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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the first episode of the Media odyssey podcast of 2026. That is Marion Renshett, and that is Evan Sparrow. It's great to be back for our second year of the Media Odyssey podcast. And we're going to start as we did last year, with our predictions for the year ahead.
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B
Exciting.
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A
So you want to go first? You want me to go first? We each brought five to the table.
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B
We did.
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A
You want to flip a coin or you want me to go first?
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B
Nah, let's go.
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A
Okay, I'll go first.
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B
Old men first.
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A
Age before beauty.
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B
That's a nicer way of saying this.
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A
That is, instead of you just calling me old. Thanks. I just called you beautiful and you called me old. And that's our relationship in a nutshell. So my first prediction for 2026 is something that I've been saying for a while, but I think it's going to culminate this year. So I've been calling AI a bit of a bubble for a while, and we've actually had a debate about this that you hosted a little while ago. But in the end, I believe that the AI bubble actually bursts in 2026. I think that the inflating of hyperbole around these valuations, particularly around OpenAI and some of these others, is going to pop this year. And I think we already started pop, seeing it pop in 2025. Peter Thiel sold his stocks in Nvidia. Softbank dumped their stocks in Nvidia. They were one of the largest shareholders. Ark Investments trimmed back their AI investments. And then you've got Michael Barry, the guy who, you know, was the. The. The guy who predicted the, you know, that he was the center of the big short. He, he predicted the, the big crash in 2008. He is seeing and predicting that the AI bubble is going to burst. And there's a number of different reasons for this, but the, the center of it is there's one big round trip happening in the AI industry. So Nvidia sells chips to OpenAI. OpenAI has investments from all of its clients, and everybody's really just exchanging money from. To chip providers to service providers. And all this money just kind of is creating one big circle. And if any of that starts to show chinks in the armor, it begins to fall apart. And mostly what you've got are these service providers who are relying on recurring revenue subscriptions as a kind of center of their business. Not all of them, but many of them. And I don't think that's pretty viable. I think you're going to see churn happened on the direct to consumer products. You know, I've talked about hallucinations in ChatGPT, other people. I mean, if you look at the McDonald's ad that just came out or the Coca Cola ad that came out using AI, first of all, it took 70,000 hours of prompting by huge teams of people to create these really, really shitty commercials that everybody hates and that are absolute embarrassments. So these kind of sexy uses of AI are not really going to come to fru the near term. And I would argue that maybe ever. You know, I don't think Sora is going to be a filmmaker. I don't think these AIs are going to create the next works of art. AI is really an unsexy optimization tool. Google uses it incredibly well through Gemini. They use it in all of their ad targeting. Meta is using it in their ad targeting. So the big companies are using AI, but they're not using it in a way that necessarily generates immediate profits. So I think AI is going to remain a massive and important technology and influential force in media. But I think we're going to see the bubble pop in 2026.
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B
So what does that mean, you know, the, the bubble popping, bursting. Are we saying that all of a sudden, you know, the valuation of those companies is, is, is going down, or people, those companies are losing interest and focusing on something else? Could you elaborate?
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A
I think you'll see a number of different ramifications of this. The first is that I think big tech stocks will take a little bit of a hit because they're all investing tens and tens of billions of dollars. I don't think their revenues are going to get hurt. You know, maybe Amazon Cloud, maybe some of the cloud services you'll see start to see that growth slow a little bit. I do think you'll see Nvidia take a little bit of a hit, but still they've got almost a monopoly in the chip business. But that second tier of companies that are getting massive investment, I think you'll see a lot of valuations, yes, get depressed as a result of this. But crucially, I also think you're gonna see the whole stock market take a massive hit over the course of the year. And I think that's gonna be one of the contributing factors to a terrible economy in the United States in particular. But I think it's gonna have a global ramifications as well. One of my other predictions is around the job market tied to stagflation. And I think, I don't know that we'll enter full recession. But I do think that the big tec so tied to AI futures right now that when the bubble bursts, I think you're going to see the whole market drop and I think that's going to have a larger, larger follow on effect for the US economy and then the global economy.
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B
I think 2026 is too soon. I, I don't think it's going to burst. I think we're going to have a bit of a correction. And if you look at the, the gardener cycle, right. The fact that it's been a hype, you know, I think will be more business as usual. Right. So where I agree with you is I think only a few companies will still stand next year. Right. So everyone who's tried to jump that, you know, train only those with a lot of money and you know, a flywheel doing other things.
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A
Right.
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B
So thinking Google is gonna power through Amazon Meta.
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A
Yep.
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B
Well, Meta hasn't done much. Right. Just like Apple, they've been kind of left out right. When it comes to AI, but I
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A
think only to a certain extent. I mean, again, their stuff isn't really consumer facing. They are using AI much more behind the scenes to target ads and keep, you know, stickiness.
