FULL DISCLOSURE: I go to Cannes Lions every year because, in short, it’s my job. I make money at Lions for appearing, moderating, predicting, and pontificating — to bring data and deliver inconvenient truth. My expenses are covered. It would not otherwise, for me, in any way, be worth the enormous time and expense it requires to attend the epic boondoggle we call “the International Festival of Creativity.”

EVEN MORE FULL DISCLOSURE: I enjoy Cannes Lions. I stick to the places where I’m invited, and avoid big, crowded parties. There are few events with the varied and interesting cross-section of thinkers and doers who attend Lions. This year was no exception. There is significant value exchanged at Lions — but, as I demonstrate below, it is just not tied in any way to the silly way all the money gets spent.

COLD HARD FACT: Cannes Lions personifies perfectly the ad industry’s absolute inability to face its own truth. From that point of view, Cannes 2026 was this on steroids.

The marketing sector is going through its greatest disruption of the HoldCo era. The advertising industry has lost 100,000 jobs since 2023. Consolidation, automation, fragmentation, and the great big tech-ification of the marketing economy have left the ad industrial complex reeling. Every conversation on the Croisette this year was cast under the dueling shadows of AI job replacement and consolidated irrelevance.

Yet, in 2026, buyers, sellers, agencies, platforms, and brands spent $305 million constructing and enjoying Cannes Lions. In just the last five years, we have spent more than $1.3 billion on Cannes Lions.

Imagine how much we could improve our collective measurement with a $305 million investment. Think about how many entry-level or mid-manager jobs we could retrain and redeploy with that chunk of change (1505 jobs at $135,000 each in fact). Consider how much training those funds could provide, to students from underserved communities who never otherwise would be granted entry into the ad industry (thousands). Or, if you’re into dystopia, think about how much less “uncanny valley” we could make our AI advertising with $1.3 billion over the next five years.

The astronomical 2026 figure was actually down $8 million from last year. Industry consolidation is slightly to blame for this small retreat. But the single biggest reason behind the spending drop at Cannes Lions epitomizes everything that’s wrong with the ad business:

Cannes Lions participants spent $6 million less on their awards entries in 2026, because so many of them were caught cheating on their entries in 2025.

The central defense of the Cannes ecosystem has always been: “Yes, the beaches are expensive, but it’s all in service of celebrating the highest tier of verified global creativity.”

Except that it’s really not.

Last year, twelve Lions winners were forced to return their trophies when an investigation exposed that an Omnicom-owned agency had aggressively weaponized generative AI to completely fabricate the real-world impact of its work. Once the specific awards entry fraud was exposed, a domino effect rippled through the ad industry. Agencies around the world were dragged into parallel investigations for unverified sales figures and entering high-profile case studies without sign-off from their clients.

Beyond resignations, this controversy ushered in new Integrity Standards for Cannes Lions entries, with dual-layer fact-checking, declarations of factual accuracy, integrity audits, and multi-track authorship authentication. As a result, submissions to Cannes Lions are down more than 25% year on year.

This spending and submissions cut is not due to inflation, austerity, or consolidation. The data demonstrates clearly that collectively the ad industry held back one in four submissions because they could not meet their own honesty requirements.

Meanwhile, while awards submissions declined and festival passes flattened, the madcap party on the beach much more than raged on.

The total investment in those spectacular, yet temporary, party palaces along the Croisette reached $108 million this year. The average activation on the Croisette in Cannes in 2026 was $4.5 million. Omnicom – smack in the middle of dissolving three legendary agencies and laying off four thousand employees – spent upwards of $3 million on their beachfront Cannes Lions activation this year.

We have officially entered the Jazz Age of advertising.

The industry is dancing the Charleston on a billion-dollar beachfront, popping champagne on yachts, driving up real-estate asset bubbles, seemingly completely oblivious to the structural cracks in its floorboards.

In the 1980s, holding companies disrupted the business via financial roll-ups. In the 1990s, they unbundled media from creative to charge clients twice. But in 2026, the HoldCos have officially run out of parts to spin off and companies to roll up. This is the era of the Quiet Liquidation.

To absorb the cost of enterprise AI and survive declining market shares, HoldCos are using the operational noise of mega-mergers to retire iconic agency brands like DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe, folding historic names into centralized, amorphous blobs.

The foundational math of the HoldCo model was always a labor arbitrage engine: hire thousands of low-paid junior staffers, bill clients a massive premium for their time, and pocket the margin. But according to the Basis 2026 Advertising Agency Report, a staggering 87% of agency professionals — 92% of senior leaders — now believe that the traditional agency model is entirely broken and unsustainable.

During a recent investor day, Omnicom CEO John Wren admitted that 58% of their corporate revenue now comes purely from automated media transactions, while creative services have shrunk to just 18%. His exact quote is the ultimate indictment of the current global agency regime era: “In the environment we operate in, Creativity is perishable.”

If that’s the case, John, then what value does Omnicom actually add? What is the case for the ad industry’s billion-dollar Festival of Creativity?

This question is particularly urgent, given the ample proof that all this new “artificial creative-productivity” uncorked by agency AI is actually viewed as toxic waste by the very consumers it targets.

Last week, at Cannes Lions, The Harris Poll released new data showing that the large majority of consumers think that “AI makes brands seem cringy.”

Despite inflation, travel costs, and consolidation, attendance at Cannes Lions 2026 was actually flat year over year at approximately 13,000. However, this represented a substantial attendee share shift: HoldCos cut back on travel, while tech firms and C-suites bulked up on the beaches. And the newest, most-celebrated demographic on the Croisette this year was: Creators.

