Mocean Bets Its Future on Erasing the Line Between Entertainment and Advertising

A Los Angeles creative agency just made a structural bet that the traditional advertising industry has been avoiding for years.

On April 23, Mocean announced it had hired Laura Likos as President of Brand and simultaneously launched a new operating model called See Change. The message is direct: entertainment and advertising are no longer separate disciplines. They are the same job.

This is not a rebrand. It is an organizational restructure with a clear point of view on where the industry is heading.

What Mocean Actually Did

Mocean is a 150-person agency that built its reputation doing marketing and promotional work for film studios and streaming platforms. It has won Entertainment Agency of the Year three times. See Change collapses that distinction between its entertainment and brand work entirely.

The new model unifies five internal practices: Strategy and Creative, Social and Community, Content Studio, Design Studio, and Post Studio. Ideas now move from insight to production within a single system, eliminating the handoffs between departments.

To lead the brand side of this structure, Mocean hired Likos away from 72andSunny LA, where she oversaw the agency's return to AdAge A-List status and worked with clients including Amazon, the NFL, and L'Oreal. Alongside her, Ryan Bucci, ranked ninth among D&AD's top 100 creative directors globally, was named Chief Creative Officer of Brand.

"The best brand work has been borrowing from entertainment for years," Likos said. "Mocean doesn't borrow from that system. It operates inside it."

The Business Case

Mocean has results that give this restructure credibility. For North Italia restaurants, an SXSW activation generated more than 913 million social impressions. For The Cheesecake Factory, converting its social channels into an entertainment program produced 60% audience growth and a 115% spike in engagement.

The core argument: agencies still treating entertainment as a creative style, rather than an operating method, are working with a structural disadvantage. Audiences do not sort content by which type of agency produced it. They sort it by whether it holds their attention.

"Advertising agencies understand brands. Entertainment agencies understand how to move audiences. Mocean understands both," said CEO Michael McIntyre, who grew the agency from 15 employees in 2000 to 150 today.

Why APAC Marketers Should Pay Attention

Forrester forecasts that 85% of US business-to-consumer marketing executives plan to review their media agency relationships in 2026. Average agency headcount cuts are projected at 15% this year, following an 8% reduction in 2025.

Holding companies are responding in their own way. WPP has restructured into four practice areas and repositioned itself as, in its CEO's words, "not an agency but an operating system." Publicis recently acquired 160over90, a sports and culture agency, to fold entertainment capabilities into its performance marketing infrastructure.

What Mocean is doing differently is building from the inside out, as an independent, rather than through acquisitions. The See Change model is designed so that the insight, the creative idea, and the final asset all emerge from the same team.

For marketing leaders in Asia Pacific, where the media and entertainment market is projected to grow from US$1.34 trillion in 2025 to US$1.76 trillion by 2031, these structural questions are arriving fast. The race to close the gap between entertainment thinking and brand execution is underway. Mocean's announcement is a signal of what the finish line looks like.