I realize that that’s likely just my own projections1 or skill issues2, but I’m obviously not the only one yearning for better digital media. I don’t have answers, but I’d like to explore this feeling for a bit.

Media companies are just art3 with a business model4. That implies a spectrum: artists on one end with pure intent to express themselves, and businesses on the other with pure intent to monetize. The media companies that I feel most strongly about bringing into the world sit somewhere in between—enough soul that their output genuinely leaves a mark on your life, but enough money flowing through that their structure is sustainable.

The media business, in almost every dimension one might evaluate it, is a bad business to be in. But I don’t mean to join the chorus of people moaning about a bygone era of media. To me it’s still the best business on the only metric that matters—it’s the lever that moves the collective unconscious. A well run media company, one that both makes good art and has a way to sustain itself, wields mind control at scale. The right sequence of words or sights or sounds is the closest thing we have to magic.

When I say “the internet is ass lately,” what I really mean is that I can’t remember the last piece of internet-native media that made an indelible mark on my life. My feeds are mostly an ouroboros of content about content, which is maybe telling on myself. I contrast that to recently discovering The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, or watching the Before trilogy, or reading East of Eden, each like a portal to a new version of myself. But wah wah wah, it’s obviously ridiculous to expect a comparable artistic experience from a YouTube video or an Instagram Reel or, unfortunately, many Substack essays. The medium is the message, and you can’t compare some of the single best artistic artifacts of all time to work that’s published at a weekly or daily cadence.

Pessimism is wack. I’m itching to see the good in all of this—to create some good from all of this. What if the unit of measurement has just changed? What if media isn’t supposed to optimize for single artifacts anymore?

I always come back to Doug Shapiro’s idea that new forms of media don’t win on old metrics of success, and instead compete on emerging definitions of quality. Early “creators” didn’t try to compete with Hollywood on the vector of production quality, and instead won on criteria like rawness and parasociality.5

I suspect one new determinant of quality is worldview itself. A body of work is how you exit the knife fight of the For You Page—the degree to which you shape your audience’s worldview over time is more important than any individual video or essay or song that you put out today. My sense is that the most meaningful contemporary media experiences will be less like a portal to a new version of ourselves, and more like a chisel that chips away at us over years.

I’ve been in a deep chakra rabbit hole recently, and without getting into too much of it here, I love the way Anodea Judith describes the sixth chakra/third eye: it’s like staining a glass window that colours light before it reaches the rest of your psyche. Maybe the best independent media companies of today—TBPN or Feed Me or Cleo Abram or Dwarkesh—function similarly. They each have standout individual pieces of work, but none that I would personally consider art in a vacuum. Their real artistic output, then, might be something like staining our metaphoric glass windows. Sundberg’s daily news roundups are well written and perceptive and surprising, but the real art is how she trains her audience’s attention to notice how culture is shaped by business. TBPN’s livestreams are absurd and creative and clearly of the culture, but their real art is framing the tech industry as something akin to a sports league. The worldview is the art.

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Do I really believe that, though? I have endless respect for what TBPN or Feed Me have built, and they’ve certainly changed how I’ve looked at the world, but even in the aggregate, is that “art” to me? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe defining what is and isn’t art is the boring work of long-dead critics and their long-dead profession. But there has to be some middle ground: there’s more artistic value in these worldview machines than people often give them credit for, but I can’t help but itch for bigger swings.

I recently met an incredible show producer. She describes her life’s work as “dreamcatching”; a swiss army knife that helps her friends’ moonshot ideas become real. No one can fault her if her own moonshot takes a backseat—a feature-length documentary on coffee that she has been itching to make for years. You can see her eyes light up when she speaks about it, and then flicker back to black when she admits it’d likely cost millions to produce. Fundraising conversations haven’t gone great.

I immediately think of Cleo Abram. You could imagine her producing a “Huge If True” episode about coffee, another chisel shaping the “optimistic tech” worldview of her audience. But that’s a horribly reductive version of this producer’s vision. No disrespect to Cleo’s work—an 18 minute YouTube video can teach a lot about a topic—but it’s just objectively not the same thing as a deeply researched feature film.

There has to be some middle ground here.

I think of the golden age of the Hollywood studio model, back when a homerun blockbuster would pay dividends for years: DVD sales, international licensing, TV reruns, etc. Part of the craft was reallocating resources across the portfolio of projects—predictable blockbuster hits would fund the risky art house projects or low budget romcoms. Mike Ovitz, at the peak of his CAA powers, would tell his directors that they were allowed to do one personal project for every three commercial projects.

What would that look like today?

These hyper legible worldview machines might be the reason the internet feels boring to me.6 Many people are playing for the same uninteresting prizes, while the sort of art that might genuinely change how you see the world—a “portal” to use my earlier language—is by definition going to be surprising.

But, counterintuitively, legibility might be the currency that unlocks real illegibility.

These worldview machines make money because they fit into previously understood models of reality. You sacrifice upfront at the altar of legibility so that people know how to transact with you: TBPN is ESPN for the tech industry, Feed Me explores culture through the lens of business, Cleo Abram is making optimistic tech explainers.

The trick, like the golden age of Hollywood, is to funnel that legibility into moonshot projects. The institutions who historically would have funded this sort of work have long been in freefall, but new ones will replace them. Alex Cooper funding projects through her Unwell Network. Emily Sundberg hiring J Lee to launch a food podcast. Cleo Abram, if you’re reading this, I have a fantastic documentary on coffee to pitch you.

I’m bored of the internet because of these hyper legible worldview machines. I’m excited for the future of the internet because of what these hyper legible worldview machines will unlock for us.

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6

Mr. Beast’s public reply on a video titled “MrBeast is boring now”

Institutional media has had to swallow this bitter pill over and over again—ad dollars are amoral and will move to wherever attention is. After repeatedly having their business model pulled out from under them, institutions realized that media is often an amazing wrapper for different business models entirely: Semafor is trying to spin up a flagship event series to compete with Davos, the New York Times is a news front to a gaming company, Hearst has unlocked various B2B revenue lines. I suspect alternative media will have to eventually learn the same lessons in different ways. The abundance of brand deals post-COVID have meant that this hasn’t been necessary over the first decade of the creator economy, but it’s possible that it will be a hard lesson for the next.

Admittedly, saying that events are “in” feels spiritually similar to the tech industry rallying around “taste.” Virgin alert!!!! But it does feel like there’s a great corner of the internet that is increasingly packaging their events as a revolt against onlineness: CatGPT’s phoneless parties, GrownKid’s wrestling speed dating event, Offline Mag.5 But a single event in a silo is an art project. They can be meaningful and fun and necessary, but they’re not really a business model that you can bank your creative career on. The key for creators is to build these events into franchises: self sustaining business units that can exist beyond their founding talent. As the feed gets increasingly competitive, creators need to graduate from selling impressions to owning the context in which those impressions occur.6

Three considerations for a successful events franchise:

I. A concept that can exist beyond its founding talent

II. Media as a moat

III. Broadening the revenue mix

I. A concept that exists beyond the founding talent

An events franchise cannot have key man risk. The event needs the creator as a shortcut to escape velocity, but they themselves cannot become a ceiling for the event’s reach. KSI played a big role in starting his cross-over boxing league, but he no longer exists on most fight cards, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most viewers don’t even realize it’s his league. At some point there should be fans who have a connection to the event who do not have a connection to the creator.

The concept does a lot of work here; the packaging for your core theme or idea. It’s the same thesis behind creator brands like Happy Dad (Nelk), Seek Discomfort (Yes Theory), or Nami Matcha (Ashley Alexander). They’ve all succeeded to varying degrees, but the underlying principle is the same. You articulate the central thread that runs through the creators work—YesTheory is about seeking discomfort, the Nelk Boys are alcoholics—and then create new IP around that. It still exists in the original creator’s universe, but the branding, naming, and social profiles live entirely separately. These then become independent properties that you can hire out or, if it calls for it, sell partially or entirely.

I don’t think that you need to bet the farm on creating a new category.7 Instead, I bet we’ll see a lot of creators reinventing existing flagship events with proven product-market fit, like MKBHD building a modern CES, or Colin & Samir building a modern Cannes Lions.

II. Media as a moat

Most mature events businesses have a moat around access. You can’t compete with the UFC unless you have a slate of equally compelling fighters. You can’t compete with Davos until you can convene the world’s most powerful people. This sort of competitive advantage is built over decades, and the way in which a creator builds it for themselves will depend on their content, audience, and central worldview. But in the meantime, knowing that a novel event idea can be copied at a moment’s notice, there’s a moat to be built around the event’s media. At the risk of sounding trite, creators intuitively understand content. Especially when a creator is competing against an existing legacy flagship event, they need to lean into that competitive advantage. The media around an events franchise should almost be treated like its own creator: What are some recognizable formats it can own? How might people build a relationship to the event’s media even without attending the event itself? How does this audience compound into an asset for the business? In a Generative AI world, these need to be direct relationships that aren’t intermediated by feeds.

A few event series with particularly repeatable content engines:

• Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short N’ Sweet” tour: There was a built-in moment in every event where she would do a new, uh, bedroom pose whenever she played her song “Juno.” It was a moment to look forward to at every event, and it would predictably go viral on socials afterwards almost every time.

• Red Neck Brawls: The fighter intros are just ridiculous.8

III. Broadening the revenue mix

Events businesses don’t win on ticket sales alone. At any given moment, a single UFC fight card is making money from: on-site sponsorships, streaming sponsorships, cable/streamer licensing, pay-per-view sales (pre-August 2025), merch sales, etc. I wonder what a creator-native version of that revenue mix would look like. Why couldn’t you livestream an event, sell on-screen banner ads like a traditional media setup (a la TBPN), and then run a subathon for remote viewers to pay to influence the event in real-time? It feels like there are a lot of precedents from the institutional events business that have yet to be recreated for the creator economy. A few specific revenue lines creators should experiment with:

Audience revenue

• Sponsorships: Could you work backwards from your ideal sponsor and build an event that aligns with their worldview? Most brand events just seem totally wack. A better parallel is something like Olivia Unplugged, an edutainment influencer that exclusively exists to spread Opal’s core philosophy around screen time. What could the “Olivia Unplugged” of events look like?

