Connect Media

Connect Media hired Hamilton McCulloh as EVP Connect Creative and Elliot Golan to expand their creative agency offering and drive next phase of growth

Leadership read: Connect Media's move is less about adding headcount and more about formalising Connect Creative as a distinct revenue line within a media business historically built on commercial real estate news distribution. Bringing in two senior creative operators simultaneously signals the agency offering is being repositioned from an internal capability into a standalone commercial unit, one with its own growth mandate, client acquisition targets, and service delivery infrastructure. That is a structurally different commitment than adding a creative director to support editorial. This is one of 12 strategic hiring signals we have tracked across the last 90 days, though the comparable set here is broad and cross-sector; few map closely to a specialist media company building out an embedded agency arm. The more instructive parallel is the wider pattern of niche B2B media businesses, particularly those with captive vertical audiences, attempting to monetise that audience access through agency and content-marketing services sold to sector advertisers. The play is familiar; execution at senior scale is where most stall. Companies reaching this stage of agency-within-media build-out consistently surface demand for commercial leadership able to sell integrated creative mandates rather than media placements, alongside operations capability that can hold margin as headcount and project complexity scale together. The client-facing and delivery functions require meaningfully different leadership profiles, and the gap between them is where these models tend to leak.

curated · 2026-05-06 · context →