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B
Well, this is where I think we won't see a bubble bursting. I think, you know, we'll stop talking about this, you know, making it, you know, headlines, etc. Etc. And it will be business as usual and it will hopefully, you know, solve some specific, you know, pain points that companies, you know, actually, actually have. I have, yeah.
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A
Let me, let me just, let me just disagree with you there for a second. First of all, when I say the bubble's gonna burst, it doesn't mean it's the end of AI. The Internet bubble burst a couple of times and yet the Internet is still a massive business. Third largest company in the world, Meta. I mean, so just because a bubble burst doesn't mean it's the end of that sector. It just means to your point, there's a major correction coming in this space. So I don't know that we're necessarily violently disagreeing. I think we're finding nuances around the same thing. But a correction in this sector will have a massive effect on the stock market and therefore the economy as well.
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B
Yeah, the job market for sure. Right. If you look at, you know, job opportunity right now, it all revolves around AI or staff is being told whatever they're doing right now use AI. Yeah. Completely remote from tech. You gotta, and I've heard that again a couple of Weeks ago, you have to take that train or there and just, you know, out the door. Right. Find a way to make that to use. Interesting, what you're saying about D2C, right? I think D2C was the surprising. I think OpenAI. You look at what they put out at the beginning of the company, they were not expecting to go into the D2C business. They thought it would be a B2B play. They were actually surprised. Right, by how much people took on those individual subscriptions. And a couple of days ago, I put out some data from our friends at Bengo, and they've been surveying folks around their use and their subscription around AI. And the data says that 61% of people are okay to cancel streaming just to keep that AI, you know, tech stack, and that they're spending around $60 a month, which means, you know, they're getting OpenAI, cloud, et cetera.
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A
Yeah, I just don't think that's sustainable. I really don't think that's.
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B
It is not sustainable. I think we're at a point in time where ChatGPT was leading, you know, the market, and so everyone took chatgpt. But what's insane right now is, you know, all of those AI gurus are saying, oh, you should use ChatGPT for this, perplexity for that, et cetera, et cetera. And I mean, a few people will perhaps have multiple subscription the same way that maybe we have multiple streaming subscription, but the regular Jew will have one, if not zero.
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A
Zero. Right. I mean, here I'll challenge all the listeners or viewers right now. Go to Google and type in a complex question in the Google search, and you will get a very, very detailed answer with links from Gemini for free without paying for it. Now, maybe Google will change that, but I don't think so. They understand how much of a threat AI is to search, and so they want to replace their supremacy, their 97% of the world's search. 97%. They're not going to want to lose that. So they're going to give away as much Gemini as they need to to retain that search advantage on the planet Earth. So I think the free products will serve well enough for the average consumer without having to pay extra for it. All right, let's move on to your first prediction.
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B
Okay, so speaking of bubbles, there's one that I think, you know, is going to, you know, burst or not going to pan out is the microdrama, you know, vertical content bubble. I mean, this has been the year where everyone in our industry started talking about that when I think very little of all of those people talking about it and hoping to work in that lane, I've actually used it as a consumer. So I think this is something that will stay what it is today. I don't expect it to become a mainstream thing in the US or in Europe. One of the reasons being that I think it is a factory. The way that they do content, it's manufacturing content, they're going to burn out the staff that are working on those people. You know what you are hearing from people working on those projects, just completely insane. So I don't think that's sustainable. And number two, we're going to start seeing often media and entertainment, so big media, trying to grasp that trend and turn it into something that's going to kill what it was and why it worked and then that's. That's gonna be the end of it. It's kind of my thing. I don't have any data, you know, so it's more of a gut feel than, you know.
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A
And the data that does surround this micro drama stuff or micro television or pocket television is actually what I try to call it. I don't know where it's coming from. So there are a lot of people on LinkedIn. I'm not gonna name names, but they keep putting out like it's $28 billion business, it's a $30 billion business. I don't know where those numbers are coming from. Who's reporting those numbers? None of these are publicly traded companies. So we have no idea what the revenue actually is. And then it's kind of like a snake eating its own tail when you look at the data. The second thing is it's a combination of porn and gaming, which is fine. And porn is a massive business still to this day, and so is gaming. So I do. I agree with a lot of what you're saying there. I think the nuance will be. So you're going to see probably somewhere between 10 to 12 of these pocket television apps launch in 2026. I've heard of at least 10, so I think there'll be, you know, more than that. The second thing is they're not all going to work, obviously. Third of all, this model of pay as you go, it's definitely a model for that in the world, but three minute episodes, I just. It does kind of boggle the mind. What I think you'll start to see though is a lot of this content move out of these walled garden apps where you have to pay as you go and go more The Way of Roomies, which is a micro comedy that was entirely sponsored by Bilt on TikTok.
