Spring Bored

Why Media Conferences Are Make Believe

Happy Summer War & Peaceniks! Ready for Summer School?

I started this spring at SXSW, and Media was in a crisis it could not describe. I just ended the spring in Cannes at Lions, where the Media finds ourselves at a crossroads we cannot navigate.

In between, I’ve listened to countless panels and keynotes, read dozens of earnings reports and suffered through so much c-suite spin. We’ve heard thousands of people saying millions of words, dancing around how fucked up our models and companies are right now; and had so many private cocktail conversations where Media pros young and old describe precisely how fucked it all is.

Before summer officially begins, I’m taking stock of this spring’s maneuvers and manipulations, Newfronts and Upfronts, festivals and conferences, panic and bullshit; and comparing that all to the realities of the world, as we enter the back half of 2023 - and I’m making some predictions for about where we may end this cra cra year.

1.     AI is often both misunderstood and overhyped. Also, it’s not going anywhere. Artificial intelligence has been embedded in Media for years – powering much, if not most, of the advertising we buy and see; and programming our video, audio and social feeds. But this year ChatGPT became the fastest growing app in history, getting to 100 million users in its first sixty days, and now it’s the only thing all we can chat gpt about.

Nina Schick at Future Week | Photo: Media City Bergen/Øystein Haara

"If I hear one more f**king person say, AI this week, I'm going to punch them in their f**king face."

Gary Vaynerchuk, at Cannes Lions

GenAI has generated as much buzz and fear as it has content. Many on our industry are excited about the endless possibilities of increasingly smart generative creative intelligence, while many fear for the jobs it will replace and the risks it presents.

AI has become this year’s distraction – so enthralling and triggering the industry, we’ve lost perspective on the topic, and lost sight of bigger, more fundamental topics as a result. Truth is, GenAI will cost jobs. And it will produce many new opportunities. New technology typically eliminates roles and industries on its way to generating new ones. It also tends to democratize resources. There’s creative marketing work being done with GenAI right now for small advertisers who could never afford to hire a team to make commercials, and content coming from creators that otherwise would have been too big and costly for them to make without these new tools.

Rules are needed for the use of GenAI - rules that benefit both IRL creators and the major publishers who hire them. Yes, studios will need to create boundaries on where and when to use AI and how that affects the livelihoods of human talent. And those very same rules need to protect everyone whose currency is their intellectual property (yes, including the big publishers), without ceding the rights for our culture’s thought and art to the very few (just two right now) and powerful owners of the best artificial intelligence technologies.

Should we be excited, hopeful, frightened, or bored about the future of GenAI in Media? Yes. Too many in Media say too much about it without knowing enough to say something truly meaningful. Too many in Media ignore the topic specifically because of all the hype.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and GenAI will be a large, integral part of our digital infrastructure – forever more. They will automate aspects of the creative process, and that efficiency will cost jobs. They will democratize creative resources historically limited to the rich and powerful. Poorly designed and regulated GenAI is a huge danger. Making GenAI safe and trustworthy requires cross sector collaboration and cooperation - but it is neither impossible, nor so far off. All the noise we’ve generated this Spring around AI has made it impossible to hear the signal.

As with all things, the Media chatter industrial complex’s interest in the topic will fade as AI and GenAI become more normalized, ergo more boring. Until then, and after it’s imperative to find and listen to those with the signal, like The Partnership on AI, Nina Schick, Allie Miller, and Don Allen Stevenson III, as to not lose the thread, or our heads. There is hype, risk, and reward in GenAI for everyone in Media. If you keep your ears and eyes peeled for those who know the realities, you can gain the wisdom to know the difference.

2.     DEI “initiatives” are temporary. For real change, we must change our systems, permanently. The tumult in Media and Tech has created tens of thousand of layoffs - more just this week - and this year, it has drowned out many of the voices that had been rising for increased and permanent diversity, inclusion and equity in the Media Business. Yes, there was much said about DEI this spring on panels and in keynotes at our spring boondoggles. Many awards were given. And yet, despite wide-spread pearl-clutching and great awakening in Media after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Jor’Dell Richardson, Tyre Nichols, and too many more… the Media ecosystem’s C-Suite elite is as disproportionately old, white, male and rich as it was a decade ago.

Why? Because as much as we love the press releases and headlines our DEI initiatives generate, when it comes to making systemic change to our organizations – in how we incentivize chief executives, in our entry level recruiting, in how we train our managers, in who we invite into the room where “it happens,” and how we listen when we do – we suck. We make it impossible to get an internship in Media unless you are rich enough to live in New York or LA (while making nothing), are born a nepo-baby, go to an outrageously expensive private college – or preferably all those things. And when we do deign to open the ivory tower to others, we make often it impossible for them to be heard, unless they learn how to “go along to get along.”