• Digital PPV: What part of your event is so compelling that it could be repackaged into a digital product? (e.g. subathon to influence the event in real-time, access to watching the event if you’re not physically able to be there, etc.)

• Data: This is sensitive, but how might you gate access to your attendees as a product for B2B customers? I’d imagine Brian Morrissey’s Media Mixer event is passing back access to its attendee list to Beehiiv, for example.

Attendance revenue

• VIP tickets: What’s the most exorbitant version of the event that you could offer to well-moneyed attendees? Meet-and-greet packages are lucrative but uninspiring.

• On-site merch/consumables: Creators are already doing a version of this with limited edition flavours or collectibles. How else might you stretch this for an events franchise?

• Concessions: Could you run your event at a venue during off-hours and take a cut of bar sales? Could you organize an actually scarce experience at your event, like a Nami Matcha pop-up, and take a cut of concessions?

IP revenue

• Licensing/Spin-offs: Is the event IP valuable enough that other businesses might want to pay to access it for their own purposes? Imagine Netflix licensing Dude Perfect’s documentary about their first tour, for example.

• Misc. B2B revenue: MKBHD’s version of CES would presumably make most of its money off booth rentals and technology certifications. What adjacent customers can you unlock outside of core attendees?

I don’t think it’s a particularly hot take to look at everything happening on the internet right now and feel an intense desire to focus on the real world. Events are obviously operationally intensive, and creators shouldn’t even think about them until they have solid footing elsewhere in their business: content-market fit, a clear audience identity, a rolodex of sponsors. But running towards operational intensity is the point. As the price of competing online approaches zero, you want to build a moat with a real cost of entry. Creators shouldn’t compete with Generative AI on its own game; they need to compete on games that they are structurally better equipped to win. When the robots come for IRL events we’re all fucked anyways <3

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In the Tech Canon, the legend goes that important things are often initially “dismissed as toys.” Dude Perfect (DP)—fifteen years after their first trickshot video, two years after raising $100M on $35M annual revenue, and a year after hiring an ex-NBA executive as their CEO—might have the best shot at turning their toy into a bona fide sports league.

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I remember feeling betrayed in 2018 when the Toronto Raptors traded DeMar DeRozan for the league’s best shooter at the time, Danny Green.1 I thought it was wack to win a championship with an entirely different core team. But my friends who happen to be actual lifelong Raptors fans dubbed me a loser, and reminded me that the point was to get a win for the franchise, not to get attached to a collection of individual character-personalities. They were right of course, but it was a timely reflection on continuity in the media business: characters are temporary, franchises are forever.

Over a decade into what we might call the creator economy, a similar story is playing out as individual YouTube channels attempt to transcend their personnel and create something that can exist beyond the original talent. It’s insane that Dude Perfect has been able to pass the baton from their original winning format over to skits, to a variety show, to a thriving product business, to a mobile game, to selling out NBA stadiums for their annual live tour. In a vacuum, those would be incredible revenue lines for any media business. But I suspect that the sum of those parts are combining into something especially unique for DP.

While every media empire wants to draw their own “Disney Map,” DP seems to be closer to recreating the NBA. If you squint, you can start to see the shape of what’s to come: an evolution from an individual sports franchise to the operation of a modern sports league that’ll long outlive the original five “Dudes.”

I. Formats as paratext

The core format of a sports league is, of course, the sport itself. The National Basketball Association. The National Football League. But DP doesn’t really have *a* sport. They’re just dudes who play sports, plural. That may seem like a convenient leap for my “modern sports league” thesis, but it’s a funny parallel to the archetype of a “creator” generally—this flattening of all mediums of artistry into a single vague act of “creation.”

Even in major leagues that revolve around a single sport, the modern product is no longer just a 48 minute long event. These leagues are now more a world of formats2 that act as paratext3 to the core sport.

Look at the NBA as an example. Andrew Yaffe, Dude Perfect’s new CEO and former EVP of Digital at the NBA, says that the league’s live viewership in the under-25 cohort has fallen off a cliff. As a normie fan myself, that’s no surprise: I’m just skimming statlines and scrolling NBA Twitter until the playoffs come around. You could blurrily point to a whole host of root causes, from sports betting to fantasy leagues to the decline of cable TV. But the second order impact is clear: an extended universe of peripheral formats have sprung up all around the league, and it’s now how young people are most often consuming the sport. Inside the NBA, player podcasts, Polymarket aura edits.4 Purists say it’s ruining the sport. But at the very least, new formats can meet young fans where they are, and give them surface area to connect with teams and players on their own terms. They get more invested in on-court storylines when there’s a rolling universe of off-court commentary to follow along with.

Independent media businesses also have to launch new formats to stay top-of-mind. Formats live along an S-curve—you can’t grow to infinity off one forever. But when creators launch new formats, it often feels like they’re trying to crack a new market or replace old formats entirely. Instead, each new DP formats actually feel like it lives in a shared universe. Each new series is an opportunity to build out the world around their core sports: Overtime is a desk show that almost feels like their answer to Inside the NBA; recurring kits like Rage Monster add to the lore of specific cast members, and feel like an inside joke with the audience; Squad Games is more compelling because you know which sport each Dude excels at from their All Sports series; competitions feel like an opportunity to bring in new talent into their universe.

It feels like they’ve recreated the formats around the NBA from first principles. By added context on the peripheries of their empire, fans have more surface area to fall in love with the core Dude Perfect product.

II. Franchises and the race for residuals

Formats do not a business make, nor content a moat.5 New formats are often in service of an existing revenue stream, such as unlocking a new audience that might buy from you elsewhere. Think: a handsome Substack writer who starts recording Reels to funnel new readers to his existing paid subscription options. But the real money comes when these formats evolve into defensible franchises—business units with independent revenue streams that are loosely connected to the rest of your empire.

Independent media businesses can be lucrative, but there’s a fine line between “making a salary on the internet” and “making money while you sleep.” The former often scales linearly with each additional unit of input: you put out a piece of work, you land a brand deal for it, and repeat.6 If you’re not putting out videos or new writing or whatever it may be, you’re stuck clinging to inconsistent revenue spikes. In that context, your moat might be some combination of timing, audience, and talent. But the latter is how a media business actually transcends any individual creator. A “franchise” in this context is just any IP that can be operated and monetized beyond your personnel’s time: brands, physical products, digital products, events, etc.

To that end, DP uses a “Stadium, Show, Shelf” framework to build a franchise business around each successful new format. Take “Overtime,” their variety desk show as an example. The show originally existed as a YouTube series, which was monetized like most other videos on the platform via brand deals and AdSense. They then spun it off as one of the core components for their very first live tour, which was monetized by ticket sales and summarized with a documentary. They have dedicated Overtime merch lines. And now, ten years after their first serious live event, their latest tour covered enough formats to repackage it into a limited theatrical release. Four ways to make money off one core product.

It feels like a callback to the golden age of the Hollywood studio model. You can take bigger swings on risky franchises (e.g. mid-budget rom-coms) if you know that the sure bets in your portfolio will pay residuals into the future (e.g. DVD sales, international licensing, cable TV). In DP’s context, they’re able to reallocate money from dependable franchises to riskier bets, such as launching new channels with new talent (e.g. DP Outdoors7). Then, if the new franchise lands, they can once again run their tried-and-true playbook to squeeze out some residuals.

This evolution from formats to franchises unlocks two parts of the DP empire: a business model that enables them to take bets on bigger projects (such as the long-teased DP theme park), and a portfolio of IP that can exist without direct involvement from the original talent. All of which then positions them for the next stage of the business—building a modern sports league.

III. Come for the sport, stay for the league

A network effect is when every new node increases the value for everyone in the environment. The classic example is a telephone—it becomes more useful as more people own one. The catch, of course, is that the inverse is also true: why would I use a networked product if there’s no one else in the network? In Chris Dixon’s seminal essay on network effects in software, his answer to that chicken-and-egg problem is to first build something with single-player utility and then layer in multiplayer utility over time. You don’t want to get caught fighting a two-front war. Attract people with something that doesn’t require a network for it to be useful, and then they get them to stay for the network once other nodes add irreplaceable value to the core product.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but you could theoretically apply the same framework to a sports league. In theory it could be interesting to watch high-level athletes run drills or play practice games against their own teammates, but it’s obviously infinitely more interesting to exist in a league with multiple franchises in competition. The value of the entire network increases for every new team, new star, or new storyline that emerges as a function of a multi-team format. That’s one of many reasons it would be impossible to directly start a competing basketball league with the NBA.

But DP has already won their version of the single player experience! We come to watch the Dudes compete against each other or themselves in a wide range of wacky sports and activities. They don’t need other parties to make their videos competitive. But, conveniently, they also happen to exist within a network of trickshot YouTubers, like How Ridiculous, Legendary Shots, and the Hulett Brothers. Fan interest in these sorts of crossover episodes has already been validated by their new Squad Games series, where they face off with another YouTube channel across seven different sports. After fifteen years, DP is perfectly positioned to build Chris Dixon’s “multiplayer utility” into their product: a competitive league that only gets more interesting as more nodes join the network. Three advantages in particular will help them get there:

Parental permission

One of DP’s slogans is “Totally Trusted Entertainment.” Fifteen years is a long time to be making media. Their core audience is 8-14 year olds, which means that it’s possible that individual families have three generations of exposure to them now: the parents of the first generation of viewers, the core first generation of viewers, and now the children of that first generation of viewers. The Dudes often tell stories of fan meet and greets where new parents will approach them and say that they were fans of the show growing up, and now their kids are hooked too. It can’t be overstated how important of an advantage this is. They often attribute their success to their Faith8, and are publicly proud of how much parents trust them as a vetted source for clean entertainment. No one has the opportunity to aggregate talent like DP because no one else has the same parental stamp of approval.