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B
So it's led about roommates in New York, right?
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A
Yeah, it's like the Office but about roommates. But it was all for free on TikTok and Instagram. That to me is a substantially better use case than hey, download yet another app. Does the world, does any consumer think they're waiting around waiting for, you know, looking for a new app? I'm not. I'm trying to get rid of apps on my phone. So I think, I think there's a model where this does work, but I think it's on instagram and on TikTok, not on a dozen pay as you go apps.
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B
Which means that it is just, you know, vertical video content like shorts and longer that we've seen these last few years already. Ready. Right.
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A
But I think more in scripted and more in format and less in. There's a really good piece in the New York Times today about the the track star. I think it's called the show where the people get interviewed and have to name the name the song. And then there's the subway takes and there's a lot of really good format short form out there that's working incredibly well. Hot ones. Millie de Moldeberg's Chicken Shop Date. So like I think we'll see much more premium short form vertical content out there. I don't know that it's all going to be behind a paywall or pay as you go models. All right, Marianne, here's a bonus prediction for 2026 sponsored by our friends at Spectrum Reach in 2026, I think you agree with this and likely forever outcomes are going to be the new top priority for advertisers.
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B
Agreed. Brands definitely still matter, but increasingly agencies and marketers are focused on results.
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A
Transactions, conversions, hands on cans, heads in beds, you done. Butts in trucks done now hearts in carts.
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B
Unfortunately, the CTV advertising ecosystem doesn't always provide a kind of high quality data needed to build a targeted audience of
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A
qualified buyers or the kind of deterministic data necessary to track the outcomes advertisers are looking for.
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B
On the other end, deterministic data proves you're reaching real humans who really want to buy your products.
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A
And Spectrum Reach offers reliable privacy compliant deterministic data from over 30 million spectrum households along with third party data from more than 70 data providers. So you know you're reaching the right audience in the right context with the right message. That's actually get this relevant to the consumers lives it's addressable advertising with a match rate of 95%. That's way, way, way above the industry benchmark of about 60% match rate. Using just addresses, Innovate conducted a study
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B
in 2025 that shows that more than 80% of CTV advertising is wasted.
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A
That's due to programmatic ad fraud or inaccurate targeting that comes from building ad campaigns with low grade data that bears repeating.
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B
More than 80% of connected TV and media winds up getting wasted. And most often the advertiser can't even tell which media is wasted because of lousy reporting on the back end.
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A
Meanwhile, Spectrum's AI driven platform offers optimized audience targeting on the front end with show level insights, audience delivery attribution and transparent post campaign analytics on the back end.
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B
We talk about this a lot. Most CTV ad platforms are not nearly as transparent or effective as they should be. And that's because the industry suffers from a deficit of high quality data.
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A
But deterministic data allows you to know with certainty who you are targeting and precisely how effective your ad campaigns are with the kind of addressable advertising Spectrum Reach offers nationwide.
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B
So in 2026, let's finally get rid of that tired old cliche about knowing that half your ad money is being wasted.
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A
Stop the CTV waste this year. Let Spectrum improve your reach. So here in the United States, next year is a midterm election. And what's funny is that when I was growing up, the midterm elections were things that most people didn't pay attention to, you know, unless you were really, really engaged in politics. Now everybody, it's become the horse race, it's become the reality show that everybody wants to pay attention to. It's also become a massive business since the United States Supreme Court decided in Citizens United to allow basically unlimited funds to get into politics. And in the United States, these campaigns are just ongoing. They're just a constant campaign. There'll be somewhere between two and a half and $3 billion of advertising money put into the midterm elections just on connected television. That's not including radio or direct response through the mail or emails or any of that other kind of stuff. That's just TV advertising. And it's going to be hyper, hyper, hyper, hyper local and super, super targeted by mindset. So it's not just about zip codes, it's about head ends. It's about profiling the target audience. And as a result, we know connected television data sucks, right? I think you're going to see because of this flood of money what happens in these massive Campaigns is it really cleans the pipes of the advertising system and it reroutes the streams and it changes basically at a DNA level the way advertising works every two year, what used to be every four year cycle, now it's every two year cycle does this. So with $3 billion in political advertising coming in, most of it between June and November, so really just a six month period or even less, I think you're gonna see a massive shift in how Connected Television sells, tracks and reports on its advertising, all for the better. On the one hand, I'm really, really angry about the amount of money in politics in the United States. On the other hand, I'm really happy that this much money is going through the ecosystem next year because I think it's going to improve the way we build audiences and track results. On the flip side, the second part of this prediction is the only qualification to be elected to an office in the United States will be are you good at social media? They're really, we don't, we don't seem to care about your policies, about your experience, about anything else. We just, are you good at TikTok? Do you have a good Instagram feed? And so I think you're going to see the rise of the social media superstar politician. We have a president whose only qualification is he was great at Twitter and now he's good at basically screaming on social media. But here in New York we elected somebody who I voted for, by the way, but his main qualification was he had an awesome TikTok feed. Like he, he's not that experienced, he doesn't have a tremendous amount of work history in politics. He was, you know, an okay politician, but now he's mayor of inarguably the most important city in the United States from a reputational standpoint and perhaps the world, because he was great at TikTok and Instagram. So I think, you know, you're going to see the rise of the social media star politic.