Independent creators and influencer network execs swarmed the French Riviera, with nearly everyone declaring that Cannes has officially become “creator town.” Over 500 top-tier digital creators flooded the festival — up significantly from last year — effectively relegating legacy agencies to NPCs at their own event.

But here’s the inconvenient truth about this new Cannes-Creator love-fest: to the ravenous advertising industry, Creators are ONLY a new shiny toy.

The ad biz has not suddenly “fallen in love” with decentralized human creativity. It has merely discovered a new, unlimited, highly efficient (aka cheap) labor pool that it can exploit without the annoying overhead of long-term employee benefits, payroll taxes, or corporate severance obligations. Creators are the ultimate at-will contractors. They are rented for their clout, milked for organic audience trust, then discarded the second the algorithm tweaks parameters.

Ad industry power-brokers are now treating independent digital players with the exact same disposable disdain they show toward the agency staff they are currently laying off. The dying HoldCo complex is just replacing its unionized, salaried creative workforce with a hyper-fragmented, de-leveraged gig-economy underclass.

By this time next year, advertisers will spend more boosting Creator content they pay to produce, than they do producing the Creator content itself.

And that plays to my biggest worry for the Creator class who flocked to France: Their time on the Croisette is heavily borrowed. The moment the trend winds shift, or the second agency and brand C-Suites think that enterprise AI tools can generate synthetic influencers for pennies on the dollar, the human Creators will be tossed in the sea in favor of the next young, hot, automated thing.

The ad biz didn’t democratize creativity by inviting Creators to Cannes; it just brought its next target for labor exploitation out to the beach for a glass of rosé before the eventual betrayal. Thus, my warning to the Creator Class: Watch your backs and build your own brands. Many of the agencies now hiring you, do not actually value you.

I had great conversations. I met wonderful people. We discussed some real shit. But inevitably, every discussion turned to the massive fog of cognitive dissonance that had settled across the south of France: the ad industry’s abject resistance to reform itself.

No, the irony-verging-on-hypocrisy of my eviscerating the very festival I was just paid to attend is not lost on me. I understand the risk to my own income by writing this. So why write it down? Because this is the very kind of inconvenient truth I get paid to tell.

The lies the ad world told to win its own awards are simply symptomatic of the great obfuscation at the core of its business model. If we audited the entire ad industry and punctured the corruption at the core of its dealmaking, the way Cannes Lions did with its awards, the entire global marketing illusion would spontaneously implode.

The ad industry spends money on the wrong things: outrageous boondoggles; artificial imagination that no one asked for; mergers that only move deck chairs and make bankers rich. The corruption in the back rooms of these boondoggles burns up resources that we could otherwise invest in a sustainable infrastructure and, crucially, in our own people.

This is how the ad industry keeps its sorry, stale, legacy measurement, long past its sell-thru date — despite literally everyone knowing that it’s all bullshit. This is why legacy can’t manage to evolve, despite an aging, shrinking audience. This is why advertisers still let digital platforms grade their own homework, despite one in five of ad dollars being wasted on fraud.

What if we all went to Cannes BUT DID NOT BUILD MASSIVE CASTLES IN THE SAND? (Like every other conference in Cannes, btw.) What if we mandated that half of what we spend yearly on Cannes was instead redirected into retraining people in the ad industry who’ve been shitcanned this decade? Could we somehow manage to throw ourselves a party that cost only $150 mil? What if we just skip Cannes Lions for two years, and reinvest that $600 million into a new, cross-screen system of measurement? Just imagine.

Nearly all advertising uses poetic license. But the advertising industry has lost the thread. They’ve let the lies they tell themselves become the industry norm. The Mad Men have forgotten the art — and artists — inside the science. They’ve turned the “Festival of Creativity” into The New Roaring 20s.

No doubt, the party was great. But I left this year’s Cannes Lions, more than ever, feeling that the dance was far too manic, and that a crash is coming.

Just me? Let me know what you think.

Which reminds me: I used Cannes Lions, in part, to raise funds for The Ghetto Film School, who teaches deserving students from untraditional backgrounds, film curricula at the university level. Join me?

And don’t forget to enjoy the week!

ESHAP

This spring I released this Kids Content Landscape Analysis in collaboration with Common Sense Media: a comprehensive report on the current state of video and gaming content for kids.

Our research shows that demand for quality kids content is at an all time high, yet supply of high-end kids content from trusted sources has dropped dramatically. This is due to a significant cut in commissions from premium streamers and from industry reaction to changing regulation on advertising to children, which has decimated revenues for the genre on YouTube.

Consumption of Kids content drives usage and revenues on all platforms. The household loyalty of kids content consumers creates incredible lifetime value. Yet commissions and production of series orders have disproportionately shifted away from commercial commissioners to our public media, which now account for 54% of series orders, despite cuts and attacks on their funding.

Simultaneously, parents report that their kids’ favorite video platform is, in fact, YouTube — where a sizable amount of content consumed by kids is both unvetted and potentially harmful.

This has made making kids content very difficult. When we surveyed kids programming producers and experts, the word most often used to describe the kids content business right now: f*cked. Not very G-rated.

Yet, there are success stories and there is good content being made for our children and families.

Today, on a very special episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast, I talk (recorded) live on stage at The Media Universe Summit about the Kids Content Landscape with two bonafide, experienced kids content practitioners and one actual kid:

• Sara DeWitt, GM of PBS Kids

• Andy Donner, Head of Partnerships at Common Sense Media

• And since Marion could not make it to StreamTV where we recorded this episode live, for this convo on kids, I brought MY KID, Jamie Shapiro, to co-host.