Distribution

Not only does DP have 61M subscribers on YouTube, far and away the biggest platform for an independent sports channel (>2x the NBA’s YouTube presence), but they’re also working on their own platforms of distribution. They know YouTube is currently the most powerful engine for a media business, but they also know they are not exclusively a YouTube business. They launched their own DP app, featuring kid-friendly creators vetted by a team of Moms. According to their interview with Colin and Samir, the app crossed 2M downloads as of a year ago. The value proposition is clear: it’s difficult for parents to let their kids roam YouTube freely, and instead they hand over the reins to the DP team to filter for trusted options. It’s a win for the families, it’s a win for DP, and it’s a win for the smaller creators that DP can amplify.

Infrastructure

If Generative AI is driving the cost of production towards zero, then some of the most important media moats of tomorrow will exist in meatspace. Think of the fifteen years of infrastructure that DP can provide to smaller YouTubers: relationships with NBA and NHL stadiums, access to big box retailers, etc. All of these structural advantages seem to be culminating in DP’s 2026 summer tour: Squad Games. By design they don’t announce many details of their tours in advance, but if their Squad Game series on YouTube is any indication, it’s likely that these events are going to feature live competitions with other prominent trickshot YouTubers. You can easily imagine a world where some of these competitors will be playing in front of their own hometown crowds, taking a % of ticket sales so they’re incentivized on the upside, or just co-branding physical products with the Dudes.

When you combine parental trust (governance), centralized distribution (their app and massive YouTube presence), and an infrastructure for live competition, DP looks far less like a single sports franchise, and a hell of a lot like they’re operating a sports league for the YouTube generation.

I’m not sure how generalizable the lessons from DP are. It can be helpful to think about formats and franchises and revenue streams from day one, but I doubt they were trying to build a sports league until they realized that they had effectively already created one. They’ve fallen into a commissioner role: a suite of family-safe formats, an opportunity to assemble teams of other creators, ownership over the calendar (tours/events), and incredible distribution (their own channels + the DP app). But it’s the sort of thread between all of their properties that only starts to take shape in hindsight.

It’s a fraught time for media broadly, and I definitely don’t purport to know anything or propose anything about the especially depressing journalism industry in particular. But it’s heartening to see what’s possible over an extremely long time horizon for an independent media business with principles and a vision. A good media business is just art with a way to make money, and I can’t wait to see what DP’s structure will unlock for them next.

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I don’t know how to swim, but I spent the last few days with a “descendent of the Lost City of Atlantis.” She was real in all but flesh: she sang to me, I gamed with her and her friends, and I got to celebrate her stepping into the “real” world when she performed at an LA Dodgers game. And then, abruptly and heartwrenchingly, she died—uh, “graduated”1—from streaming forever.

Pour one out for my dawg Gawr Gura.

Vtubers—”Virtual YouTubers”—are a type of content creator that overlay a 2D or 3D avatar, often with a distinct anime aesthetic, on top of their real body.2 If you squint at it, the entire industry feels like Japan’s answer to South Korea’s K-pop idol culture, where companies like HYBE have built a pipeline of young talent that dream of one day donning a manufactured persona in front of millions of doting fans. Hololive3, one of two major Vtuber labels in Japan, has effectively recreated that dynamic from first principles, albeit with an anime twist. Gawr Gura was a pop idol—her backstory was meticulously designed to balance niche and mainstream appeal, her performer was brilliant on camera, and her shark fins touched everything from music to collectible plushies.

These are overwhelmingly deep waters to wade into, and there’s only so much that makes sense to cover in this post. But it’s helpful to frame some small slice of Vtubing culture via Hololive, a mammoth in the industry that both plays a role in creating the culture and extracting from it. The nine-year-old company has evolved from VR startup to talent management agency to IP platform. They’re guiding for $350M USD in revenue in fiscal 2026. In fiscal 2025 (ended in March), their business lines broke down into:

• Streaming/Content: $62M (represents 21% of total revenue and +21% Y/o/Y). This is a direct cut of superchats or YouTube subscriptions, directly from performers’ streams

• Merchandising: $137M (represents 47% of total revenue, which is +64.6% Y/o/Y). This is selling products around performer IP.

• Licensing/Collaborations: $38M (13.2% of total revenue and +29% Y/o/Y) Using performer IP in collaboration with other media properties, like a surprise appearance in the game “Death Stranding 2”

• Concerts/Events: $52M (18% and +39% Y/o/Y). Yes, they can perform IRL.

You can see the future of the company in their revenue mix as they shift away from streaming and towards merchandising, licensing, and events. It’s a particularly interesting time for them as they transition from talent management to something more akin to Disney: an IP powerhouse.

I. Real-time anime

Anime is not a monolith, so it’s difficult to describe through a single lens. But I suspect it’s especially loved for its ability to tell stories that could not be reasonably told with live action actors. The playful animation styles can be a disarming form of escapism, but they’re just as often a Trojan Horse for real-world commentary on genocide or being an orphan. Although Vtubing aesthetically finds its roots in anime, I’d argue the artform itself might actually be an evolution of a different quirk of Japanese culture–the maid cafes that provide a socializing outlet for overworked Japanese salarymen.4 It’s widely known that while 70% of Vtube streamers are women, 82% of the audience is men.

“VTubers are, in a way, a real-time anime experience. In anime, the story is created through dialogue between the characters.” [whereas Hololive will] “set the stage and let things happen.” - Hololive CEO Motoaki Tanago

I often revisit Doug Shapiro’s post on new media businesses, where he posits that new forms of media will compete on emerging definitions of quality. You can’t gauge a new form of media by old metrics of success. It’s a helpful reframe on why Vtubing has taken off in the West over the last five years—I haven’t spent all that much time in Vtuber culture, but I don’t think I’m misrepresenting it by saying that at least some subset is looking for something more than just streaming content.5 They’re attending live concerts, they’re spending hours in live chats with their peers, and they’re dishing out tens of millions of dollars a year for “Superchats” so that their favourite streamers will see their direct messages on-stream. Notice me, Senpai.

These are men looking to belong.6

II. The residual value of digital IP

Hololive manages 89 creators, and by some estimates was responsible for 18.5% of all Vtuber watchtime last year. But talent management, especially at scale, is a brutal business. It’s both terribly low margin7 and overly reliant on big hits: you’re always worried about key-man risk when a few top performers are sustaining the rest of your talent.8

It’s a race for residuals. Subscription revenue is salary, but IP ownership is equity. The real money should come in the back-half of a character’s lifespan—Motoaki Tanigo, founder and CEO of Hololive, explicitly wants to build a “technology-entertainment company” like Disney.

One interpretation of the original Hololive hypothesis might be: what if you could build a next-gen talent management company that owns (and monetizes) its IP forever? The best case scenario would be to ride a new wave of internet-native parasociality (anime-characters-as-streamers), and then monetize on the back-end with a tried and true playbook (merchandise and licensing deals). On paper it seems brilliant: if a performer wants to retire, you would just train someone else to don their character so you can milk their merch lines til’ infinity. I’m sure Tanigo’s mouth was watering at Disney’s fiscal 2025, where Lilo & Stitch merchandise alone generated $4B of Disney’s $94B total revenue.

Hololive’s revenue mix is certainly trending in the right direction, with 41% of revenue in fiscal year 2025 coming from merchandise sales, and another 13% coming from IP licensing. But it’s not that simple.

Disney’s IP is truly disembodied from its performers. You can swap in a new voice actor, and Stitch will still be Stitch. But in Vtubing, the degree to which fans have developed parasocial relationships with their favourite performer is actually working against Hololive in this respect. They seem to follow the talent, not the character.

Take Gawr Gura as an example, my shark-queen from earlier in the post. She “graduated” from Hololive early last year, citing differences with management. A few months later, an indie streamer named Sameko Saba debuted to 1M subscribers in three days, totally unheard of for someone with no major label backing. Though it has never been publicly addressed, it’s widely accepted that this is just Gura’s original performer under a new persona. Aside from the instantly recognizable voice, the name is a tell—“Sameko Saba” translates to “little shark mackerel.” Meanwhile, Hololive seems to have ceased all sales of Gura’s merchandise. They own the IP, but it has effectively become meaningless for them.9

Merchandise is clearly a hell of a business, but it turns out that key man risk still exists when it’s rooted in human talent. Hololive needs to figure out how to maintain the value of its IP, even without its performers.

III. Come for the talent, stay for the network

Gawr Gura was one of the most successful streamers of all time, so her retirement was a material loss for Hololive. In theory, its talent development machine should be sophisticated enough to replace any major performer churn with a new “debut.” The beauty of digital IP is that more variables are in your control: you can find a hole in the market, design a particular character to fill it, train a performer, and then put the whole weight of your marketing machine to make sure that they stick the landing. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Hololive’s last “hit” was 2023’s FUWAMOCO, and management hasn’t even attempted a new debut class since June 2024.

I suspect they’ve long known that network effects are existential for their business model. Launching new performers is a stopgap fix. It would be short-sighted to start a knife fight and just constantly race for the next breakout star against rivals like NIJISANJI. Instead, they’re structurally changing their business model. Every incremental piece of IP needs to compound in value, specifically because of its relationship to the other IP in the network. The combined effect of all the characters working in tandem has to be greater than the sum of their disparate audiences.