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B
Is it the only reason though? I think the reason why he was elected was because he's, you know, symbolizing, you know, hope, right? And he was able to market that on social. But I don't think it is only social that got him elected.
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A
His message, his message was affordability, which was beautifully timed and incredibly well crafted. But he got outspent by a lot. And the only reason he won was because he found he got younger consumers to give a shit. And yes, you're right, he had the right message, but the right message in the forest if no one's around to hear it. Does it make a sound? Yeah, absolutely not. There are tons of politicians. I didn't vote in the primaries for this guy. I voted for someone else who had a very, very similar message. But he was just terrible at social media and Zora Mamdani was just, he just, he was so good at it that his message landed better because he was really targeted and incredibly powerful on the platforms that younger voters care about.
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B
Yeah, so it's about the way, you know, he shares, you know, that message, how anyone should. Yeah, okay.
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A
The medium, you know, Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. So yes, he had a great message, but he used the medium to tell it in a very effective way.
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B
Yeah.
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A
All right, what's your next prediction?
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B
Yeah, my next prediction is one that I actually, I wrote about it early November when Clement Schwebbyg today is at Warner Bros. Discovery in May 2026. He's going to be the new CEO of RTL. That's a big deal. That's a big deal because when I saw that news I thought, okay, there's a new generation of CEOs in European media and particularly ad broadcasters. Then a couple of weeks later you have Priya Dogra who was chosen to be the CEO of Channel 4. And there's a lot more seats. Right. We're waiting to Hear about the BBC, Artez, France television. They went continuity. So both CEOs have been renewed for another five years, I think. But I think across the board it says that broadcasters are not looking for custodians of legacy media anymore. They want operators, they want people who understand M and a partnership who have worked at streamers. So both Schwebeg and Dogra were at Warner Bros. Discovery at some point in time. She was most recently at Sky. But they understand streaming, they understand cross market growth and they've run portfolio globally, they're good deal makers, etc. Etc. And most likely those are the right CEOs for the next few years because they're going to help broadcasters operate that transformation. So I'm very excited about that. It's almost, I had it and then it's already coming true. But I think that's going to accelerate and I think this is going to be the blueprint for any new media and entertainment CEO in the region. I don't know if it's something that you've seen in the States, not yet.
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A
Unfortunately we are still stuck on our old white dude legacy. Hollywood grasping for the straws of the last era leadership here in the United States. It's a shame unless you call David Ellison a next generation of leader. And when your daddy gives you a company, I don't know that you can call that.
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B
He's a Nepal. He's a Nepo baby.
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A
He's the worst kind of Nepo baby for many different reasons. But I want to double down on what you said because I could not agree more. You look at Dogra's experience and it really, I think the reason she got that job was and by the way, she and I wound up direct messaging after I announced her her selection on LinkedIn. Mostly she thanked me for pronouncing her name correctly in my video and as Shapiro. I take that to heart. But I think she was chosen because of her M and A experience, because she knows how to target good acquisitions, to integrate good acquisitions and then operate good acquisitions. So Channel 4 in particular has a big transformation coming. They're going to take a lot of their production in house for the first time ever, because they're now legally allowed to do that. One of my predictions that we're not going to cover today is that the rise of the public service media back to preeminence, for all the reasons you just talked about, but also because the commercial area is really, especially in the American media in such chaos. And the big streamers and the big commercial publishers are pulling back on their investment in scripted and entertainment programming to put it into sports. So that's going to leave a vacuum that I think the big public broadcasters and media providers are going to. Phil. So I could not agree with your prediction here more vehemently.
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B
Yeah. And I mean, that ties in nicely with what we did last year. Right. We spoke to agents of change and I think those companies need people like that. Okay, so what's your next prediction?
