongest movement among exactly the market-moving audience the whole thing was built for. The Forum did not stay a one-off. It became a permanent Bloomberg editorial fixture, still running its annual summit today.
A lot of executives spend year twenty defending a title. Pakier gave his up. In 2019 he founded Field Trip Department, a consultancy that behaves like a fractional CMO, a marketing department and a creative studio folded into one. The bet underneath it is almost stubbornly simple: the strategies that were built for the biggest companies in the world work just as well for companies a fraction of the size, if someone senior is willing to bring them down the ladder intact.
Fractional gets mistaken for freelance, and Pakier is quick to draw the line. Freelance is hours. Fractional is ownership. The idea is to give a challenger brand the same strategic brain a Fortune 500 rents full-time, minus the full-time cost and the politics. He was early to say it out loud. When the economy tightened and companies started cutting the very roles - strategy heads, creative leads - they still needed, the market caught up to the argument he had already been making.
Which is how a former Bloomberg strategy director ends up carrying a marketing title at a brand that sells underwear, socks and undershirts. It reads like a mismatch until you look at it his way. A challenger brand fighting for attention against giants is exactly the kind of company that needs to act like a media company - to earn a watch, not buy an interruption. The playbook does not change. The budget does.
Away from the decks, Pakier keeps a serious photography practice, most of it built around Asia and cultural documentation - a China photo essay, a "Hidden Asia" series, people-and-place work that sits on his own site right next to the brand case studies. He does not treat those as separate hobbies. Both are the same act: find the culture, find the story, tell it so someone feels something. A camera and a client brief are just two doors into the same room.
He lives in Summit, New Jersey with his wife and two children, and lists hiking and hunting down craft breweries among the off-hours pursuits. It is a grounded life for someone whose work spans continents and categories, and it fits the pattern. The through-line of his career is not a single brand or a single big number. It is a refusal to specialize into a corner, and a conviction that good brand-building scales down as well as it scales up.
Ask what he is building toward and the answer is less about a bigger logo and more about access. He wants the thinking that once belonged only to the Visa-and-Coca-Cola tier to be within reach of the company three people deep in a room somewhere, still figuring out what it stands for. That is the quiet ambition under the four-word tag line. Turn a brand into a media company, sure. But first make sure any brand can.