• Jamie interviews Sara, Andy, and me about the Kids Content Landscape Report and how PBS is transforming its distribution to meet kids where they watch.

You can watch the whole podcast 👇 here, or listen/watch wherever you want.

APPLE PODCASTS | YOUTUBE | SPOTIFY

Episode Rundown:

• [01:14] Andy Donner introduces Common Sense Media’s mission to rate, educate, and advocate for kids.

• [02:16] Sara DeWitt introduces PBS Kids and its reach across digital and broadcast platforms.

• [03:12] The state of kids media is f*cked. The baseline problem? There’s a strong demand for high-quality content but no economic model to support it.

• [06:07] How a 25% decline in series orders, driven primarily by streaming platforms has majorly decimated the kids-content supply chain.

• [09:29] Kids are migrating to YouTube for new content due to limited offerings on traditional streamers.

• [10:40] While co-viewing is still happening, much of today’s content is aging up, leaving younger audiences with fewer developmentally appropriate options.

• [15:03] PBS Kids’ strategy for brand building and growth on YouTube.

• [19:38] The dangers of “AI slop” and developmentally inappropriate content being fed to children by algorithms.

• [23:34] The argument for running YouTube Kids more like a traditional network with human curation and better monetization.

• [27:02] A call for major players like YouTube, Amazon, Paramount, and Netflix to embrace the opportunity to become the definitive destination for kids and families—and create lasting generational impact.

APPLE PODCASTS | YOUTUBE | SPOTIFY

This is an important conversation for our community right now. We want you in it! Let us know what you think.

Reminder: it’s always a good time to call your parents/kids. Have a great weekend!

ESHAP

Today: A Blueprint For The Future

Those who follow this newsletter, know our Map of The Media Universe (this one just updated to reflect Fox’s brilliant acquisition of Roku — middle left, between Disney and Netflix).

You may have also seen the recent launch of our exclusive Cross-Screen Attention Index — the first metric to track total consumer attention, across all screens, on all platforms.

We use this newsletter to publish infographics based on shit-tons of data, landscape reports generated from mountains of research, and forecasts for the future, mapped against the voice of the audience.

We work year-round, with data partners such as Ampere Analysis, GWI, Antenna, Tubefilter, MX8 Labs, Digital i, Precisify, Common Sense Media, Influencer Marketing ai, and more; continuously updating our datasets. Each quarter, we pore through the earnings reports of all the Media players represented on the Map. We continuously scour the connected universe, hunting for fresh insight and scouting gaps in Media’s user-awareness. Our quantitative construct is sound.

But the framework of our work is not built solely on quantitative analysis. Each year, we interview hundreds of citizens from the Media Universe — experts, execs, vendors, advertisers, agencies, engineers, information officers, strategists, consultants, managers, interns, academics, data scientists, platforms, publishers, producers, and individual members of our community. We talk to a diverse array of global Media thought leaders, nearly every working day.

These two data engines — one dashboard of user behavior and industry trends; the other based on the current, actual reality of the people and institutions who make up the Media Universe — form our framework.

This is the Cartographer’s Blueprint: A strong cocktail of hard math, human input, and inconvenient truth.

Last week, we curated a live program at StreamTV based on this Blueprint. The Media Universe Summit was a full day of brand new findings from the real world of real consumer behavior, blended with best practices from Media’s best practitioners, containing THIRTY CASE STUDIES from the front lines of what’s actually working right now.

In the flow below, you’ll find videos of the whole morning program of the Summit:

• My opening keynote where I unpack our recent Attention Index and show how to see The Whole Consumer (25 mins)

• The New Media Model: case studies from Larry Flynt Productions, Stapleview, Uscreen, and Pressman Film (30 mins)

• The Future of Animation: Moderated by YouTube; feat. case studies from Animation+, Toonstar, and Explosm (27 mins)

• Building A Modern Media Empire with Dhar Mann Studios: feat. DMS CEO Sean Atkins, Tamara Rothenberg from Samsung, and Kim Larson of YouTube (25 mins)

• Scoring Franchises: A fascinating keynote from IP valuation guru Lauren Zeinfeld, who grades my ESHAP brand, live on stage, to demonstrate how to value YOUR IP and measure the upside you’ve yet to realize (20 mins)

Videos of these full sessions are all below. You’ll see these are not run-of-the-mill panels driven by PR flacks and talking points. There’s no pablum, no bullshit. Just real talk from smart people.

We promised people Punk Rock Presenting: three chords and the truth. I think we delivered.

Together, they are a live Blueprint for what is next and now — actual actionable insights from the real world of what’s working, built on a foundation of data from the behavior of our audiences.

In this newsletter, we strive to offer digestible analysis to help you navigate the chaos. The sessions below are a live-action adaptation of that. Additionally, at the very bottom of this post, following all the video, you’ll find a downloadable PDF of my entire presentation on The Whole Consumer.

This is the culmination of a year’s work. I hope you enjoy!

CARTOGRAPHER KEYNOTE: THE WHOLE CONSUMER

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I’m hitting the Croisette running!

LMK if you wanna join any of these events at the Lions Festival — space pending.

See you soon.

Tchin-tchin!

ESHAP

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Attention: Share of 55+

Attention Share: Bar Mitzvah thru 54

Thanks for watching.

Let me know what you think!!

ESHAP

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Introducing the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index.

