The Two-Story Problem: Misaligned Communications Are Bleeding Streaming Companies Dry

Every company has two communications strategies, though sometimes they aren’t connected, and they aren’t always fully evolved. There’s the external narrative: the press release, the earnings call language, the trade press quotes. And there’s the internal narrative: the town halls, the manager talking points, the Slack channel where people say what they actually think.

The myth is that employees will tolerate an internal communications strategy that doesn’t match the PR, doesn’t match reality, or is totally overlooked. They don’t.

The data backs this up. According to research from Gallup and EY, 47% of key employees leave a company within a year of a merger, and 75% leave within the first three years. These are the people with the most institutional knowledge, the deepest relationships, and the most options. The people the acquiring company actually needed to retain to make the deal work. And the primary drivers of those departures are uncertainty about company direction, loss of culture, and a lack of communication during the transition.

Streaming has no shortage of examples, but you rarely see the damage attributed to communications. It gets labeled as “integration challenges” or “cultural misalignment” or simply “turnover.” And the cost lands across the organization in ways that never trace back to a communications line item: slower execution, lost momentum, teams that stop trusting leadership enough to take risks or raise problems early. The hypothesis is straightforward. When what you tell the market and what you tell your people run on separate tracks long enough, the operation starts breaking in places that are very expensive and very difficult to reverse.

Gabriel Andriollo is Founder and CEO at inFocus PR, with nearly two decades in entertainment communications and publicity at major media companies, including HBO Max and TelevisaUnivision. He has navigated the communications pressure of major mergers and acquisitions more than once, and with the great rollup happening across streaming right now, that experience is increasingly valuable. Very few communications leaders have been through it at this scale as many times as Gabriel.

What follows is a conversation about why the gap between internal and external communications keeps happening, what it actually costs, and what it takes to close it.

Rebecca Avery: What are the most common reasons media companies end up with a gap between their external narrative and what they’re telling their own people? How much of it is intentional versus just nobody thinking about it?

Honestly, it’s rarely intentional. Most of the time it’s a structural blind spot. External comms has a clear owner, a clear audience, and a clear deadline: the press release goes out, the earnings call happens, the trade coverage lands. Internal comms doesn’t have that same urgency forcing the conversation.

What I’ve seen more often is a sequencing problem. The external narrative gets built first, usually by a small group of senior leaders and the comms team, and internal alignment gets treated as a follow-up step. By the time employees hear the story, it’s already been shaped for external consumption. And often, they unfortunately read it first on the news. It doesn’t feel like a conversation. It feels like a press release addressed to them.

The other thing I believe is an organizational problem. Many companies don’t have an integration point. HR is responsible for employees where comms only see external positioning. So you end up with two separate stories running in parallel, and the gap between them grows.

Rebecca: A lot of companies treat external comms as strategic and internal comms as operational. Why does internal get deprioritized, and what does that cost?

I believe it is because the consequences aren’t immediate. If your external messaging is off, you feel it quickly: a bad headline, an investor questions something you weren’t prepared for, etc. But when your internal messaging is off, the cost is slower and more diffuse. And it feels controllable, unlike outside of the organization. It may even show up as quiet disengagement before it shows up in turnover numbers. By the time leadership notices, the damage is done.

There’s also a perception issue. Internal comms gets treated as HR-adjacent, or as something managers handle through talking points. It doesn’t feel like strategy. It feels like logistics.

But the cost is very real. When employees don’t understand where the company is going, or when what they’re told internally doesn’t match what they read externally, trust erodes. Culture suffers. Everything feel disingenuous. And once trust erodes, you can’t buy it back with a town hall. Which is usually the go-to for shorten the gap between the org at large and leadership.

Additionally, when you take a step back and look at how all of the above affects you in the medium-long run, in my opinion, you lose your best people first, because they have options. And then you lose institutional knowledge, relationships, and momentum at exactly the moment you need them most.

Rebecca: When employees stop believing the official narrative, what does that actually look like inside a company? What are the early warning signs?

The first sign is always the random questions to middle management. And they are more often than not based on rumors. That means there is a void of communication. And that void is being filled by assumptions and what people read or hear. This is what we understand by informal communication. Side conversations, WhatsApp threads, hallway speculation, slack channels. When official channels stop feeling credible, people fill the vacuum themselves. And the stories they fill it with are almost always worse than the truth.

Then you start seeing it in behavior and eventually it shows up in the data: exit interview themes cluster around “leadership,” and you start losing the people you can’t afford to lose.

Rebecca: Can you point to a company or situation where strong internal-external alignment made a real difference?

The example I come back to most is the HBO Max launch in Latin America. What made it work wasn’t just the external story, and we had a strong one: first-ever international launch of the service, 39 territories, a content slate that genuinely excited people. What made it work was that we treated the internal teams as the first audience, not the last.

