1. While Media Slept
In 1938, Winston Churchill published a book called While England Slept. It was intended as a wake-up call— Churchill’s main argument was that England’s complacency and political divisions left it vulnerable, that while the dictators of Europe rearmed and retrenched, the British glided on as if the world had not changed since Armistice Day in 1919.
I was reminded of Churchill while circulating around Advertising Week New York this week.
Because for many in the greater media industry, you would think that the world had somehow been frozen in amber sometime back in 2015.
Why It Matters
People talk a lot about “AI” and love throwing around words like “agentic” and “discriminative”, but, as I shall explore in the second of today’s stories, there’s not a whole lot of understanding of how it all works.
But that is not the point of this piece.
The point here is that we still carry on as if nothing’s changed.
Jimmy Kimmel becomes an international icon for free speech and so much of the conversation is about his ratings. His actual Nielsen ratings.
As if most people didn’t watch late night TV via clips on social media.
Not because they’re lazy or super techy, but because late night TV was actually designed for clips. There are bits that work and plenty that don’t and if you watch the one or two that do, it’s far more efficient than staying up well past midnight.
In a world where the news was not available 24/7, timely commentary was worth losing sleep over. In today’s memeable world… it’s not.
It’s not just Kimmel though. It’s there in the way that the fact that The Dream Factory is broken is still being treated as news.
And by The Dream Factory I mean the ability to come to LA and launch an entertainment industry career. Which, if you were moderately talented and had a reputation as a hard worker, meant a fairly seamless glide. One that came with a house in Sherman Oaks and employment that, while occasionally more sporadic than you wanted, would last you through to retirement.
It was a great half century to be a creative professional, but the Creator Economy is not going to be a replacement for the Dream Factory Economy—not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur—and we have to figure out a way to deal with the fallout from a shift that thousands of people have been living with for the past several years as the monoculture collapsed and Feudal Media—the fragmentation of media into thousands of small bubbles across multiple platforms—took root.
It’s also the chorus of left-leaning journalists having a meltdown over Bari Weiss taking over CBS News, no one apparently having informed them that it is impossible to diss a colleague who has had that kind of success without it sounding like severe sour grapes. (Imagine a football player publicly grousing that Patrick Mahomes “can’t really throw a football” after he’s just won the Super Bowl. I mean even if you think it’s true, you have the sense not to say it out loud.)
But the real news here is of course overlooked as well: Substack beat out mainstream media. Which is not surprising at a time when a substantial percentage of Zoomers get their news from “news influencers” on TikTok, people who may or may not have ever taken a journalism class and for whom “news” is just as specific and narrowly targeted as everything else these days. (Thank you, Feudal Media.)
Meaning that the problem isn’t that people are getting political news from biased sources.
It means they’re not getting it at all, because in the new post-monoculture world, current events of the geopolitical kind are all too easy to avoid.
It’s The Atlantic not fact-checking an assertion that CBS News is “the least watched of all three little-watched network news programs” when in fact those network news programs regularly kick the asses of all three cable news networks, often by a multiple of 2 or 3X.
It’s that they don’t generate clips the way the cable news shows do when they interview attention-starved politicians with three-letter monikers, having chosen to remain focused on a very midcentury notion of news instead.
But they have viewers, millions of them, because you see in the world of Feudal Media, traditional linear TV is still one of the bigger kingdoms, also with its own celebrities and slang and brands of choice.
It’s just that no one in that world is saying “6, 7” or buying Labubus. Which TPTB deem more buzzworthy than Wegovy and SUVs.
Though the latter do an excellent job of paying the bills.
Something to think about.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are in the media industry, remember that in chaos there is opportunity.
That even though everything seems to be slowly (or rapidly) collapsing, that’s your cue to take advantage of the tumult and secure your place in the new order.
Step one is actually being aware that there is a new order. That those declining numbers aren’t because of “AI” or “still recovering from the pandemic.”
To succeed, you will need to take some risks and understand that not every setback is fatal.
It is, of course, easy to bury your head in the sand and sleepwalk through all the changes.
But as Churchill warned us all those years ago, a failure to rouse yourself will indeed be your ruination.
And Dunkirk was just a lucky break.
2. The New AI Wranglers
Because I do what I do, all week people have been asking me to tell them the most interesting thing I’ve heard all week.
And so I will tell you what I told them: it was something Jonathan Moffie told me last week when I was talking to him about the Streamr.ai acquisition.
He said that there were creatives at ad agencies who were developing an expertise in prompting various AI tools in order to generate better creative.
In other words, they’re becoming AI Wranglers.
Why It Matters
AI is not going to replace us any more than the internet did.
It is going to replace the people who don’t keep up.
Meaning that instead of using cameras to create video, we are going to use AI. And instead of knowing how to frame a shot, a good copywriter or art director will know how to frame a prompt.
Much in the same way that they had to learn how to use InDesign rather than markers. Or Final Cut Pro rather than how to splice film with a razor blade.
That is how the future often manifests itself.
Are there instances where AI will speed things up, or replace what is often (correctly) perceived as busy work?
For sure.
Cranking out personalized headlines on already banal banner ads for instance.
Maybe even writing the scripts for certain types of formulaic non-fiction shows—real estate shows come to mind.
Though even those will need to be prompted.
So humans are not being disintermediated in the future, as much as being forced to learn new skills, skills which at many levels do not yet exist.
What You Need To Do About It
Because many of these skills do not yet exist (everything is still in perpetual beta) this is your chance to get in on the ground floor.
Don’t blow it.
I know what I am speaking of: streaming was still in its early days when I fell into it. There were no experts. Which made it easier for me (and lots of other people) to become one.
AI is much bigger than streaming.
Much, much bigger.
So to circle back to Mr. Churchill again—you can sleepwalk through it. Or you can remain wide awake and figure out what you need to get ahead.
It’s your call.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.