In the commercial Media industry, measurement has always been divided by screens. No major auditing bureau or currency panel has ever forced television meters, handset timestamps, and browser logs into a singular, logic-enforced, zero-sum attention budget. This is collective malpractice. If you still treat social video and television as separate silos, to twist the age-old Wanamaker adage: You are wasting half your fucking money.

Here’s why…

In the next three years, one trillion dollars will be spent on advertising in the US. More than three quarters of that will be spent on digital platforms. Another $180 billion will be spent on television advertising. No one is measuring the reach, frequency, or effectiveness of this massive cashflow across these platforms.

Publishers and advertisers look at their TV ratings, digital buyers and social media experts look at mobile handset logs, and everybody claims they are winning the war for reach. Meanwhile the measurement industry locks agencies into long-term contracts, then charges sellers through the nose to use their “currency.” Or, they will track attention across all the platforms, but only by campaign - not as a map nor trajectory of total cross-screen attention. This leaves our collective data on real attention siloed to the point of pointlessness.

The industry is totally blind to how real people actually behave. Today’s consumer is a singular, fluid entity moving seamlessly across a multi-screen day, allocating a single, finite commodity: attention.

The Media industry is lost specifically because they are charting their course based on the failed logic of vanity metrics, rather than following the actual data; the voice of the audience.

In a recent survey by ESHAP and MX8 of 3,000 US consumers, 59% of people say they use their phone to watch video more than any other device. Just 28% named TV as their most-used source for video. When you look only at people under 55, however, this ratio gets more dramatic.

Only Baby Boomers watch more video on televisions than on phones. Every other generation of Americans watches video on their phones two to three times more than their TVs.

This is the Media Generation Gap.

I have been studying this trend all year. I have become obsessed with the idea of measuring total attention among competing platforms across all screens.

As far as I can tell, the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index represents something never achieved in media analytics: a singular, logic-enforced, zero-sum attention budget that tracks the whole consumer across all attention endpoints simultaneously.

By treating human focus as a tangible physical property constrained by a fixed 24-hour clock, we built a model that removes corporate bias, complacency, and corruption from measurement.

This model produces a singular, unduplicated map of total human attention by harmonizing Nielsen’s TV currency with Comscore’s handset panels and GWI daily consumer diaries. We collapsed every delivery mechanism — linear, on demand, broadcast, cable, subscription streaming, free ad-supported streaming, and mobile social feeds — into their corporate parents. To do this, we built a deterministic Python accounting engine that operates under the laws of data science and geometry. This logic engine treats attention as a closed, zero-sum matrix.

This data is from December 2025 through May 2026, and tracks all attention, including time spent watching video and consuming other social media.

The results show, for the first time, a more accurate media hierarchy across every format and screen — from vertical social feeds and letterboxed streaming to smartphones, laptops, and Connected TVs. Is this Index a 110% perfect read of all Media usage? No. Does it provide a clearer, more accurate account of actual, total Media attention in the US than the industry has ever had? Hells to the yeah.

Our data construct is sound. But the framework for this index is not built solely on quantitative analysis. Over the last year, we have interviewed hundreds of experts, practitioners, vendors, buyers, managers, executives, interns, academics, data scientists, platforms, publishers, producers, and members of our community. On nearly every one of our working days.

The numbers in this index are from companies we all know. So is its point of view. We knew to ask the right questions, because everyone asked us. We use words in this report that come straight from the mouths of the people, at all levels, who run all the companies in the Media Universe.

These results are not mine. They are ours. These opinions aren’t mine. They are ours.

The underlying raw inputs we used to construct this index — Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge, U.S. Census population stats, Comscore’s digital market updates, and GWI’s consumer diaries — are all 100% publicly available, out in the open for anyone to read. Yet, no one in the multi-billion-dollar Media Industrial Complex has ever combined and shared them. Because our industry is kept in eat-what-you-kill silos. So we don’t ask.

That fear of finding out is the systemic blindness now pushing our industry off a cliff. Thus, the Cross-Screen Attention Index. It’s our new compass, away from the cliff and on the path toward today’s audience: The Whole Consumer.

Like many metrics used in the Media Universe, this index’s framework — our Cartographer’s Blueprint — is a mix of hard math and human behavior. We have a pretty strict methodology for both. The quantitative methodology is at the bottom of this report. The qualitative framework is our secret sauce, so, then, it’s secret.

The result, is that the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index shows a picture of the Media landscape, and The Whole Consumer we have literally never seen:

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The 2026 World Cup officially kicks off today! I live in New York, where World Cup fever has officially taken hold. This is the first time in more than three decades that North America has hosted The Cup. So much has changed in sports and Media since then, we might as well call it the new world order cup.

To celebrate day one of the tournament, we are joined on The Media Odyssey podcast by Scott Melvin, CEO of The Overlap - one of the fastest growing digital sports networks in the world.

Scott takes us behind the scenes of a sports media empire that began as a simple YouTube side hustle with Gary Neville. They started with a radically simple, totally unscripted rule: put legendary athletes in a room, start rolling the cameras the second they walk in, and give them an hour and a half to say whatever they want. The result? Content magic that surrounds sports while also transcending it.

Traditional TV execs want us to believe that the world completely stops for hours and hours of linear broadcast (and in soccer that could even be scoreless!). They pour billions into exclusive sports rights because it is the absolute last thread keeping legacy television afloat.

But if you only look at live broadcast metrics, you completely missing the goal - the most seismic shifts in modern media history are happening right now, in sport.

