Future of (media) World

If I could condense where the world of media and marketing is headed, it would be into this single piece.

I want to tell you about the massive change in the world that I am seeing at the forefront of the media and marketing world. If you don’t work in marketing, you will feel these changes in sometime but that impact is how the world works.

I will break it down into pieces, but by the end of reading this, you will have at least a few new thoughts that you did not know before.

New Shopping Malls

The world is suddenly obsessed with content; everyone is talking about distribution, and there are two reasons for it: attention displacement. In the ancient time if you had to buy anything you would go to the local market where you would find your regular merchant that satisfied all you daily needs - cobler, blacksmith, food vendor etc but now if someone wants to buy anything the first thing they do is pick up their phone and look that up on social media - Whatever your preferred form of consumption it may be - Linkedin, Instagram, X whatever. Even more so, the only channel for discovery and activation is social media. In marketing, when you introduce a new product or a new brand to a new audience, that’s called discovery. So much so that the desire is also given to you by social media. This means that the “bazaars” are not in the physical world anymore; they are in your phone, and any company that is not on these phones is not in business. It is a matter of evolution; if you cannot adapt, you cannot survive, which is the reason and thought that made me start creating content last year.

But on top of this, the second layer of this is that with AI, all the things that were sold online are now very easy to make, and when the market is flooded with supply, the only people who will succeed are people with a network and distribution. These two events combined made everyone suddenly focus on content and media in general a lot.

So what was the result of this in the world?

Venture Capitalists are now creating funds that are deploying billions to make content, they are partnering up with creators, and they are backing media companies. Now, something interesting about Silicon Valley and VCs’ money is that wherever that money flows, the world goes. Because Silicon Valley companies control the algorithms and the algorithms are made by people, what ever idealogy is flowing in Silicon Valley becomes the reality of the world. VCs, as an industry, used to back treasure hunts and explorers who used to go out to find new landmasses. Trips like Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance to Antarctica were backed by Adventure Capital, that’s what it was called and which is the origin of the word Venture capital. The idea was that we are gambling on you when you have nothing, and you are taking on an adventure, and when you do find a new landmass, new country or gold, we are going to take a piece of it, but the current strategy of adventure capital is that it has turned into a power grab. The acquisition of X showed how the change in the ideology of people behind the algorithms of X changed the ideology of what is seen as acceptable in the world. People in power saw how social media can change the course of the culture and world, and now they want a piece of it.

This has resulted in people in power and poverty both wanting to build their own distribution.

What is the evidence for this

-a16z, the top VC firms make videos, podcasts, and content. They have acquired media companies worth 100M+, and they are making content creators partners
-Advanced AI labs are hiring for creative directors and storytellers who can communicate the product and technical things to people. Every company with some money has a podcast

- OpenAI has one, Stripe has one, Anthropic puts on our regular roundtables -Consumer brands are building an army of clippers who can edit and distribute videos for them with multiple accounts
-Traditional PR is now being done with faceless video clips and podcast clip networks -Private Equity firms that used to buy factories and businesses are now buying YouTube channels

The goal of this is to build their own audience because this solves practically every business problem for them, hiring, customers, PR, product, everything.

Now, where is the world headed?

Anyone in the marketing and content world will tell you that the world is heading towards more and more decentralization, where individual creators are creating their own distribution, and people subscribe to their ideas. However, I think the opposite will happen. Because if you dig deeper, you will find that “Media” used to have the power to shape public discourse and action, media like TV, newspapers. That’s why it used to work hand in hand with political power and money, but with the downfall of traditional media, the void or the space is still empty; nobody is shaping the perception on a high level.

And people have already started to realize this and have started moving towards grabbing that spot that was once taken by TV networks. By building networks on social media, X and YouTube.

Private Equity firms are buying Youtube Channels, Finance Companies are building channels and buying up creators, VCs are bringing creators to partner with them. Enterprise companies are hiring social media anchors and creating IPs because they are now treating this as an asset like a factory or a building, which, if they can build, they can promote themselves forever.

And whoever has more content “factories” can shape what the world thinks and what the world buys.