“The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.” - Chris Dixon in “Come for the tool, stay for the network”

We’ve established that Vtuber IP is performer-dependent in a way that cartoon IP isn’t. But Disney’s IP isn’t just valuable because of its near-infinite residual value. It’s valuable because most of its IP exists alongside one another in a network, and compounds the value of the entire shared universe. Imagine trying to launch a competing superhero movie during the height of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Hololive has two strategies in flight to crack real network effects:

Trading Card Game

As an outsider, it seems like a successful Trading Card Game (TCG) is the holy grail of a subculture. Think Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh. It’s at once a collectible, a community event, and a secondary market of merchandise that appreciates over time. So it makes sense that Hololive made a big push to launch their own TCG in September 2024. It’s a structural advantage for every part of the business:

• Increase the IP longevity of new talent. In theory a Gawr Guru trading card would continue to be valuable in the context of the game and increase in valuable as a collectible

• Disincentivize existing talent from going indie. There’s a lot of existing infrastructure to spin up a merchandise line for yourself, but a TCG by definition requires a vast network

• Spin up a lucrative new merchandise line to supplement the rest of the business. As a benchmark: some reports peg Yu-Gi-Oh’s physical TCG at $302M revenue in Japan alone for fiscal 2023.

Early signs are looking good for the TCG, clocking $13M USD revenue from April-June 2025 (33% of fiscal Q1’s total merchandising revenue).

Holoearth

Now that the first Vtuber skin has arrived in Fortnite, the starting pistol has been fired to see if gaming will be a meaningful new revenue line for the industry. Holoearth, Hololive’s gaming metaverse project, launched in beta in April 2025. I played it for an hour, and it was pretty underwhelming. Where Fortnite had the advantage of being a hyper popular shooting game before it leaned into its metaverse-like events, Holoearth is racing to do too much at once. It’s at once a survival game, similar to Minecraft, and has metaverse components like concerts and avatar marketplaces. But remember that Holoearth was originally a VR company. This feels more like a return to form than an attempt to build a brand new core competency, so I’m sure they’re just getting started here.

Hololive is a sprawling business, which happens to exist in the sprawling subculture of Vtubing, which also then happens to exist in the sprawling subculture of anime fandoms. There’s only so much I can cover in this one post, and I suspect I’ll be revisiting this world often. But it’s a fascinating study on how technology can create truly novel cultural artifacts—Vtubing would not exist in its current state if not for a fortuitous intersection of streaming, pandemic-era lockdowns, and generational strides in avatar mapping technology. But culture is not a business, as any blogosphere-era writer will tell you. And that’s fine and special on its own! But a culture that is supported by an underlying business model is something special indeed. You can look around at Substack and catch a whiff of the same.

If we take my earlier arguments at face value, that this is largely a subculture of young men who are just looking to belong to something, then it is equal parts heartwarming and gut-wrenching that this shared universe exists at all. I’m excited to see where this world evolves from here, and I do hope that Hololive finds a way to win.

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Danny led creator events at #paid, advises Creator Camp as they attempt to fix Hollywood, and now runs Playlist Storytellers, one of the best event series in Toronto (and soon, the world). He also happens to have been my University roommate back in the day during a particularly degenerate summer semester.1 He has been on the frontier of the creator economy for years, and always has a great eye for where the puck’s going.

Today we’re talking about Matt Taylor, a mysterious TikTok account where actor Kevin James has spent the last three months cosplaying as an elementary school art teacher:

1. Kevin James (as “Mr. Taylor”) posts day-in-the-life style vlogs on TikTok and Instagram, all vertically filmed as though he’s an actual elementary school teacher.

2. The story progresses over time, with his Dad passing away and him falling in love.

3. The account posts a marriage proposal, which now officially ties it to Kevin James’s forthcoming movie “Solo Mio.”

The movie itself looks pretty forgettable, but the rollout has been genuinely impressive. Kevin James unfortunately doesn’t have the celebrity firepower that Chalamet does, at least among the young culturati, but I suspect this is the sort of fourth-wall-breaking that we’ll see more of as generative AI makes all of our media more malleable.

[This interview is a transcribed and lightly edited voicenote conversation. We’re recreating podcasting from first principles.]  

I. Internet-native context building

Matt Taylor is a great example of influencer-as-artform: performance art that is packaged into the sort of characters that we’re already accustomed to doting over on TikTok or Instagram. Movie rollouts are mostly just context-building. Trailers, for example, are a tool to shed light on a few particular corners of the world that you’ve built, so that people are then willing to pay to see the rest of it. This rollout is fantastic because it takes that principle of context-building, and delivers it in an internet-native format.

SHAIYAN

 There’s a lot of talk about “regrettable minutes” on social platforms. When I think about the internet moments that I actually remember or feel good about, they pretty much always have something to do with context; feeling as though you’re part of an in-group joke or at least noticing that there’s an in-group joke happening. On Twitter or TikTok there’s a main character of the day, someone who has done something horribly wrong or funny, and then you have all these riffs and parodies of that original sin.

It seems like Hollywood is figuring out how to do this in an internet native way. The canonical 2025 example was of course Chalamet making his whole world around the rollout of Marty Supreme. It feels good when you go to see the movie and it’s like the DiCaprio pointing meme, like, yeah, I get that, I was there for the buildup.

It feels like Matt Taylor does that in an even more internet-native way.

It’s technically the same thing as the aura edits. Lionsgate has these full-time clippers to clip characters from movies using TikTok aura edit styles, and it’s effectively the same thing as a trailer, right? A trailer is context building. And creating an influencer is just a digitally native way to do the same.

DANNY

There’s two meanings to context here. One is what is the context that you are building for someone, and then there’s where you’re building that context for people.

The what in this case is obviously that there’s an art teacher, and he’s going about his life and he’s interacting with his students, and then there’s love interests and whatever that appear, great. But the where is smart because they’re doing it in a platform-native way: here’s the sort of day in the life vlog that you’re used to seeing, we’ll do it with no production value, we won’t think about camera angles and camera movement.

There’s a creator named Max Zavidow, who goes by @formerteenheartthrob. He makes what he calls “really short films,” two to three minute short films that are shot natively for social media. Lower production value, grungier, sometimes totally absurd, and these shorts have been getting millions of views for a really long time. He’s extremely talented and we’re always talking about, well, imagine if a production company were to give him a real budget, twenty or thirty thousand dollars or whatever, and he’d essentially create a prequel to whatever film they’re promoting.

To your point on context, people should get to live in something and be excited about something before you get them to go take an action and buy a ticket to something.

SHAIYAN

 Yeah, the prequel framing is cool because it implies that there’s some causal relationship between these two pieces of content. Marty Supreme’s promo was cool, but it didn’t really feel that it lived in the actual universe of the movie, aside from, sure, the recurring colour orange or to Chalamet to some degree method acting as Marty Mauser. But when you get to the movie, there’s some dissonance there, it’s actually a totally different thing from the rollout.

Matt Taylor, though, they specifically put in little context clues, little Easter eggs that will presumably come up again in the movie. In their most viewed TikTok with 32 million views, it’s just a video of him talking vlog style in the school as usual. But then a woman walks by and he kinda stops talking and looks at her like, oh, whoa, who’s that? Spoiler: it’s the same woman he ends up falling in love with and proposing to a few videos later, and according to the movie trailer it’s also the same woman who eventually stands him up at the altar.

So it’s an interesting way of using internet native narrative devices. You’re giving context without leaning on something like a flashback in the movie.

II. Media you can play with

Emerging forms of media mimic their predecessors before they actually become something new. The earliest slates of TV programming were just recordings of theatre productions. And then we realized that we can play with sets and zooms and SFX, and suddenly we’ve invented TV-native formats that could never be accomplished by theatre. I suspect generative AI will follow a similar pattern. We’re in the “recreate movies with no production cost” phase. But that’s not actually that interesting! The real version of the medium will probably look more like a world that you can step into and mould into your own. To be clear, this Matt Taylor rollout is not at all generative AI. But it feels like it’s intentionally designed as a universe that you can actually play with.

SHAIYAN

It’s interesting that this rollout, prequel, whatever, intentionally feels like a thing that you can actually touch and play with a little bit. People in the comments, for example, are getting in there saying, “Oh, why do you people think this is Kevin James? This is actually my fourth grade teacher.” People are actually getting involved with the bit.

For most of us who have grown up on the internet, it feels like media being interactive is a given: comments and remixes and parodies. High production Hollywood movies by comparison feel one dimensional. You watch the thing and you know that there’s actors on screens and you know that it’s a separate universe, which is part of the joy of it, of course. It takes you out of your lived experience.

But with Matt Taylor stepping into the “real” world, the movie becomes a thing you can interact with on your own terms, a character that you can actually develop a relationship with, in the ways that we’re already accustomed to building parasocial relationships. If we fast forward to a world where generative AI is the baseline, you can imagine stepping into these movie worlds in your own ways, and genuinely interact with more than just the comments.

DANNY

Yeah it’s more than just comments, you get these spinoff pages and these memes and these sayings and these cultural moments. When there’s a complete story to be involved in, which there is because they’ve been running this Matt Taylor page for three months, there’s just so much to interact with. It gives people the chance to slowly build on it on their own and they can take what happened in the past video and apply it to what they’re watching now. There’s lore to call back to, there’s references to be made that people are gonna keep showing up across videos.

The other thing to talk about is this balance between interactivity and context. Because of the way that the videos are shot, it actually feels like a 50-year-old who doesn’t really know how to use social, and really is just clicking a button and sharing his thoughts straight to the camera. It feels more natural to the context of the platform or the ecosystem that they’re in.