In this episode, , Scott, and I go deep into the business of modern sports:

• “Rights-Free” Masterclass: Independent creators can’t compete with the likes of Apple dropping $2.5 billion into the MLS. But you don’t need to. By adopting a “rights-free” strategy, The Overlap bypassed the billions required for game footage and monetized the community around the game instead.

• The Power of “Shoulder Content”: Traditional TV assumes sports fans just want the match. The data proves otherwise. Digital-first shoulder content—raw conversations, unscripted clip culture, and post-game reactions—frequently outpaces official live broadcast views by 20x.

• The Clip Culture Paradox: Why Lionel Messi scoring a hat-trick generates a billion views on social media, yet nobody wants to watch 90 minutes of a standard league match.

• The 2026 Time Zone Gamble: Will European fans actually stay up until 2:00 AM to watch the group stages, or will they completely abandon linear TV for TikTok highlights?

• The Overlap Shoots… Scott and The Overlap team will be covering the 104 matches (the most ever) of The World Cup - without any rights to the matches themselves. Will that work?

• Calling The Cup: Scott, Marion, and I make our predictions for who will win The Cup!

And, to celebrate The World Cup, you can watch or listen to the full episode right here on Substack! Or, you can choose your favorite podcasting platform right here:

WATCH/LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS | YOUTUBE | SPOTIFY

What’s your hot take? What will happen to live sports as clip culture booms? Does it expand the audience or diminish the game? Who will take home The 2026 World Cup? Let me know!

ESHAP

As much as Scott Galloway hates social media, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he understands that, today, there is no “Media” without “Social Media.” In fact, as Galloway’s reach on social platforms has risen, paid advances for his books have climbed along with it.

[My entire conversation with Galloway is at the very bottom of this piece.]

Prof G’s hot take is reinforced - in droves - by a new, exclusive survey of US consumers I did this month, with my partners at MX8 Labs.

Consumers now say that the device they use most to watch video is not the TV, but rather the phone - more than 2 to 1.

That’s for the whole general population. When you break it down by generation, the gap is even more dramatic…

The only generation who uses the television for video more than the phone are people born before the invention of the TV. Two-thirds of Gen Z (more than 3 to 1) use their phones for video more than their TVs - and the phone wins with 63% of Millennials and 59% of Gen X.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the Media elite, the living room is not the only place we consume our entertainment. We asked consumers to rank their Top Three Places to watch video. The answers may surprise you.

(NOTE: In the first iteration of this survey, we omitted “Bed” as a choice. So we reissued the survey and included the bedroom in our list. BTW, this is the huge advantage of working with MX8: We were able to turn this new survey around in just one week.)

“Bed” is THE #1 place that consumers say they consume video, beating the couch/living room handily. And while many people do have TVs in the bedroom, a LOT of us watch on our phones in bed.

More importantly, the places we watch video is now a wide-ranging spectrum. Yes, two-thirds of us say the couch is a preferred location for video consumption. But one-third of us rank “waiting on line or in an office lobby” in the top three, more than one-quarter rank “Work” and “The Toilet” atop their lists.

This picture gets even more complicated when we look at the viewing habits of our most voracious Media consumers, Gen Z.

“Bed” beats “Couch” even more handily among Gen Z, with “Toilet” jumping to #3 in the rankings - 40% of A18-24 and more than one-third of A25-34 rank the WC in the top three places they watch video regularly. (So, when a Gen Z in your life sends you a video to watch, know they very well may be in the head.)

Think about yourself: Is your smartphone the first thing you touch in the morning? Is it the last thing you touch at night? (Be honest.) As depressing a thought as this may seem, it is simply the new truth - our phones are now the touchstones of our lives and remote control of our lifestyles.

Returning to Prof G’s point: The very definition of “leisure-time” content consumption has changed drastically in the last ten years. What mainstream Media C-Suites seem to misunderstand, is that “content” is no longer defined by Hollywood, but rather by the audiences themselves.

According to data collected by SQ, Social Media now outpaces traditional “entertainment” for screen time. One third of our time on our screens is spent on social platforms, yet less than one-third on “entertainment.”

So, if you are a publisher, platform, producer, or advertiser, you no longer have the luxury of targeting only the living room, the couch, or even the home. You must see THE WHOLE CONSUMER.

This strange new world perplexes the existing power structure of the entertainment industrial complex. To be fair, it is not easy to transform the way you reach your community in today’s nuanced, fragmented, modern Media ecosystem. It is much harder than in the Media world in which I was raised.

Yet, if you listen to your audience, if you put your community at the center of your business, it is not as hard as it seems either.

AFFINITY ECONOMY CASE STUDIES

Below, you will find three Affinity Economy case studies that I will present next week at the Media Universe Summit at StreamTV in Denver (use Code ESHAP200 for $200 off passes right now, right here). These aren’t hypotheticals: they are specific lessons on moving your brand beyond marketing and into passion.

These companies and brands aren’t running away from the challenges of our radically fragmented Media Universe, they are embracing The Affinity Economy and targeting the WHOLE CONSUMER.

The KitKat Heist

The KitKat Heist is a masterclass on modern brand management. Nestlé, one of the oldest and most traditional packaged goods companies on the planet, turned a fascinating crisis into a viral sensation - by embracing every aspect of their audience and gamifying their entire brand.

Many have speculated that Nestlé staged the crime (it happened on April Fool’s Day). They didn’t. But where many/most brands might have dived headfirst into damage control, KitKat embraced the chaos and invited their Fans to play along - ceding control to the entire internet.

