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Jared Cohen Invites Audience and Brands to Share Cultural Moments
How he guides Your Name in Lights (formerly Home Brew) through the entertainment marketing space
“Culture is moving toward people wanting to feel like they’re a part of something,” Jared Cohen tells Muse. “There is still a tendency to create a sense of exclusivity to make you appear more desirable. But on social, audiences are looking for inclusivity and communities they can belong to. The opportunity is to be relatable over aspirational and build a community that audiences want to feel connected to.”
This is at the center of Home Brew’s rebrand to Your Name in Lights.
“While we help put entertainment brands in the spotlight, we are devoted to the communities that put their name in lights. Audiences don’t want to just consume culture, they want to participate and be a part of it,” he adds.
Jared serves as president of the award-winning entertainment digital marketing and creative agency. A former Sony Pictures executive, he has 16 years of experience providing marketing strategies for Universal and Paramount, TV series including Abbott Elementary and Shark Tank, plus hundreds of film campaigns for Spider-Man, Jumanji, Ghostbusters and other franchises.
We spent a few minutes with Jared on his background, inspirations and the company’s rebrand away from Home Brew to Your Name in Lights.
You’ll be operating under your sibling agency MDRN Logic. How did that come about?
Both Your Name In Lights and MDRN Logic are part of the Terry Hines & Associates agency network, making this a natural evolution of our agency’s growth. The move deepens our strategy, creative, social and production capabilities, creating more opportunities for innovation while also offering clients an expanded range of specialized services and expertise.
Tell us about the rebrand, and how the company landed on the new name?
We are putting a renewed focus on what the agency does best: putting entertainment clients and their brands at the center of culture through social-first campaigns designed to capture attention and drive conversation. The new name is inspired by Hollywood’s Golden Age and the thrill of seeing “your name in lights” on the theater marquee. That breakthrough moment. That feeling that you’ve arrived, you’ve made it.
You have said you intend to bring clients more creative capabilities and opportunities via MDRN Logic. Can you expand on that?
Bringing Your Name In Lights under the MDRN Logic umbrella creates a stronger, more integrated offering for clients by combining two complementary areas of expertise. Your Name In Lights brings fan-forward entertainment marketing and social-first expertise, while MDRN Logic adds expanded capabilities across brand level creative, strategy and production. Together, we have the opportunity to develop more ambitious, culturally relevant work while staying rooted in what defines Your Name In Lights: entertainment.
And we’ve already seen the results. From initial concept through full production, our agency produced the hit social series Spill The Tea for All Elite Wrestling, garnering millions of views across platforms, sparking positive fan conversation and earning coverage from Yahoo! Sports and Sports Illustrated. This example highlights how we can combine our entertainment expertise with creative strategy and production to develop original work that captures the attention of new audiences and creates deeper connections with fans.
What excites you most about the rebrand?
Bringing together different perspectives, experiences and approaches. Working alongside forward-thinking leaders like CEO Erica Coates and CSO Allan Gungormez creates new opportunities to push our creative and strategy.
What trend is shaping culture right now?
We’ve seen the power of nostalgia firsthand through our community management and fan engagement across MGA Entertainment’s Miniverse and Little Tikes, where audiences gravitate towards content that speaks to their childhood and creates an emotional connection. What’s exciting is how nostalgia is being reinvented for a new generation. It also speaks to how trends are cyclical. Something what feels old can become new again, and social accelerates that cycle. Social trends move fast. But they always come back around, creating opportunities to revive moments that clearly connected with audiences and reinvent them to feel fresh and relevant to current conversations.
What’s a project you are proud of?
I am so proud of our recent digital media campaign for Season 2 of FX’s Adults. We truly embodied the voice of the show and brought that personality to life across every aspect of the campaign. We turned Uber Journey Ads into FaceTime calls from the cast, created character profiles and direct-to-camera videos on dating apps, and even saw our copywriting take to the skies on aerial banners flown across Lollapalooza and Los Angeles beaches.
When marketing feels like an extension of the show, you know you’ve succeeded. When your digital creative feels like a part of current culture, you know you’ve succeeded. And when your content travels beyond the platforms where they were initially launched, you know you’ve succeeded.
A non-advertising industry you learn from?
I went to college at The University of Texas at Austin, and it’s a tradition to attend games with my family each year. One of the parallels I see with social marketing is the development of a playbook and the need for adaptability. I love to create social playbooks for entertainment brands, developing strategy, approach to social content, and execution for engaging with fandoms. In football, you can have a complete game plan going into each week, but once you’re on the field, every play gives you new information and informs your next move. You must be willing to react to what’s happening in real time and adjust the play when the moment calls for it.
How has your lived experience shown up in your work?
I love to travel, and part of my travel adventures include seeing how different cultures and local communities consume entertainment from music and art to movies (of course). On a recent trip to Norway, I went to see Sentimental Value at an Oslo movie theater to immerse myself in the true Norwegian moviegoing culture. It gave me a deeper appreciation for the communal experience of entertainment. I always bring these different perspectives into my work when defining target audiences, creating social content, and developing engagement tactics that will truly resonate with communities while also having the ability to work on a larger—even global—scale.
You’ve got 2 minutes with the industry. What’s your hot take?
Don’t overthink it. Refuse the urge to play it safe. We can all get caught up in overanalyzing—I know I do and I have to remind myself to pull back. It’s when you take that risk, trust your instincts, and push the boundaries that you create a moment in entertainment marketing. That’s when you see your name in lights.
2 Minutes With is our regular interview series where we chat with creatives about their backgrounds, creative inspirations, work they admire and more. For more about 2 Minutes With, or to be considered for the series, please get in touch.
