Brian Greene

I find the line that makes people care about an idea.

As Director of Publishing & Social for TED, I led the strategy and voice for TED Talks, originals, podcasts and more across TED.com, newsletters, YouTube and social, setting the standard while the audience grew.

Brian Greene sitting alone in a darkened theater, watching the stage

My work sits where editorial standards meet audience strategy. I use performance data to sharpen judgment and AI to supercharge the work.

Writing

A speaker spends months crafting 18 minutes encapsulating their work, then delivers the talk of their life. Next, someone has to plan the digital release, write the words that will be seen by an audience of 125 million and decide how it will appear across every platform. For the better part of a decade, that someone was me.

I directed publishing strategy and copywriting for headlines and descriptions, the TED Blog, speaker profiles and more for 3,000+ TED Talks created by TED HQ. Each week, I led the writers’ room, made the executive edit and fed what worked best back into the process.

High-stakes speakers

Breakout hits

Views to date, rounded

Beyond the headlines

Directed copy and packaging for TED.com, the TED app and social, authoring titles and thumbnail text for TED’s 27M-subscriber YouTube channel; composed and edited on the TED Blog; edited printed conference program guides.

Launches

I took new initiatives, editorial projects and original series from idea to launch, setting goals, running budgets and leading performance data insights. I led naming and copywriting for TED’s original series, newsletters and games, and wrote the proposals to fund new series.

I also directed sponsored series and LinkedIn Lives with partners including Wells Fargo, Capital One and US Soccer.

Audience

I used performance data to decide what to write and publish next.

YouTube

+74% click-through

I treated titles and thumbnails as editorial work, and click-through on the channel rose 74% from 2022 to 2026. Using AI to analyze years of channel data, I found that original series drew 2.7 times the median views of talks. That finding shaped the 2026 channel strategy, which called for fewer, stronger uploads and a regular place for originals.

TED Talks Daily

25% → 40% open rate

I reprogrammed TED’s daily newsletter around what readers opened and watched, and sharpened its subject lines. Newsletter ad revenue grew 75% from 2023 to 2025, and TED’s newsletters reached nearly 11 million subscribers at their peak.

Framing and packaging

+63% views

With TED’s Audience team, I studied the copy framing that drew the most attention. Headlines that spoke directly to the reader and promised a clear answer did best. Talks framed both ways drew 63% more views in their first 30 days. We turned the findings into a guide that editors and curators used for every talk.

AI

I built the prompts and systems TED’s editors used every day, so they could spend more of their time on taste and judgment, and take on projects we’d never imagined before.

About

I started as a reporter at U.S. News & World Report, wrote daily for PR News and managed sponsored content at Time Inc. I joined TED in 2015 as an editor and spent 11 years there, most recently as Director of Publishing & Social and a member of TED’s Leadership Roundtable.

I managed and mentored a team of editors, strategists and producers; co-wrote and taught TED’s style and voice guides; designed the media vetting process and made the final call on what got published. Ideas don’t spread on their own. Somebody has to find the words.

Looking for a leader? Let’s talk.

brianwgreene@gmail.com LinkedIn
Brian Greene speaking with a microphone on the TED stage