COACH: Explore Your Story

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THIS IS THE JUNE 2026 MAP:

[THIS IS A LOW RES JUNE MAP - HIGH RES MAPS FROM 2020-2026 ARE THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST.]

My name is Evan Shapiro. Many people refer to me as a Media Cartographer. This map is why. Since 2020, using only publicly available data and powerpoint, I have been mapping the Media ecosystem, redrawing it each month and posting it here. The map represents my view of the most important entities warring for attention in the Media, tech, and entertainment industries.

The ratios on the map are not subjective opinion... they’re maths. Each entity is represented to scale by their current valuation - the fairest way I could find to portray the gravitational pull of power in the info-entertainment-tech industrial complex and track the trajectories of all its major players over time.

As a point of comparison, here👇 is my first Media Universe Map, from 2020…

Drafting these maps, by hand, in PowerPoint; digging into the earning reports of every company on the map quarter after quarter; tracking the trajectories of all the planets, month after month, year after year, offers useful and unique perspective.

That process fuels this newsletter: where I publish more visualizations and infographical landscapes (such as the UK TV Universe, the Addressable Table of Elements, and the Creator Ecosphere) as part of weekly analytical essays covering the Media Industrial Complex and its ongoing mishegas.

The June map shows massive movement in the Media Universe.

• AI Valuations are literally off the charts. I’ve added SpaceX/xAI which goes public this week, likely at a valuation of $1 trillion or more. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are valued near that bonkers high water mark as well. Oracle is up $51 billion in the last 30 days, making Daddy Ellison the world’s third richest man.

• For some perspective, Anthropic, alone, is now worth $300 billion more than Netflix, Disney, Comcast, Paramount, Fox, and Versant - combined.

• I’ve added Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to the telco region - because mobile providers are now the most important Media bundlers on the planet.

• I added Mediawan to the Euro Media Zone, at the suggestion of a super-savvy reader of the newsletter.

• Samsung has overtaken Walmart in value - also a product of the AI hype cycle.

• Comcast is at its lowest market cap in a decade and a half, proving my ongoing assessment of their epic leadership vacuum.

• Many of the sports leagues have been re-valued: the MLB jumps from $79 billion to $95 billion; the NHL skates from $57 billion to $67 billion; the IPL scores $19 billion; and, in honor of The World Cup starting this week, the introduction of FIFA to the map.

• Netflix’s value is down 40% year on year - showing that the street agrees with my analysis that they are utterly out of ideas (proven by their silly bidding war for Disco Bros and their constant copycatting of YouTube. In just one year, Netflix has devolved from disrupter to Trad Media - and its value shows it.

• On the other hand, FOX is charging, while Paramount continues to shrink (in both value and ethics). This reiterates my side by side case study of the two companies and their very different Nepo Kid leaders.

May’s map shows that gravitational pull I demonstrated in my very first map - away from Trad Media and towards Big Tech - isn’t just continuing, it’s accelerating. It makes one wonder:

Which OG Media Planets on today’s map will even exist as stand-alone entities on my May 2030 Media Universe Map?

Stay tuned right here to find out!

The maps above are in low resolution. Below, you’ll find Media Maps from each year since 2020, in high res, for you to download and use however you like.

I hope you have a very Happy 2026!

ESHAP

MEDIA UNIVERSE MAPS 2020-2026: IN HIGH RES

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Recently I was lucky enough to moderate a panel at the Greater Together LA conference in Los Angeles. Greater Together was an ultimate transatlantic mashup - where the world’s two most powerful creative engines proved that the future of storytelling isn't dying; it's evolving into something new.

My panel was a literal all-star line-up:

• Alison Lomax, Head of YouTube UK & Ireland

• Dame Carolyn McCall, CEO of ITV

• Tony Pastor, co-founder of Goalhanger (one of the hottest podcast companies on the planet).

I am not just saying this because I moderated - it was a terrific, honest, entertaining conversation. I asked each leader to speak on innovative new efforts at each of their companies; to tell us what we all needed to stop doing; and where they saw entertainment and news headed next.

Tony talked about defying conventional wisdom of short attention span and attracting younger audiences to news and history programming, by distributing their podcasts, on all platforms, to wherever the audience is.

Carolyn talked about bringing disruption into a legacy institution and how ITV now programs the digital prime time, between seasons of their shows, by focusing on the IP and not the “channel.”

Allison talked about finding new audiences and breaking down boundaries by using technology to translate entertainment for new regions and bringing new ideas to new audiences.

These are three literal legends of Media. Grab a coffee, ignore your inbox for a bit, and take a trip with them to the UK - via LA. You won’t regret it.

Cheers!

ESHAP

Given the hyper-fragmentation of modern media, the infinite algorithmic noise generated by every human with a smartphone, and the undeniable reality that the mobile device is now mankind’s primary viewing apparatus, the single hardest thing to achieve in all of entertainment right now is getting a consumer to leave their home at an appointed hour, buy a ticket, and sit in a dark room with strangers.

For decades, legacy Hollywood treated theatrical distribution as a predictable consumer habit. It was top-down scale. You bought billboards, ran a TV spot, and the transactional machinery took care of the rest. That universe is dead.

To understand just how severely this consumer habit has eroded, look at the cold, hard trajectory of the domestic box office over the last quarter-century. The industry has masked its worsening decay behind rising ticket prices, but the real metric of health—actual tickets sold—tells a story of systemic, secular decline.