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A
Well, this actually segues really nicely. It's almost as if we planned it to. My next prediction, which is M and A mergers and acquisitions in media gets even more manic in the new year. The year ended with a real kind of like battle royale for Warner Brothers Discovery that's still ongoing right now and I think is gonna continue through year end 2026. Because while Netflix seems to have the current advantage, that fight is far from over. And then there is the regulatory issues around that, both in the White House and in Congress. And then there's gonna be states attorneys general and then the EU is gonna have a say in whether or not the current bidders can buy Warner Brothers Discovery, AKA Disco Bros. So I think you're going to see substantially more M and A and I'm not the only one predicting this. There's a bunch of other. They're banks predicting a really big vibrant year in mergers and acquisitions, specifically in media. But we've got just happened Versant just spun out officially. You're going to see CNN get pulled out of the whole Warner Brothers discovery ecosystem and probably get sold on its I think thinking Gaming EA was the subject of the largest leverage buyout in corporate history, $55 billion. And I think you're going to see companies like Roblox and Take Two start to look around and think about well, how do we arm up for the looming battle that's ahead of us. And then you know, the Saudis just seem to want to buy friggin everything. And so I think they're going to wind up trying to put money into all of the big American streamers and media companies both from an investment standpoint but also from an influence standpoint. And unfortunately a lot of these mergers and acquisitions that are going to come out, the IPG Omnicom one is a really good example of this. So this is the culling of holdcos in the advertising ecosystem. And as a result at the end of last year 4,000 people lost their jobs and then they're closing down three of the most iconic creative shops in the history of advertising. And these mergers and acquisitions aren't about building anything most of the time. Most of the time they're about taking out competition or they're bankers whispering in the ears of these moguls saying hey, we can make a lot of money from this as my asmr. But I just don't think that there's a lot of strategery around a lot of this M and A. It's mostly about bankers convincing CEOs to do stuff so that the bankers can make money.
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B
Well, there's also the fact that, you know, it's a defensive move, right? It's not just always about, you know, knocking out a competition but it's like, you know, out of ideas on how to grow next. The one thing I will say is that you know, all of those companies and that applies also to Netflix. Well now they tend to, you know, overestimate the synergies. You know, the great thing that are going to be coming out of the merger and the other thing is they tend to forget about the culture clash, right? And that may be between us companies but even there folks from Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, very, very different, right? Very different ways of doing business. If you then put on top of that the Fact that there's a lot of M and A between companies that are from different countries in Europe. We've started so mfe. Right. So I'm agreeing with you. At the beginning of last year first episode we were saying we would have M and A. Then we were a bit disappointed and then H2. Yeah. Completely, completely blew up and we've seen MFE going after multi territorial deals, et cetera. And here there's a big cultural gap that these companies are going to need to fill.
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A
Yeah. And I think you're right. I mean Netflix, their viewership is flat or down in every territory that they play. We have no idea how many subscribers they have and they just seem to be now doing. I mean I don't disagree with the stuff that they're doing with Spotify and iHeart. I don't disagree with some of the moves that they're making. I think the TF1 deal was very smart, but they're just kind of really adopting other people's business models which to me says you're right, they're out of ideas. And so this Warner Brothers Discovery, this and the math I did, I wrote about this on my substack. There's not a lot of logic behind the amount of money they're offering for this. There's no way that it's ever going to return on the investment based on the amount of debt that they're going to wind up. They're going to have like $84 billion in debt after this is all said and done if they wind up with Warner Brothers Discovery. So I think that's really a sad sign for, you know, the market leader in streaming. But, but there are some, you know, things like I to your point, like the MFE Pro cb, that deal was probably right for everybody. So there are some times where this does make sense. But I hope that we can add more strategy and vision to these deals as opposed to desperation.
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B
Yeah, well, so that ties nicely back to having the right CEOs, right. At those companies. Are they able to. Because MFE, the vision is to be a pan European player. Kudos. This should be done somehow. And. But the question is he making the right moves just going after commercial broadcasters only? Right. I think this is step one. But again, if you want to transform your broadcasting business, you should look beyond that. So if you truly want to be a pan European player, that is more than just the addition of four or five commercial local broadcasters. He's going to need to look outside.
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A
Yeah, I think he's. Here's a prediction for you, a bold prediction. I think he's going to go after d'. Zm.
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B
Oh, you think so?
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A
Yeah.
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B
Interesting.
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A
I think, I think MFE goes after Dazon for numerous reasons.
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B
Interesting. That's a, that's a big one. That is an expensive one. I'm not sure because I, I have
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A
to say, how expensive could it possibly be though? Like, they're not making money, they're not profitable, and they have no path to profitability.
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B
Yeah, but then I wouldn't buy the zone for those.