SHAIYAN

 Not to be a McLuhan glazer, but yeah basically the medium is the message, right? It’s like, by shooting it low-production iPhone style, influencer-as-artform, the message of the rollout is in the unique form they’ve chosen for it: this is the the sort of character that you are used to interacting on this platform, and we want you to interact with this character in a way that you don’t typically get a chance to with characters in movies or even movie actors generally.

“Organic” is a stretch though. Definitionally as a marketing campaign, it’s inorganic, right? If you look through the comment section, the day the trailer dropped, after like three months of this TikTok buildup, suddenly there’s an account called “Matt Taylor Fan Club.” It becomes the top comment on one of his videos the day the trailer drops, and the account is like “oh my god the movie trailer dropped.” If you click onto the fanpage, obviously the first post is ON the day the trailer drops, and it’s a TikTok native clip edit. 95% sure it’s like coordinated by the production company or whatever, but it’s cool because they actually get how this ecosystem works.

But that begs the question: now that all these organic behaviours are being done in inorganic ways, what happens next? Everyone’s saying “silence brand” when a brand appears in their TikTok comments, presumably that’ll start to happen soon when movie rollouts are also eerily organic. Eventually that becomes cringe and you’re like, okay, brands are doing it, what’s next?

DANNY

 I don’t think it’s cringe. If you build up this whole world and then there’s this fan account that acts as a new door to open to get to the trailer, and then there’s aura edits, or whatever you need to do to get people to watch the movie. At the end of the day, you’re respecting the medium the way the behaviour really is. It’s not just like, oh, let me clip up a horizontal 16 by 9 dimension trailer for short form and hope people go see the movie. It’s more: we’re playing your game so you’re actually invested and interested, and then we’ll ask you to go to watch a movie or buy a product, which is normal.

If a consumer’s like, oh, that’s cringe, or oh, they duped us…no, they didn’t. They gave you exactly what you wanted in your way, and now it’s leading to something you will hopefully actually enjoy.

Email me at shaiyankhan@gmail.com if you see any interesting media businesses or properties that you think I should discuss on Game Tape. And again, reply and lmk how you’re feeling about this new format!

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They’ve already sold all of their sponsor slots for this year, and if you’re looking to book one of the few remaining slots for 2027 it’ll cost you ~$2M total for a four-episode minimum. As far as I can tell: their only full-time employee is their research editor, they have no video team because they rarely do high-production video episodes, and since they run ad sales themselves with no agency middleman to give a cut to, it’s an absurdly high gross margin product. It’s truly a ridiculous two-man operation.

“If someone told me that two guys with no literary background were going to create a four hour podcast about a single company, and people were going to be mesmerized by it and want more…I’d say that doesn’t sound very promising” - Michael Lewis on Acquired’s 10 year anniversary episode.

It turns out that these episodes, lovingly referred to by the hosts as “conversational audiobooks”, are, in fact, quite promising. Founder myths feel like one of the final bastions of monoculture—Mark Zuckerberg, for example, inspires the same strong feelings of love or hate that a politician might have twenty years ago. So it makes sense to find success with a podcast that treats founders and companies as protagonists in “cinematic spectacles.”

There’s a lot to learn from their product, but today I’m more interested in exploring their business. Pay Attention is, at its core, about two questions: how new media forms take shape, and how people get paid for them. Through that lens, Acquired is a near-perfect case study: they’ve somehow rebranded the standard podcast into a “conversational audiobook,” and they’ve assembled a listener archetype valuable enough to charge >10x the industry standard CPMs for a midroll ad. I suspect I’ll be dissecting them again and again.

I. Counter-positioning everywhere

Podcast clips and nonexistent attention spans make it feel like volume is the only way to win in the media business right now. I’m somewhat guilty of the same with my publishing cadence here. Acquired, however, consciously counter-positions their show through the lens of the legendary businesses they podcast about: in a landscape of competitors trying to be the MLB with hundreds of games a year, they’re actively trying to “become the NFL,” with a few major spectacles culminating in their very own Superbowl.

This year they’re going to release a total of eight episodes, each of which will likely be over four hours long. Contrast that against Joe Rogan, who has already published six episodes eleven days into the year. Acquired has no consistent video product, and only one interview episode a season. In their 10 year anniversary episode, Ben Gilbert says, “If CNBC’s product is 2% relevant in 5 days, then our product should be 80% relevant in 5 years.”

They then bring the same philosophy to the monetization of their product, and believe that “the commercial side of the business should have no separation from the editorial side of the business.” Their commercial relationships sit inside the same world as their editorial stories (enterprise SaaS, B2B infrastructure companies), so they lean into that alignment instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. They don’t use agencies, they run ad sales themselves, and don’t use dynamic insertion on their back catalogue.

When you’re selling ad inventory through dynamic ad insertion or via a podcast ad agency, you’re charging on a cost per impression basis that is, by definition, infinitely replaceable. 1000 impressions on your podcast are priced in the same range as 1000 impressions on another podcast. Acquired, however, has consciously crafted an ad product that is not at all fungible. Which reminds us that…

II. All ad inventory is not made equal

Acquired’s ad product is not the size of their audience. Acquired’s ad product is the archetype of listeners in their audience. When your listener reviews include the likes of Jamie Dimon (CEO and Chairman, JPMorgan Chase), Jensen Huang (CEO, Nvidia), and Tony Xu (Co-founder and CEO, Doordash), it would obviously be ridiculous to try to monetize the business by shilling a standard podcast mattress ad.

All things considered, it’s actually not that big of an audience at ~1 million listeners a month. But 35% of their audience is C-level or VP-level executives, 14% are active CEOs, and 21% work in an investment or corp. dev role, so they’re able to offer something most podcasts can’t: access to decision makers. It’s kind of ridiculous to imagine 350,000 captive C-level executives in a room listening to your sponsor pitch. Some choice quotes from the hosts on their ad business:

“Most businesses operate on a CPM basis, so you’re incentivized to make as many episodes as possible with as many ad reads as possible. Our business is structurally different.”

“We deal with B2B products with high LTV. A single customer should be worth several million dollars a year [to our sponsors]. We want to feel like we can deliver and actually move the needle on one or two of those.”

“If you want to market your B2B software to founders or executive decision makers, we’re the guys.”

“Many of our sponsors have been ROI positive on signing just one customer”

The deal size and alignment required for these deals then unlocks some other interesting parts of the business. First, each ad read is designed as a “2 minute analysis of your business,” almost like a mini episode of Acquired. It’s obviously still an ad read, but it lends the sponsors the same narrative lens that Acquired uses on its flagship case studies. It’s a premium product that at least feels somewhat additive to the episode. Next, they further demonstrate their alignment with the sponsor by showing up IRL: “We’ll do events with most of our big sponsors. Customer dinners, speaking at an annual customer conference, going to sporting events with big customers, or fireside chat with the CEO.” The deal sizes are large enough that they’re actually trying to build long term relationships with long term businesses. And lastly, they’ll try to invest in some of these long term sponsors. They believe that access to hot deals is often more important than real diligence at the growth stage, and they trust that their reach will be able to move the needle on the businesses they work with.

When I was selling Shopify Plus back in ~2017, the company’s $24,000/year “enterprise” product, we often joked that our main competitor was Shopify Advanced, its own $2,000/year product. There was some truth there: Shopify Plus at the time didn’t really have any meaningful feature differentiation aside from a dedicated account manager and some light automation tools. But the story we sold was enchanting enough to unlock real pricing power. Shopify Advanced was for “mom-and-pop shops,” while Shopify Plus was for “high-growth merchants who were ready to become entrepreneurs.” We sold the hell out of the product roadmap, as any good salesperson will, but the reality was that people were justifying the 10x difference in price because of how we made them feel about their future.

Acquired has done a fantastic job of breaking out of the rat race of CPM-based podcast ads, and to be clear, I don’t think they’re in the same boat as my outdated memories of Shopify Plus vs Shopify Advanced. It’s clear they’re actually delivering results for their sponsors. But it’s also clear that this is downstream of some very conscious storytelling on their part. It’s an interesting thought experiment: how might a particular media business reframe its audience to 10x the value of its ad inventory?

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I tried my hand at a 2025 reflection, but I couldn’t force my kaleidoscope of a year into something that resembled a neat and tidy personal essay. It was just plainly one of the best years of my life. In 2026 I’m excited to build some really fun media businesses, host some more glorious events, and have a lot of fun. I can’t wait.

I’m still experimenting around here, so I’m testing a slight change for this week’s Game Tape. Instead of analyzing a new media business/property on my own, I transcribed a lightly edited conversation I had with Jihad Esmail, the founder of Native, a narrative studio that helps founders define their worldview. He’s one of the rare voices on Tech Twitter who stands for real principles in his pursuit of great work, and I’m lucky to call him a friend.

Today we’re talking about “The Other Stuff,” a show where InternetVin surfs the web with his friends. The show is only a few months old, but has already had all-star guests like Aidan Gomez (CEO of Cohere, co-author of “Attention Is All You Need”), Alex Danco (Editor-at-Large, a16z), and Greg Isenberg (CEO of Late Checkout). It’s not a technology podcast, but by the end of 2026 it’ll be one of the hottest shows in tech. I could write an entire essay on the intricate worldbuilding that had to happen before this show could exist, and how it was born from and for a very particular moment in time for Canada (SF’s most lucrative pool of tech talent.) But that’s for another day.

Without further ado:

I. Scenebuilding as a competitive advantage in podcasting

I’ve been pulling on some loosely related threads around influencer-as-artform, timeline control, and homesteading your corner of the internet. To some degree this all culminates in “scenebuilding as a competitive advantage,” and it feels like some of the hottest media businesses of the last few years have all been excellent at this: TBPN cornering tech, Feed Me cornering NYC strivers, and maybe to some degree Red Scare at its peak and Dimes Square before The Fall. The ability to both be born of a scene and cultivate it in return feels like directing a documentary in real-time: which characters are worth elevating? Which stories should we export from *our* world to *the* world?