The 25-Year Theatrical Decay (2000–2025)

Movies for The Affinity Economy: Yindie Film

That table is Hollywood’s terminal disease. But a new vanguard of digital-native creators has the cure: The Affinity Economy. While legacy media is trying to use expensive, transactional marketing to buy back an audience that has moved on, YouTube creators are leveraging pure, un-churnable Affinity to pull millions of people out of their living rooms and into theater seats.

This is exactly what legendary indie producer and former Amazon Movies head has been urgently shouting about in Hope For Film. Ted has meticulously documented the absolute collapse of the traditional independent film pipeline and how the streaming wars destroyed the ecosystem. Ted articulates impeccably for film what I’ve been earnestly preaching for the rest of entertainment: artists and publishers must build direct, activated relationships with audiences before asking them to fork over cash or time.

Ted’s “audience-activated cinema” is perfectly suited for The Affinity Economy. But his movie movement means something larger. Social media is no longer just marketing. These para social video platforms are no longer the beginning, middle, and end of a creator’s career. They have become capital-efficient seed layers for bootstrapping the next generation of diversified entertainment empires.

In the movie industry, this has sparked a new era of Indie Cinema: “Yindie Film” (YouTube + Indie). This new indie wave is its own sovereign cinema category that converts fandom into physical, localized, retail mobilization and turns its talent into vertically integrated studios. (Trademark application for “Yindie Film” filed with the USPTO this morning! So, hands off.)

The Cold Open: Inoxtag & Kaizen

The absolute origin point of this systemic disruption happened internationally in September 2024. France’s MrBeast, YouTube sensation Inoxtag (Inès Benazzouz), spent a year completely offline to train for a seemingly impossible task: climbing Mount Everest. He didn’t pitch a network, and he didn’t sell a documentary package to a streaming giant. Instead, he partnered with French indie cinema circuit MK2 to test the boundaries of digital loyalty.

When his documentary, Kaizen, was given a hyper-limited, 24-hour theatrical window, it shattered every alternative programming record in European history. The film sold 350,000 movie tickets across 1,000 screenings in a single day. Over 200,000 of those tickets were stripped away in the first few hours of presales, completely crashing theater ticketing servers across France, Belgium, and Switzerland.

At an average ticket price of $12, Kaizen pulled in a massive $4.2 Million global box office gross in 24 hours—on a production budget subsidized entirely by his digital brand partners. When it migrated to YouTube the following week, it logged an additional 24 million views in just 96 hours.

This is for a documentary.

“Traditional media told me this wasn’t television, so people wouldn’t pay to watch it in a room. They didn’t realize that my community doesn’t watch me because of the box I’m in - they watch because we lived the climb together.”

- Inoxtag

Flush from the cross-border success of Kaizen, Benazzouz is now scaling his operations into a full-scale documentary and unscripted production company. Inoxtag is evolving from Creator to mogul, leveraging his massive corporate brand partnerships to bankroll a slate of high-end adventure and human-interest documentaries, giving other prominent European digital creators the infrastructure to mount high-production physical projects that bypass the traditional French state television funding system entirely.

The Inciting Incident: Markiplier & Iron Lung

If Kaizen was the flashpoint, then Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach led the mass migration out of the digital wilderness and straight into Hollywood’s premium real estate.

A lifetime ago, in 2023, Markiplier, a horror YouTuber with 38 million subs, announced he was adapting a viral, indie cosmic-horror video game called Iron Lung into a feature. If legacy gatekeepers paid attention, they scoffed.

Fischbach self-financed the production entirely out of his own pocket for $3 million. When major studios failed to offer a distribution deal that preserved his autonomy, he went direct to his community. He told fans to contact their local multiplexes directly and demand the movie.

When Iron Lung breached mainstream cinematic inner sanctums in January 2026, it triggered a theatrical shockwave. It didn’t just perform; it shattered the structural math of traditional distribution. With a total of $0 in traditional marketing or P&A spend, he weaponized his deep audience equity to self-distribute directly into 3,015 commercial screens across North America, logging an iconic $17.8 million domestic opening weekend and wrapping its theatrical run with a massive $51.2 million global haul – a 646% return on Fischbach’s investment. Before streaming!

Rather than do one, simple deal with a distributor, or simply sell Iron Lung direct to consumers as a one-off, Markiplier is using his momentum and newfound leverage to change the nature of digital distribution. At the Cannes Film Festival, Fischbach announced the creation of Markiplier Studios, to empower the new wave of indie creator filmmakers, cutting direct distribution deals with major theater chains and digital platforms, lowering traditional middleman fees, and ensuring maximum backend equity.

During his Cannes panel, Markiplier explicitly noted that the primary delay in bringing Iron Lung to digital wasn’t technical—it was legal. He spent months building out the framework to act as an official digital aggregator on YouTube. And this is the crux of today’s point:

This Creator used YouTube to become so huge, he could open a mainstream motion picture in theaters. His fandom gave him the power to force YouTube itself to change. And that has become the capital behind a new, powerful, vertically integrated Yindie Film studio, operating on all platforms, including IRL.

Setting a trend many are bound to follow, on Friday, Markiplier activated Premium Streaming access for Iron Lung exclusively on YouTube Movies & TV, keeping his entire distribution loop sovereign. We will likely find out how the film did there, because unlike most major studios, Markiplier Studios has cemented transparency a core value.

“The traditional studio system is designed to take the keys out of the creator’s hands the second real money gets involved. Markiplier Studios exists to prove that the community is the engine, the funder, and the distributor all at once. We don’t need Hollywood to validate our audience; we are building a permanent pipeline where online communities own the theater screen from day one.”

