Happy Monday War & Peaceniks - today, I’m bringing Austin to you!
Two weeks ago, I wrote a comparison between my treatments for cancer and my proposed cure for the cancer inside the Media industry. The next day, I gave a presentation at SXSW, digging into the detailed diagnosis I have for Media and offering the pathway forward that I see for Big Media and Tech, out of their self-made apocalypse, and into the light.
Having come out of hospital just 72 hours prior to getting on stage, and still in a reasonable amount of pain from the major renovation of my insides, the speech was an emotional one - even for me, who tends to cry at Coke commercials. As you may have gathered if you read my stuff semi-often, I don’t take this stuff lightly.
I take the epic destruction of value in our business personally. How can you not, when you see hundreds of peers and friends lose jobs and careers due to blithe and arbitrary decisions based on greed and hubris? I see the future of our Media deeply intertwined with the fate of our culture and our planet. How can you not when you see the data demonstrating a direct correlation between the health of our Media and the health of our democracy?
The current state of our Media is Dumpster Fire, with a 100% chance of Complete Implosion. Yet, rather than look deep inside at the choices they made that got us here, or make the hard decisions to radically transform themselves into the kinds of platforms the world needs right now, the companies that used to be our most innovative are spending all their time fighting anti-trust regulation, and the businesses that used to be our most visionary are rewriting bonus metrics to benefit the MBAs in the C-suites.
There was a time when companies were run on the premise of solving real human problems. Yes, they did it for profit, but the profit was not the point - the products, the innovations, the ideas were the point. Now, what’s very clear, is that the only problem these Tech and Media moguls are looking to solve is the puzzle of what they’ll say on their next earnings call to most please Wall St.
That is how we got a world where the average consumer has 100 individual password logins. That is why instead of using the collective power of our combined data, each platform and player locks their data behind a garden wall, convinced that their dataset is somehow more valuable than everyone’s. That mindset is what dragged us into this zero-sum war, where the winner supposedly takes all, but in the end, no one wins.
But it does not have to be that way.
A few days ago, someone who was inquiring about speaking at their corporate event, asked me if I could temper my presentation about the state of Media to be “less doom and gloom.” I wanted to say “so you want me to lie?” But when I thought about it, I answered truthfully: “I always give the unvarnished truth, no matter what it is, but I also always do my best to inspire us towards a better place, towards the light that we all want to see.”
There is a path forward - not just to survive, but also to thrive. But to get there, we need to be honest with each other about the challenges we face, about the level of transformational change we need to make, about the things we must stop and start doing to remake the Media for the User Centric Era we all helped create. That means accepting ideas from every corner, not just the corner office. This means a revolution of leadership, from the secret club of golf handshakes, to the open door of diverse points of view. It means big, substantive changes to the way we all work - not against one another, but together for everyone.
Yesterday, I gave an encore of my SXSW presentation on zoom. The presentation has much more data to back up my prose, and more detail on how we got here and for how we might get out. It wants to be a call to action for anyone who cares about this industry and truly wants to do something to make it better than just good enough.
I’ll post the whole video of the zoominar soon. I hope you check it out.
Most of all, I hope you enjoy your week.
ESHAP