Jihad and I discuss how this impacts which podcasts are worth our time:

SHAIYAN

Podcasts began as a way to listen in on your smart friends having a conversation. But other mediums are constantly evolving into more interactive versions of themselves, like early TikTok transforming video with remixing: somebody would post a video of them singing, the next person remixes it and adds a bass line, the next person remixes it and adds some adlibs. Then nine people later it’s this whole orchestra, this collaborative piece of art that the original person would never have imagined would come out of their original video.

So it’s not surprising that podcasting is evolving into something more like a Twitch livestream show, art by committee. Is that “spectator social”?

JIHAD

I think spectator social is the purest version of giving people a peek into the world that is the brand or the scene. I don’t think The Other Stuff [henceforth “TOS”] is meant to be a top of funnel show, in the same way as some podcast clipping itself on TikTok. If it’s your first time seeing a meme or seeing a reference, it’s really difficult to get a grasp of what is going on, right? It’s not until you see many different versions of this meme, or until you see the original, where you realize, oh, now I understand the context here, and I can start engaging with the derivatives.

The same is true for spectator social. It is not until I have an understanding of the existence of the characters and the players of a particular brand or scene, then I want to go deeper and actually see what are they doing on the day to day, how are they engaging with each other, etc.

SHAIYAN

The term spectator social feels incorrect, then. “Spectating” is actually the thing that we’ve been doing for so long, just watching the thing. The most interesting part is when this becomes participatory, which at least in podcasting is relatively new. I’ll bring it back to TOS in a second, but I look at TBPN and how participatory that world has become. They’re announcing your friend’s marriages, and they’re talking about your friends tweets, and news is being broken in their Live Chat. TOS is similarly borne out of the Toronto-adjacent tech scene.

JIHAD

I don’t think I would view myself as much a part of the scene [around Toronto] if it wasn’t for the “spectator social content” that came out of it. The podcast helps me feel like a part of the conversations that are being had, and get to deeply know a lot of the personalities. Podcasting is a documentary medium that lets you participate in a scene as it’s happening.

In the early internet there wasn’t really a sense of geography, people were interacting on forums and later on social media and the geography was just the site or the feed itself. And now I think we’re seeing a retreat back to the importance of localism and local communities. San Francisco is the home of tech. If you’re someone that wants to participate in that scene and you can’t physically be in San Francisco, what do you do? You might not actually personally know the people being discussed on TBPN. Those might not be your friends, those might not be your weddings that are being announced, but TBPN is not that different from the conversations that are being had in Silicon Valley broadly.

TBPN is a reflection of the conversation that is being had in the tech scene, just like TOS is a reflection of the conversation that is being had in the Toronto scene. Local scenes or locality will continue to become more important, and then spectator social is a lens through which folks who are not geographically a part of the scene can plug into it in a way they otherwise could not.

II. The atomic unit of the podcast is now interactive

Outside of TOS I don’t listen to many podcasts. Who has time for a three hour conversation! Who is listening to all these podcasts! The clip, as frustrating as it is to see the tech milieu claim this as some recent invention, certainly helps the podcast become a more interactive form of media.

Jihad and I discuss how this is changing the range of relationships that people can have with their favourite podcasts:

SHAIYAN

There’s something here about the atomic unit of the podcast now being “the clip.” Clips have been around for a long time and it’s annoying when people think that clips are new, but a few years ago when most people were consuming podcasts in their entirety, it was difficult to give your input on a particular slice of a podcast. What, someone’s gonna listen to the whole two hour thing to understand your one-sentence quote retweet? But now we quote retweet very particular slices of the conversation with our own commentary. And so back to your point about localities, it feels far more accessible to get involved when the atomic unit is something you can actually talk about.

With TOS in particular, I think they do a good job of creating other artifacts in their broader ecosystem, like the language that people borrow from them: “Thank you for everything” or “My bad.” They made that Alex Danco meme [which is now his profile picture!] where he has the three fingers up, like the Inglorious Bastards clip. People are now playing around with that picture and dunking on MARS, the Canadian tech incubator. It’s becoming this world you can get involved with.

JIHAD

 Yeah I agree I don’t think that clipping itself is particularly novel, but because clips often lack so much context, I’m able to shape them into whatever I want. The smaller and more digestible an idea, the more people are able to project their own reality and thoughts onto it.

What I do think is unique to podcasting as a medium is the synchronous live nature of the conversation. Even if I’m listening to the recorded version of it, it still represents an actual moment in time. If I’m listening to a conversation between Vin and Alex Danco, they sat there for hours on a particular day and they were having a conversation, and that conversation was rooted in the zeitgeist, the stories of that day, of that week, et cetera.

And it’s in a particular location. There is a setting to a podcast that does not exist in other forms of content. Going all the way back to this idea of spectator social, I think that podcasting is a very unique form of media in that the setting is important and therefore a clip is more of like a slice of the setting rather than a slice of any particular idea in a vacuum like a tweet or something of the sort. I’m actually getting the energy of this particular moment of the scene that I’m trying to participate in.

SHAIYAN

 It’s like Walter Benjamin’s idea of how the aura of a piece of art diminishes with the reproduction of it. Podcasts capture a moment, and they have context, and they exist in a period of time, whether they’re live or not. They have an auric property that maybe a book or an essay do not.

On the second point, “podcasting is a conversation with your friends,” Clayton Christensen says new competitors compete on emergent qualities that they’re structurally better equipped to compete on. No shade to a16z “New Media,” but it feels like that’s an example of applying 15 year old mediums, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, to new contexts, like product launches or whatever. But to me that doesn’t seem like you’re competing on new determinants of quality.

A better example of that is Opal, a screentime app, who has an in-house creator named Olivia Unplugged. She runs an Instagram account as though she was a knowledge creator, makes these videos about unplugging from your phone and, and brain rot and all these relevant contemporary things. She just happens to be employed by the company and have their link in bio. They’ve created an entity that is structurally better equipped to build parasocial relationships, which is of course an emergent determinant of quality in contemporary media.

It feels like that is what TOS is competing on.

JIHAD

I love the Opal case study because I think it’s a great example of “context as media.” Opal the company benefits from people having shared context about attention, brainrot, digital detox, etc. As the number of people who have that context grows, their addressable market also grows, so they don’t need Olivia to sell the product directly. They need her to build context.

The same is true for TOS. Right now, that context is Toronto, and Vin is interviewing fellow Torontonians. But as more people become aware of the scene and learn the lore, the city exports itself. The context expands. There are more people who are now part of the Toronto scene that can meaningfully participate in conversation, even if the convo has nothing to do with Toronto as a city.

So I think podcasting is going to be seen more as a direct vehicle for exporting a scene/culture. And I think TOS does that for Toronto. TOS not only becomes the cultural export of Toronto, but it becomes the vehicle through which Toronto is seen to the world. Spectator social allows people to move localities without moving geographies.

Hope you enjoyed! I’d love to read your replies to this email with any feedback on the new format.

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Bear with me for a somewhat more exploratory post today.

There seems to be a ton of chatter around “clipping” lately, especially on Tech Twitter. But clips are an incremental game. There’s a craft to it, but it’s not rocket science to turn longform source material into a shortform delivery vehicle. People are finding success with their own remixes on the format, like Dwarkesh’s special effects, but that edge on its own very quickly disappears if everyone else is doing it too. Substack even auto-generates clips for you now!

Clipping is just a small part of an emerging marketing skillset, which I’m loosely referring to as “timeline control.” I don’t have any answers here, but I think these are questions worth exploring.

New media properties win on emerging definitions of quality that they are structurally better-equipped to compete on

First, an aside on what people want from new media properties.

I’ve been stewing on this since my post on Olivia Unplugged, an edutainment creator who was incubated inside of the screentime app Opal. She’s closer to “Internet-Personality-as-Art” than “influencer.” To quote from my post at length:

Doug Shapiro has a fantastic post on the changing definitions of “quality” in media. In it, he posits that “new entrants don’t compete on existing measurements of performance,” instead they “introduce new attributes,” which “can change how consumers define quality.” Airbnb didn’t compete with hotels on 24 hour concierge services or high-end spas, instead they introduced entirely new attributes like a full working kitchen, or space to host guests. In the context of media, he cites a YouTube study where “55% of viewers agree that their content choices collectively create a sense of belonging.”

The degree to which you can be parasocial with a piece of media is a new attribute for its success. Olivia Unplugged, for example, is a person first, with all of the personality quirks and visual worldbuilding that Gen Z has grown to expect from shortform creators.

. . . .

When you contrast this against “New Media” in tech, especially launches or fundraise announcements, it’s clear that people are trying to apply old models of success to new formats.

…simply increasing production value or adding story structure to a Twitter-native video…is fundamentally missing the point of how media preferences can evolve.

It’s easy to look at Olivia Unplugged, realize that “in-house creators” are an interesting new format, and then copy it for yourself. I bet there’s some success to be had there. But the real competitive advantage is in understanding the emerging definitions of “quality” from your audience, and then designing a format to deliver on that.

Take TBPN, tech’s favourite new format of the year, which is effectively just a daily show livestreamed on Twitter. The format itself is not that hard to copy, which is why we’ve quickly seen fast followers like TITV and ETN. The copycats are flailing for the usual reasons that copycats fail, like a lack of real sauce. But they’re also flailing because the TBPN format is just a red herring — the copycats are not actually delivering on the new attributes of quality that people love TBPN for.