As crucial as they are our DEI problems are not just issues of inclusion and opportunity. The deciders inside Media organizations determine what stories are told on screen and in our news. The way we see each other in our shared Media culture is almost always shot through a “privileged white dude” Insta filter. Yet, we send execs out to conferences, we make promises, we enact initiatives and we strive like heck to be better “as an industry.” Until, we don’t. Because we get busy running our businesses, and dealing with crises, and worrying/buzzing all spring about GenAI.

Very often, we all get upset enough to do something, but not quite upset enough to change all the things that caused the upset in the first place.

As encouraged as I am by all the conversation in Media around DEI, I’m equally disheartened by just how little actual change all this talk has created. Unfortunately, I don’t see a near term end to the reactive-yet-ephemeral white guilt treadmill – at least not until we have real conversations, inside our companies and not just at yearly conferences – about changing board and executive contracts to reflect benchmarks for systemic change in their organizations; about popping Media’s thick, nepo-baby recruiting bubble; about debunking our pipeline myth by rerouting the pipeline our of the Ivies and through the communities we pretend to serve, but never really represent.

3.   The same old guys will not give us any new ideas. I could just say “read #2 again,” because many of the biggest issues Media faces about its inability to reinvent itself, stem directly from going to the same well for inspiration over and over, and expecting the water to suddenly taste different. Much of what we’ve seen and heard from big Media moguls this year have been reactionary attempts to regurgitate glory years, mixed with a seemingly wholesale misunderstanding of the real, hard, fundamental work of building entirely new enterprises for the new era already surrounding us.

No, you can not simply bring back TV advertising like it used to be, now that YouTube is the biggest TV channel. No, you can’t simply mash today’s D2C subscriptions back together with ads and make the math work like it did with golden goose of cable. No, you can’t create an unbreakable addiction to expensive new content, and also pay your writing talent less to make it all. No, you can’t compete directly with the four largest companies in the history of the planet by doing the same exact things you’ve done for the last half-century.

Netflix disrupted old media. Now it’s obviously leading old media around in circles, looking for the exit. The Trillion Dollar Death Stars have all the assets they need to lead even more Media disruption… yet when we talk to their various parts, we all see that they can’t seem to get out of their own ways enough to understand the dots they do have, let alone how to connect them. All spring, reading the earnings reports of major Media players, then listening to their C-Suite earnings calls offered a real-life definition of cognitive dissonance.

Media is incredibly ripe for disruption – in fact, it’s badly in need of a fresh one.

Our industry will eventually pull out of this tilt-a-whirl we’re stuck on, but it will likely take a major disruption to shake us off. New Trillion Dollar Death Star NVIDIA could get into major Media M&A; or Apple might buy Paramount; Microsoft could acquire Roku, or Netflix, or both; what if Meta bought Spotify – any one of these events could spark a cascading wave of consolidation that would re-order the Media Universe. And any one, or others, are somewhat likely to happen in the year ahead. Until then, look for a lot more spaghetti thrown at fancy walls, with hopes that more than some sticks.

Listening to and speaking with so many people this spring - from inside and outside of the Media industrial complex, from various generations and different continents - has shown me things I believe are inevitable truths:

• In the next few years massive tech platforms will transform into mammoth media bundles;

• Powerful new technologies will create entirely new industries and obliterate others;

• Former market leaders will be subsumed and/or eliminated;

• Powerful Media moguls will be shown the doors; and new disruptors will kick them in.

Learnings from this walkabout have also convinced me of other outcomes I now feel are quite likely, if not yet provably inevitable:

• Gaming is about to evolve into the next iteration of Social Media;

• Social Media will need to adapt or die;

• The Creator/Community economy is now a necessary and important direct competitor for talent and revenues with the corporate content economy;

• It will take a massive generational exodus from big Media to affect the systemic changes necessary for the real, permanent changes in representation, and inclusion, and to the underlying economic and cultural fundamentals of the industry itself.

• These changes are coming, and they will be very uncomfortable for those of us who are traditionally the most comfortable.

This spring, and all its noise, has also reinforced one important, life-long lesson: To separate the intellectual wheat from the inane chafe, and keep your ahead above the tsunami of change, stay out the doom loop echo chamber, and try and learn something new about something new - from outside your bubble - every day.

This coming Monday, June 26, I’m holding my monthly webinar for paying subscribers. I’ll be digging into all this and more, with news and notes from around the globe, with very special guest Doug Shapiro (no, no relation that we know of).

Webinar details are below my signature. If you see them, thanks for being a paying sub! Try it maybe?

Happy summer!

ESHAP