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A
Well, except that, except that when you can amortize the rights that they have across many more properties, suddenly that becomes less of a thing. And then if you can, to what you've been saying for a year plus now, if you can then build a tech stack that, that amortizes across all these different properties, suddenly you're lowering your cost. So plus, you know, not everything is about making money on that one deal. There is a, you know, ego aspect of this as well. And there are a lot of good rights in design.
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B
Oh, they do. But given that they're spending so much money and end up having to sub license everything, I would just wait and leave the door open and get those,
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A
those, those deals, get those rights after they fail. I think it's, that's the thing is like I, I think everybody's sitting around waiting for Dazn to fail and it just takes, it's taking too long.
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B
Well, someone is very wealthy in the background to make that happen. The tech point is very interesting because I agree with you. And this is also something that, you know, is being a bit left out of the discussion on Netflix and, and WBD or mfe. But that's a biggie, right? To be able to put everything on par on one platform, that's gonna take years.
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A
Yeah, yeah. The HBO Max is supposed to launch in all these territories in Europe and around the rest of the world in 2026. That's gonna cost them a shit ton of money in tech. Whereas Netflix is already there. And you're absolutely right, but the migration is going to be incredibly painful.
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B
Yeah, they're launching in Jenna. They're launching in a couple of weeks and they will do it. You know, it is ready to go. Right. They've said that the day in Europe, Italy, and I think it's sometime in.
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A
It's the end of this month. Yeah, it's the end of this month.
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B
And so. And then the uk, which is a big one, is going to be in March. So those, those are going to happen. But imagine the Time that and the money that is being wasted instead of, you know, doing other things. Anyway, let's move on. All right.
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A
To your next prediction.
- [34:30]
B
Mine is last year was the year of YouTube in so many ways. YouTube is still not TV. No, let's stop with that.
- [34:39]
A
You want to take that fight on? Do you want to take that fight on?
- [34:42]
B
No. What's fascinating is that clearly YouTube, it's been on everyone's mind all year long. And who was very quiet last year, TikTok, Insta and others. And so I think, you know, broadcasters and streamers, everyone has tried to find, you know, a way to partner or challenge YouTube, etc. In the meantime, nothing has truly happened from Insta, TikTok and others in terms of we can be TV too. You know, this could be our year. So I think that next year, and just, just in December, we had an announcement from Instagram saying that they would be launching a CTV app on Amazon Fire TV devices. And so I think all of those social media apps are going to be playing catch up to find a way to again be on par with YouTube. And that also means that they will focus more and more on long form because I don't know if you can succeed on the big screen with short form.
- [35:49]
A
Only agree 100%. Yeah. No. Last June I predicted Instagram would be on television by the end of 2026 and they announced that they're coming to television at the end of 2025. So check TikTok is definitely next because the Ellisons are gonna control TikTok. They also control Paramount and CBS, so obviously that's where they're headed with that. But no, I don't think people. I think short form will work on television, but I don't think you can be exclusively short form. As you just said, Vevo does incredibly well both on YouTube and fast on TVs. But if you look at the history of TikTok, ByteDance in particular in Doyen and China, they've gone vertical, they've gone long form, they've gone to the television set. And everybody who is in social media, most especially Instagram and TikTok, have to be lamenting the amount of money that YouTube is printing by being on the television and being the only social video platform that has a major presence on television. So I again, I vehemently and violently agree with this prediction of yours.
- [36:56]
B
Okay, cool, so what do you have next?
- [36:59]
A
My next prediction is. So it follows on my last prediction, which is the M and A mania is not always going to be rational. And you know, Omnicom is going to wind up shedding as many as additional 10,000 jobs in 2026 because of the WBD merger. And whatever happens there, tens of thousands of jobs, if not tens of thousands of jobs, will disappear. 2025 was a worse job market than 2024. I predicted that going into 2025. There's a number of different things, but at the center of it, in 2026, I think we're going to hit a major period of stagflation. And stagflation is a combination of very slow, if not negative growth, although maybe not recessionary, very high inflation check and very high unemployment. In December, we heard the highest unemployment number since COVID And I think we're going to see more very high unemployment, many more job losses, many more months of negative job growth. And when you combine those three factors, slow growth, high inflation, high unemployment. That is the definition of stagflation. And what happens in these periods is companies cut back on employees, they slow hiring, they eliminate jobs that they were gonna hire. And I think there's a ton of people out there looking for jobs right now. I think it's gonna be harder for them to find jobs in 2026 than it was in 2025. And I think there's gonna be a ton of more people out on the street by the end of this year, which is not great news. And it goes back to something you and I had been saying over and over again. Look for opportunities where you haven't looked before. Whether that means going out on your own and selling your skill sets in bottles rather than cases, or looking in sectors like gaming, like retail media, like the creator economy, where jobs are actually being added. But whatever, stop looking for the same job that you had in the last era, because there's a good chance it will no longer exist, I think.