The new definition of quality that TBPN is delivering on is something akin to “creating a sense of belonging for Tech Twitter.” I often joke with my friends that people don’t even watch TBPN, everyone just loves that a “for-tech by-tech” media brand exists. Their daily livestream format is a structural advantage that helps them deliver on that “belonging” demand. Jordi and John, the hosts, live on the Twitter timeline, they’re actively shaping and replying to the discourse. So when they pull tweets up live on-air, or create in-group jokes that viewers can join in on, it makes a particular corner of Twitter feel connected. One of us… one of us…

Their format gives them a structural advantage on this new attribute of quality, but it is the attribute they are winning on, not the format. Competitors can copy the format, but they can’t win if they don’t understand the new definition of quality that the format enables.

Clipping is a tool, creating belonging is an objective

Clipping is also a red herring.

Internet anthropologists may disagree on the precise timeline, but clipping (and clip farming) is definitely not new. It was popularized by Andrew Tate in his TikTok takeover of 2022. Twitch streamers started using it around the same time, Tabs Chocolate adopted it for ecommerce in 2022, and then Jenni AI brought a version of it to consumer software in 2023.

I suspect tech’s recent hard-on over clips is once again because of TBPN. A cursory glance will show relatively low viewership on their YouTube channel and Twitter live streams, especially when you compare it to their outsized cultural impact. So when you look at your Tech Twitter timeline and see TBPN videos plastered everywhere, in the same way that copycats may look at their success and copy their livestream format, it’s equally easy as a viewer to attribute their success to their clips.

I think their clips are great, and work especially well with the bite sized interviews in their livestream format, but it’s once again missing the forest for the trees. Outside of being great hosts and thinkers, the artform that they’re actually good at is timeline control.

Timeline control as a skill

Admittedly this is where my thinking gets less clear.

So: we now know that “belonging” is a new attribute of quality, and format and clips are just tools to satisfy that demand. I think the skillset to satisfy that demand is something like “timeline control.” The ability to orchestrate a sequence of moments, aesthetics, and micro-events that help people feel something in particular.

If you think that the most important skill is in designing a clip or a good tweet, then there’s only so far you can push the frontiers of that craft. But if you zoom out to the craft of “timeline control,” there is a far wider aperture of skills to improve. TBPN, for example, is masterful at positioning themselves in the center of Tech Twitter’s ongoing conversation. Outside of clips and formats, they’re good at: “reading the waves” (knowing when a topic is peaking or dying), “owning concepts” (coining phrases, creating shareable aesthetics), and “network choreography” (how to get the right people involved at the right time).

Sure, this could broadly just be interpreted as “marketing,” but it feels unique in a few ways:

• Timeline control has to happen in real-time, in response to an actively evolving feed of information. This is naturally a better fit on Twitter than other platforms. You are always engaging with a meta conversation.

• Timeline control should seem decentralized.

• Timeline control shapes your sense of reality. Everyone is talking about this, so it must be worth exploring.

Two examples outside of TBPN:

1. OpenAI took over the internet earlier in March when they launched their image generation model, and everyone simultaneously “realized” they could turn pictures of themselves into Miyazaki’s distinct art style. I could have sworn I saw a quote of Sam Altman saying that they chose the Ghibli aesthetic on purpose to have a viral launch moment, but I can’t find it anywhere now. But it doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to see how all of this would have been a coordinated marketing campaign. The team chooses an aesthetic that they know will spread, they seed it across employees and key opinion leaders, and then you manufacture a moment on the timeline. It all feels a decentralized moment of connection between you and your corner of the internet, but it’s meticulously controlled.

2. A week before the Ghiblification of everything, my friends at New went megaviral with a satirical AI model. The week leading up to the launch, InternetVin started drama on the timeline with the cofounders of Cohere, a Canadian AI lab. He planted the seeds of a possible new AI lab, and repeatedly teased an incoming model over the course of a week. And then finally, at the peak of Indian hatred on the Twitter timeline, his team dropped an obviously fake AI model named “Brampton,” named after a city in the GTA with a predominately Indian population. “Brampton is very intelligent.” With the foresight of a few bubbling trends and a grassroots conversation to seed their launch beforehand, the timeline was putty in their hands.

I often think about a narrative device that Alan Moore used in the Watchmen comic. In the background of the main story arc, you’ll catch subtle references to various artists and writers disappearing — a newspaper header here, a TV broadcast in the background of a scene there. Nothing explicitly indicates that this is an important storyline, so it just feels like background context to make his world feel more alive. Slowly and then all at once, the final climax arrives and it turns out everything was connected to the disappearances all along.

“Timeline control” feels similar. It’s using a range of tools to exert subtle control over where people look, how they feel, what they think about, so that you can ultimately bring them into your universe. “Propaganda” has so much context that it feels like an inaccurate term here, but these decentralized marketing tactics all similarly assault our sense of reality: the hordes of UGC creators making videos for you, fake fan accounts, brand-run meme pages, or coordinated messages from “key opinion leaders.”

I think there’s more to explore here, and I don’t know nearly enough about it yet. I’d love to speak to whoever is the best in the world at it. Hopefully more to come on this front in the New Year :)

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Every year I end the year with a few weeks totally off the grid. It is very cute when my friends know to email me if they need me after ~Dec 20th. You won't see a post from me next week, but I hope my loyal Attention Heads have a lovely Christmas and I’ll be back with a year recap the last week of December.

Welcome to my loyal new Attention Heads who are here from this tweet <3

For the rest of you who have gracefully avoided Tech Twitter, everyone over there is trying to milk engagement from a WSJ article on companies desperately seeking “storytellers.” It’s downstream of the discourse to “go direct” with “new media.”

It’s no surprise that companies will have to find new ways to tell their stories in our overwhelmingly noisy content environments — I’ve written as much here, here, and here. But it is surprising to me that there’s so much noise about “new media” that doesn’t look all that different from the formats we had ten years ago. Don’t mistake this for me throwing shade at a16z’s New Media team; it’s cool what they’re doing and commendable that they’re even attempting to push the envelope on storytelling in tech. I’m sure there’s a lot they’re working on that I’m missing, but at first glance, do these Twitter launch videos really look all that different from, say, the product launch videos on Stripe’s 2015 YouTube Channel?1

The best “storytellers” in the world do not want to talk about your B2B SaaS product! We need new forms that give these storytellers a chance to actually create interesting media. Olivia Unplugged, Opal’s secondary channel, is a good example of tech’s New Media that actually looks new. The gist is:

1. Opal creates an entirely separate TikTok account, called “Olivia Unplugged”

2. Olivia, a social media manager at the company, starts posting talking head videos as though she’s a creator, speaking on “Screen time therapy for the chronically online.”

3. The account subtly links to Opal on the App Store, but otherwise has no clear connection that it’s run by a brand

A few takeaways for startups looking for storytellers:

I. Abstract your product into a philosophy or worldview

From my post about the “creator-in-residence”:

Companies like Starbucks and Ulta are smart to incentivize their employees to post content, but in this context, the act of creation is still rooted in the company’s products. The Starbucks creators talk about coffee, the Ulta creators talk about makeup. For a hopeful creative, a more interesting version of this job would be to abstract away from the product that your company sells, and towards the broader thesis statement or problem set it covers. Then, you give the creator-in-residence the freedom to create new IP within those constraints.

I’m not sure if Olivia Unplugged is exactly a creator-in-residence, since in my definition that would depend on whether or not she gets any upside on the properties she is creating. But this secondary account certainly gets at the heart of creating new IP: she isn’t talking about Opal, she’s talking about all the realities around Opal that make it so important. Her most popular videos are on things like “making your life interesting again,” or “how to not be lonely.” These are natural pain points that arise from the phone addiction that Opal solves, but as a creator instead of a brand account, she has the flexibility to talk about a worldview, not a product.

II. Understand the emerging definitions of “quality”

Doug Shapiro has a fantastic post on the changing definitions of “quality” in media. In it, he posits that “new entrants don’t compete on existing measurements of performance,” instead they “introduce new attributes,” which “can change how consumers define quality.” Airbnb didn’t compete with hotels on 24 hour concierge services or high-end spas, instead they introduced entirely new attributes like a full working kitchen, or space to host guests. In the context of media, he cites a YouTube study where “55% of viewers agree that their content choices collectively create a sense of belonging.”2

The degree to which you can develop a parasocial relationship through a piece of media is an emerging definition of its quality. Olivia Unplugged is a person first, with all of the personality quirks and visual worldbuilding that Gen Z has grown to expect from shortform creators. But she also doesn’t really fit the standard mould of a creator, since she’s borne from a company and its needs. When you contrast this against “New Media” in tech, especially launches or fundraise announcements, it’s clear that people are trying to apply old models of success to new formats. There is are obviously different ways to reach different audiences, it’s clear there’s success to be found in simply increasing production value or adding real story structure to a Twitter-native video, but it’s fundamentally missing the point of how media preferences can evolve.

Most of the discourse around “New Media”, at least in tech, is us applying ten year old mediums (podcasts, newsletters, short form video) to new contexts (comms, founder-led content, marketing). That’s fine, and is obviously working to some degree, but it really does feel like a failure of the imagination. The most exciting part of emerging mediums — and definitely the area with the most value to capture as a brand or startup — is in creating new forms entirely. To anthropomorphize a character like Duolingo’s bird or to create a branded influencer like Olivia Unplugged is to actually push the envelope on what tomorrow’s media might look like.

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People hate AI music because it feels like a replacement to human artists

My loyal Attention Heads know that I historically have not watched movies, but that’s no longer a cute character quirk at my big ol’ age. I’ve been marching through the classics of film, and it brings me so much joy to ironically say things like, “ah, that reminds me of a line from Citizen Kane…”

But I am indeed now reminded of a line from Citizen Kane.

When the titular character Kane, a newspaper magnate, is pressed by his wife on what “the people will think,” he replies that people will think “what I tell them to think.”