We were operating across markets with very different conditions: different environments, different competitive landscapes, different levels of HBO brand equity on the ground. A single cascade from headquarters wasn’t going to hold. So we invested in making sure every local team understood not just what we were launching, but why the strategy was built the way it was. When people understand the reasoning, they can hold the line in conversations anywhere, most likely in places you are never going to be at.

The result was that when the external story landed, it was consistent across markets because the people delivering it actually believed it. They weren’t reading off a script. They were advocates. And in a launch of that scale and complexity, that kind of internal alignment is the difference between a coordinated market entry and a series of disconnected local announcements that happen to share a logo.

That experience shaped how I think about communications strategy now. The internal work isn’t separate from the external work. It’s the foundation it stands on.

Rebecca: Can you walk us through a situation where a disconnect between internal and external messaging created a real problem?

Without naming specific companies: I’ve seen this play out many times during mergers. The external announcement is polished and optimistic. The language is about “creating value,” “combining strengths,” “unlocking new opportunities.” It’s designed for investors and press.

Meanwhile, employees on both sides of the deal are sitting with very practical questions: Will my role exist? Who will I report to? What happens to my team? And those questions aren’t getting answered, because leadership is still figuring it out, or because they’re worried about what happens if they say the wrong thing.

The problem is that silence doesn’t feel safe. It feels like confirmation of the worst-case scenario. So people start doubting. Distrusting. And actually many leaving. And they don’t leave randomly: the ones who leave first are the ones with the most options and the most institutional knowledge. The people the acquiring company actually needed to retain to make the deal work.

By the time leadership got the internal story right, the culture and talent damage was already done. The external story was fine. The integration was not.

Rebecca:  You’ve managed communications through HBO Max across 39 territories and the TelevisaUnivision/ViX era. How do you keep what you’re telling the market and what you’re telling your people in sync when things move that fast?

The honest answer is: you have to decide that internal alignment is a foundation, not an afterthought. In both of those situations, the external timelines were fixed. You have launch windows, investor commitments, market expectations as well as you are trying to manage internal communication milestones into the same timeline.

With these international rollouts you have to take into account different market conditions, regulatory environments, and team structures. The external messaging has to be regionally adapted. But so does the internal messaging. A team in Colombia had different questions than a team in Brazil. A generic cascade from headquarters just doesn’t cut it. That is hard in nature.

At the bottom of it, what works is giving local leaders both the narrative and the context to translate it. Not just talking points, but the reasoning behind the strategy. When people understand why, they can represent it credibly in conversations you’ll never be in the room for.

Also the challenge is different when you have two legacy cultures trying to become one company while simultaneously launching a new product. Internally it has to be more than a launch. It had to be proof that the merger was creating something neither company could have done alone. A communication about what the merged company stood for.

Rebecca: What’s one expensive problem you’ve seen that could have been avoided if a company had invested in aligning internal and external communications earlier?

The most expensive version of this problem is a culture and talent crisis. Period. I’ve seen companies invest years and significant resources into building a streaming service or a new content vertical, only to have the launch degraded by internal disengagement at exactly the wrong moment. But it not only costs you momentum. It really undermines vision, belief and synergy.

When you don’t have employees that buy into the big idea, that north, then things collapse. And all because, internal comms was an afterthought and a controllable environment. Many times, senior leadership wrongly believe that because employees are an internal component of the organization, it is in their full control. And they are missing the point and opportunity of transforming employees into fans. Because ultimately, people are what drive the company forward every day. Silence is also a form of communication, one that will transform your worst fears into reality. Because nothing stays as a void. Everything is filled, so you have to make sure it is filled with the right information, understanding and spirit.

Rebecca: If a network executive reading this wanted to start closing the gap tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d tell them to do?

Read your own press release and then sit in a room with a group of mid-level employees and ask them what they think is going on at the company. Don’t guide the conversation. Just listen (and don’t judge).

The distance between those two things is your problem statement.

But most importantly, stop treating internal comms as a function that supports leadership messaging and start treating it as a function that builds organizational understanding, and culture. Your organizational soul is built by this understanding. The same way, your company’s image is built by what press, influencers or the market says.

You want to bring that perspective.

In other words, bring your comms team into the room earlier. Not to manage or “massage” the message, but to think about who needs to know what, when, in what sequence, and what questions they’re going to have that the current draft doesn’t answer.

Bottom line is, just treat your employees with the same strategic intention as you treat your best journalists, investors or analysts.

Conclusion

Your employees are your first audience. Aligning what you tell the market with what you tell your people is essential to the core success of the company. The leaders who create the space to see that whole picture are the ones whose organizations achieve best-in-class cultures, talent, and margins.

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Rebecca Avery is the Owner and Principal of Integration Therapy, a performance-based operations firm that helps media companies recover leaking revenue and scale with clarity, speed, and control.