- [39:10]
B
Well, one of my prediction is that next year we'll see a new age of discovery and distribution because of AI, because of LLMs. And I think a lot of people in the industry have the right skills to do partnership work for companies like OpenAI and others to either do deals like the one we had at the end of last year with Disney, to feed ip, et cetera. But I think there's a lot of companies who are going to be in need of understanding how will they be surfaced within a GEO world versus an SEO world. And this is where I'd be looking for opportunities to kind of recycle, you know, our experience, what we've done, and make it to work for something that Is, you said it, it's a bubble. But at the end of the day, as I think it's going to take a bit more time, I think there's going to be. This is where there's going to be cool opportunities. So I know that very often people ask me, if you had to stop doing what you're doing right now, where would you go? What would be, you know, your next gig? Often, more often than not, I have no clue. But sometimes I'm thinking, not that I want to work with OpenAI specifically, but somehow finding a way to put my distribution partnership expertise to work for AI for LLM companies would be of interest because I feel it's a blank page. And over and over again in my career, I've always loved that. It's like the business model doesn't exist. Even the deal terms, what does it look like? What should you do? So I think this is a great direction for people in need of a new.
- [40:58]
A
And I don't want to go work at those companies, mostly because it's just not my headspace. Not because I don't believe in those companies, but in my mind, you look at things like Under Armour, starting a studio, Dick's Sporting Goods, starting a content machine, Walmart and Vizio coming together. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity in the content economy that isn't at content companies, but it's at companies who do content, who make content in the form of advertising and marketing, but are now going to shift and go direct to consumer with content rather than marketing. And I think there's going to be enormous opportunity at brands, at platforms that have not normally worked in content.
- [41:39]
B
So I actually have, like you, many more predictions that, you know, I've put out on streaming, made easy, it's on substack. And another one that I had was the, the birth of the corporate storyteller.
- [41:55]
A
Right. I feel we share that prediction. Actually, I'm calling it the affinity economy, but yes, absolutely.
- [42:02]
B
But so it's interesting because so people who are, you know, out the door, so to say, have that freedom, right, to learn that skill, reinvent themselves and they could be that person for a lot of companies. And you're starting to see, you know, job descriptions for someone to be chief of substack and whatever, but what it says, you know, underneath is not so much, you know, be the chief of substack, there's going to be something else, you know, in a year or two years time. It's more like, you know, you know, how to tell a corporate story and you know that wins every time.
- [42:36]
A
Yeah, I agree. And that's what, that's actually when you look at what hiring managers are most looking for right now, it isn't somebody who knows how to use AI. It's it's storytellers. People who know how to take complex ideas and sets of information and turn it into a narrative. And now I think to your point, the corporate storyteller, I'm calling them the corporate creator as part of the affinity economy. I agree. We completely agree on that. All right, My last prediction is, and this is one I'm stealing from Roku. So Roku made a bunch of predictions at the end of last year. One of them I wish I had made myself first. But I'm taking it and running with it, which is the extinction of the ad free viewer. I think that by the end of 2026, so from, from during the course of 2025, the amount of ad free viewing on streaming dropped dramatically. And that's because people are introducing new ad tiers. That's because sports is moving to streaming. And so while I do believe there will be very high end, very R who choose to pay for ad free experiences, I'm an ad free subscriber on Netflix and I don't believe I'm going to change anytime soon. But during the course of every week I see ads. I see lots of ads for many different reasons. Whether it's I'm on Peacock and I refuse to pay for the ad free tier or I'm watching sports. Even on Amazon, where I don't necessarily spend a lot of time when I watch the NFL, I can't avoid the ads when I'm on other platforms. On Christmas day, there were ads inside Netflix's NFL games because that's just the way the NFL works. So while you can avoid ads on certain platforms, I think it's almost impossible, if not absolutely impossible by year end that as a regular television viewer, if you're watching, think of the screen, start ad on Roku, on Samsung, on the rest. That's going to become incredibly valuable for to reach the ad free viewer. But then again, that ad free viewer is no longer ad free. They're turning on the television set and the first thing they're going to see is an ad. So I do think we're going to see the absolute extinction of the totally ad free viewer by the end of this year.
- [44:52]
B
No, I don't agree with that. Extinction is very, it's a very strong word and I love Roku. But when they're putting a prediction like that they're just, you know, preaching to their own, you know, choir. And I get it.
- [45:06]
A
I agree with you. There was a reason why they put that out there. But I also think there's a point to it.