- Markiplier

The Rising Action: Obsession & Backrooms

Remainder reserved for Premium Peaceniks only!

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The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS has been the #1 late night show on TV for nine consecutive years. Last week, Colbert broadcast his last show. Because CBS canceled TV’s most-watched late night program.

The last edition of Colbert’s talk show scored the biggest audience in the show’s history. The catalyst for Colbert’s firing, the sitting president of the United States, the world’s most powerful man, in the middle of an escalating war and a major legislative crisis, celebrated the death of the late night institution, with a social media post, at 2 am in the morning, in which he also threatened other late night comedians.

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TL;DR: Many of us still watch most video on the couch. But 31% of Americans and 41% of Gen Z say the toilet is a “Top 3” place they watch.

And that’s one reason why the 2026 Upfronts focused on reaching beyond TV, to the WHOLE CONSUMER.

Last week, TV’s biggest players staged their Upfront presentations. It was the culmination of months of presentations, schmooze-fests, parties, and pitches, yet strangely, it’s really only the midpoint of boondoggle season, with Cannes Lions still more than a month away.

Many themes pulsed through Upfront Season, including omnipresent “agentic AI” talking points, big sporting events, “full funnel CTV,” and on stage handshakes with everyone’s DSP arms dealer, Amazon.

I was actually interviewed by DIRECTV, in an SUV, during a ride around Upfront Week, about how The Upfront continues to survive and what all these trends really mean for the ad industry.

However, one theme that stood out most to me, maybe because I predicted it, was the Mobilization and Verticalization of Premium TV as the best way to reach THE WHOLE CONSUMER - from the couch to the doctor’s office, to (yes) the toilet.

HOW AND WHY THE UPFRONT IS GOING TO THE TOILET 🧻:

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The Finals for the 70th Eurovision Song Contest start at 3:00 PM ET today. You can watch them LIVE on YouTube. And I am partly to blame for that.

There are MANY reasons to watch the Eurovision Finals.

🎤 It’s an amazing event. Incredible talent from 25 countries, sing and dance their hearts out, vying to be the world’s best song - and maybe even a modern-day ABBA (yes, they first got famous at ESC!).

🎤 It’s an incredible TV show, produced by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in a different country each year - in conjunction with the host broadcaster of that country. They don’t know which country, or which broadcasting partner, until the very end of the Final - because this year’s winner hosts next year. This year, the contest is LIVE in Vienna, Austria, last year’s champ.

🎤 Eurovision is the world’s most popular entertainment event, only behind The Olympics and World Cup in popularity.

🎤 The drama every year is tremendous - the Olympics of Music. This year, THE DRAMA is palpable through the screen - as is the controversy!

🎤 Finland is in pole position coming into the Finals, but Greece and Australia (not European but still competing) are hot on their heels in betting markets.

🎤 HOWEVER… Amazing art is also colliding with intense geopolitics. Five countries sat out in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza and Israel’s behavior during the last Eurovision. Broadcasters in Ireland (RTE), Spain (Radiotelevisión Española), and Slovenia (Rtv) refuse to show the contest at all. Protests broke out during the show this week.

🎤 What’s more: EVERYONE can vote for the Eurovision winner! Last year, 1.5 million Americans voted in the ESC.

🎤 To avoid “gaming,” the EBU keeps semi-final vote counts a closely guarded secret until after the Finals. So while we have odds, we have NO idea where rankings stand going into the Finals.

🎤 BEYOND the international drama and pageantry of this global spectacle, Eurovision is also a PICTURE PERFECT case study in Transformation for The Affinity Economy. 🎤

🎤 YOU CAN WATCH THE EUROVISION FINALS LIVE ON YOUTUBE FOR FREE!

🎤 In Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia, if you want to watch the Eurovision Finals (and believe me, MANY do), the ONLY way to watch them live is on YouTube.

🎤 The EBU has 113 member countries/organizations. Between 35 and 45 countries participate each year in the Eurovision Song Contest. The members are all public service broadcast television or radio organizations.

🎤 Despite long legacies, traditional origins, considerable bureaucracy, and carefully curated diplomacy, ESC has fully embraced a new form of Broadcast: one that includes ALL THE FANS, FOR FREE, wherever they are.

🎤 Jurian van der Meer is Commercial Director at The EBU. I’ve worked with him this last year on this new strategy. I’m proud to have played a part in this important broadcasting evolution.

🎤 I talked with Jurian, Yigit Dogan Celik from Merzigo, and Filipe Ligeiro of RTP about the legacy and transformation of THE ORIGINAL SONG CONTEST, live on stage, at StreamTV Europe. You can watch that whole panel at the top of this post.

🎤 And you SHOULD WATCH The Eurovision Finals today at 3p ET on YouTube.

Happy Saturday!

ESHAP

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This is my latest Media Universe Map. I “redraw” it every month, resizing each planet “by hand,” in PowerPoint. There are 173 companies represented. There are more than 600 datapoints included.

An enormous amount has changed since the last map in April.

• Alphabet/Google is now, securely, the second-most valuable company, of all time, and their current trajectory should allow them to overtake NVIDIA within the year. For those paying attention or reading this newsletter, this should not be surprising. When Google surpassed Apple for the first time, in January, I detailed how that happened, why Google was going to win the AI wars, and how the Alphabet flywheel flies faster than any corporate ship in this universe.

• Samsung and Walmart are both now valued at more than one trillion dollars. Again, momentous, but not surprising if you track the numbers, or read this publication. On Februa…

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