- [45:12]
B
I think. So again, could be that this is a us thing only, right? Because you do see that you guys are going heavy on ads per hour. The ad load in the US is nothing compared to us. We have what, 8, 10 max on commercial TV streamers. We're looking at 4 to 6, depending on who we're talking about. So I agree that, that in some shape or form you're always subjected to advertising somehow. And that could be, to your point, the homepage, this could be in the video, etc. Etc. But I think people will want to keep a safe, you know, uninterrupted experience somehow. And you're never far from the moment where people get sick of advertising and go back to premium and ad free. This is what happened right when Netflix came in, there was very much no ads. You know, it's free. You can do whatever you want. We won't bother you.
- [46:11]
A
30% of their subscribers have ads. And then even if you're an ad free viewer, if you watch the football games on their platform. And by the way, my prediction is a US centric prediction. It isn't about Europe, like you're watching the BBC, but even in Europe, increasingly with YouTube becoming the number one channel on TV sets and you know, ITV has ads, Channel 4 has ads. So yeah, in Europe there is ads.
- [46:39]
B
Even, you know, in the uk.
- [46:42]
A
You're making my point, Mary.
- [46:44]
B
So they're saying that perhaps the BBC could be putting ads. So I agree with you that we're in a world where there's more and more ads. But you know, we'll still have pockets of subscribers who will want none. And I think, you know, we're never far from the moment where people get sick of it and actually kind of revert back.
- [47:02]
A
I agree with you. I just think it's going to be, even for those high end consumers who, who, who choose the ad free options, they're gonna wind up watching something every week that has ads in it, whether it's news or sports or, or just their home screen popping up in front of them.
- [47:19]
B
Yeah, out of all the subscription that I have, there's one where I have ads. But I'm this close to actually going ad free because it's, it's, it's getting on my nerves. The one thing I will say that is, is scary about this prediction Is I think in 2025 what we've seen right is that there was way more supply than demand. And so if you're saying that everyone is going ad supported, we're going to have a big, big problem. And this is where I think that at some point in time we'll go
- [47:47]
A
back and that goes back to the M and a prediction because well, so there's all these platforms. You're absolutely right. We don't need as many platforms as we have.
- [47:55]
B
You don't need as many platforms. There's too many ads, not enough of money and advertisers ready to invest. And so actually a lot of platforms, fast channels and others, they're going to call it quit and they're going to go back to ad free or they're going to.
- [48:09]
A
So yeah, the thing I want to say about this is television in the United States started as a totally advertising supported product. There was, there was no ad free option at all and people didn't mind it. And there are a number of different reasons for that. The ad load wasn't crazy, the over frequency wasn't nuts and the advertising was good, it was well produced and it fit in context of the show that it lived in at. We go back to one of my earlier predictions with the the political advertising dollars are going to flood the US market. I do think you're going to see better targeting, substantially better personalization of the ads themselves. So if I'm a, a 58 year old man like myself, I'm not going to see diaper commercials, it's just not what I'm looking for. But I am going to see car commercials and insurance commercials and pharma commercials because they're targeted specifically to my household and to the viewer that's actually watching. And so that deterministic data that we've talked about in this episode that I think is going to have a major influence by the end of this year. I think we're going to see a substantially better set of personalization tools using AI. That's a great example. Meta talked about their increase in ad revenue by better targeting using AI and I think those are the things that are going to influence a better ad environment hopefully by the end of this year and therefore consumers caring a little bit less because I'm not over frequencied not seeing the wrong ads. And by the way, the ad matches the content that I'm watching.
- [49:46]
B
Yeah, let's see, let's check, let's check in.
- [49:49]
A
Yeah, we're checking year's end so and it's going to be hard to measure that one. This is why I picked it.
- [49:55]
B
That's an interesting one. Okay, so we've done, we've, we've done, you know, most of our prediction, but there's much more on our substack, so go to our substack. So we were just in Vegas for CES and we brought in a special guest to actually have a discussion on some additional predictions for 2020. Can we tell who our guest is?
- [50:16]
A
Yeah, it's your. I'm kind of pissed off about it because it's your other podcast husband. Alan woke my second husband. So, yeah, no. We had a throuple in Vegas where we talked to Alan about our predictions from our substacks that we put out this week and his predictions for 2026. And, you know, Alan is obviously a brilliant friend of ours who also coined the phrase fast. And so it was a great conversation. And that episode comes out next week week. So that was our first episode of 2026. It's also our one year anniversary together. Marianne, happy anniversary.
- [50:50]
B
Happy birthday.
- [50:52]
A
It's been great doing this with you. I look forward to a whole other year. I'm really entering this year energized. So thanks everybody out there for tuning in or watching this episode of the Media Odyssey podcast. We will see you next week with our special guest, Alan Wolk.
- [51:08]
B
Sam.