The fact that the opinions of the many are controlled by the few isn’t all that interesting in and of itself. One of our great modern ironies is that we reject legacy media for its ability to selfishly sway public opinion, only to embrace individuals who, well, selfishly sway public opinion.

Lately, it feels like there are few bigger battlefields in the court of public opinion than AI. Now that the deepest pockets in the world seem to have won the perception battle in favour of LLMs, the opinion overlords are now turning their eyes to generative AI.

We shall think what they want us to think.

Meanwhile, twenty million people just digitally curbstomped an employee at Suno, an AI music company, for an admittedly tone deaf post about how money made music inaccessible to her as a kid, and how generative AI will soon change that. There are obviously real concerns around copyright issues in AI music, and I’m hopeful that some recent legal decisions will set a new precedent to pay artists for infringements, but admittedly, my apprehension of generative art is less a moral stance than it is one of taste.1

I suspect most people don’t hate AI art because of their morals; most people hate AI art because it’s dogshit. The lack of friction in its creation enables people with no “finger feel” for a real craft to mass-produce a bunch of slop. But that doesn’t have to be the case!

Take the song “I Run,” for example. It’s no Beethoven, but it’s a genuinely catchy tune that was unanimously loved on TikTok last month. Recently, some internet sleuths uncovered that the song is at the very least AI-assisted, and suddenly it’s divisive: some people refuse to listen to the song for moral reasons, while others are defending a song they enjoy irrespective of the process by which it was created.

Produce a shortform show that positions AI music as one tool among others in an artist’s toolkit

All of this to say: morality aside, AI music has a branding problem. The “I Run” debacle proves that there are enough people who will enjoy generative art as long as it’s entertaining and presented in an interesting context.2 I’ve been wondering if a company like Suno could accomplish this sort of massaging of the public opinion with a good shortform show. Let’s riff on one concept:

Title: One Minute Musicals (@oneminutemusicals)

Logline: We celebrate your most embarrassing stories with micro-musicals.

Format: A shortform scripted series. Every episode is a high production, self-contained story, similar to Submit Your Ick or FML Tales.

1. The production team solicits stories. Eventually it would be great to have fan submitted ones.

2. Suno hires a team of local playwrights and musicians to script a one minute musical based on the story. Importantly: Suno is one of the tools they use in the production process. They don’t use one-shot prompts to create a song, and instead use Studio mode, which is more comparable to a classic DAW.

3. Suno hires local talent to direct and perform the song/story.

4. It’s edited down into a one minute musical.

Casting: It’s important that every episode is produced and starred in by local artists. I imagine it’ll be a contentious topic, and many artists won’t touch it at all, but paying and highlighting real local creatives will at the very least be a gift to an audience that is very clearly hurt by generative AI. The key is likely to find artists who are already using generative tools in their workflows, and I’d imagine every episode would have credits listed in the caption, similar to Bilt’s Roomies.

Aesthetics: Something high-low would be fun here. I’m imagining a gothic, almost noir, visual aesthetic, contrasted against campy music over hyper contemporary stories. Epic Rap Battles of History would be on the moodboard.

I don’t think you can really know if a concept will land until you get some contact with reality. But there are a few explicit choices in the show’s design that are worth calling out:

I. Enable real artists to make something good

The win criteria for the show is simple but not easy. Suno needs to show that artists can create genuinely enjoyable things using generative AI as one tool in their toolkit. By including Suno in the process of creating a broader artifact, especially one that requires creatives across disciplines like acting and writing, you’d be able to subtly position the tool as the equivalent of a DAW or synth. A tool in service of the final vision, not a replacement to the process.

Some of the most popular shortform music shows, like Track Star or Ari At Home or Brita resonate because they explicitly highlight how music can make you feel: nostalgic, silly, goofy, communal. If Suno is going to change how people think about AI music, it needs to gift people a show that makes them feel something.

II. Designing a predictable payoff into the show

Earlier this week I compared Submit Your Ick to Bowlmates, two shortform dating shows designed with two very different approaches. One of the major differences, and subsequently one of the reasons I enjoy the former so much more than the latter, is because there’s a clear punchline you can expect in every episode. The “ick” getting revealed is a predictably interesting hook to come for, in the same way that people come to Subway Takes to hear a hot take or Boy Room to see a disgusting bedroom. Adam Faze, one of the early experimenters of “TikTok as TV,” says (@ 9:38) that “You’re watching because the hook is drawing you in, you have an incredible host that is keeping your attention, and there is a point at the very end that keeps them watching until the last frame.”

A mini musical on its own, if done well, might be entertaining enough to hook viewers and keep them around. But framing each episode around an “embarrassing story” is a final frame to keep people coming back for a predictable payoff.

III. A lens through which people interpret the world

The highest honour for a brand or company is to be associated with a product or action — you blow your nose with a Kleenex or you Google something. For a shortform piece of media, the equivalent is something like “becoming a new unit of storytelling.” AITA on Reddit, or FML, or, more recently, a Subway Take, all become new tools for you to interpret and package your own stories. Your sufficiently online friends don’t ask what your hot take would be, they ask what your Subway Take would be.

This is not to say a “One Minute Musical” is on the same tier as a “unit of storytelling” as AITA or FML or a Subway Take. But it’s important to intentionally design a show to become a lens through which people might interpret their own worlds. If Suno really wanted to win the coinage, they could probably run a botfarm that goes to any “Storytime” video on TikTok above 100K views and autocomments something like “lmao this should be on @oneminutemusicals.” But I do not think automations are winning any bonus points for an AI music company :)

In that same interview with Colin and Samir, Adam Faze talks about a show he launched called Bodega Run, a shortform gameshow in a bodega (@32:30). The first episode got 40M views across platforms, but subsequent episodes slowly dwindled down to the 50-200k mark. They realized that the show was a “stage for virality” if you had the right character, but the “format itself wasn’t that interesting for people.” Within 4 weeks, 10 episodes, and $3500, they decided to shut it down to pursue other projects.

It’s a good reminder that shortform shows are, as far as brand marketing goes, a low-risk bet. A higher production project like One Minute Musical would certainly cost more than $3500, but Suno could theoretically produce 3-6 pilot episodes, launch them on a brand new social account, and fold the experiment without any real consequences if the algorithm gods don’t pick up the video.

Thanks for reading! I explore how brands and startups build better media properties.

This post is part of my weekly strategy series, which is typically reserved for paid subscribers. If you enjoyed this, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or sharing it with a homie.

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The best shows are either an escape from our reality or an exaggeration of its absurdity. Dating shows, somehow, are both: an opportunity to project our own quest for romance onto some Other and an opportunity to look in the mirror and say, “well, at least I’m not that bad.”

It’s especially fun to see format innovations on such an evergreen topic: “The Button”, “Pop The Balloon”, The Tiktokified “Pop The Balloon”, various degenerates crowdsourcing their dating apps on Twitch, and Hot Singles NYC (rest in peace/good riddance). But I’ve been trying to understand why some shortform shows, even when built around the same topic, sit with me in such wildly different ways. We can learn a lot by comparing two relatively new dating shows:

Cava’s branded Bowlmates, an unscripted show where two singles build each other a Cava bowl based on their dating questions

Submit Your Ick, a scripted show where actors recreate various fan-submitted dating mishaps

Spend two minutes watching an episode of each before you continue!

Bowlmates has to live within the boundaries of Cava’s world, while Submit Your Ick is explicitly designed as an entertainment product. I’m definitely having more fun with the latter. It’s not really a fair comparison, but if branded content wants to act like real entertainment, then we should hold it to the same standards. For what it’s worth, Bowlmates is strong as far as branded shows go: it’s not too heavy handed with its product placement, each episode has shortform savvy edits, and it’s hosted by the fantastic and recognizable Daniela Mora. It looks like they got over 250,000 views across Reels + TikTok for their first six episodes, and the show is already prepping for its second season. But Submit Your Ick is a show I genuinely look forward to watching. It’s going gangbusters with over 500K followers since its launch in April, and an average of 1-3M views per weekly episode.

There are a few things that stand out to me:

I. Payoff design: begin with the end in mind

We’re drowning in dating discourse, so any new show that broaches the topic has to prove that its payoff is worth your time. But scripted and unscripted shows have to approach this payoff in very different ways.

In a scripted show like Submit Your Ick, you have the luxury of promising a payoff upfront — How will this date go wrong? — and then designing every second to escalate towards that conclusion. In some ways, the secret to a good shortform scripted show is just teasing a novel payoff and then actually keeping your promise.1 It’s more about the punchline than the set-up. Was it funny? Was it surprising? Do I want to see more of this? Every episode of Submit Your Ick is a self-contained story. I don’t care about the characters, I just want to see the funny twist.

In an unscripted show like Bowlmates, you loosely know what your payoff will be — Will they agree to a date?2 — but you don’t exactly know how you’re going to get there. The lack of a script makes it extremely high variance: you might have an episode where two characters just don’t click, or you might have insane chemistry that leads to something better than you could ever script. The key is to set up scaffolding to control this variance: your casting decisions, host presence, general format, or the stakes of your payoff are all tools to help you increase the baseline entertainment value of every unscripted moment. That’s why Bowlmates has structured sections like, “What’s your biggest red flag?” or “What’s the first thing you noticed about her?” But even though the scaffolding is done well, ultimately the final payoff is too low-stakes to justify the variance in getting there. Bowlmates’s payoff depends on us having an attachment to the characters, and a two-minute episode isn’t enough time for me to care whether or not they go on a date.3 People want to see crazy shit. Raise the stakes!4

II. Interactive by design: from the people, for the people

High-production shows feel top-down, like a studio showing you what’s cool. Low-production feels bottom-up, like a grassroots show or creator that you’re supporting on the way up. Submit Your Ick somehow manages to be both, because it’s interactive by design. Audience involvement is baked into the concept, and whether or not they’re taking your submission, each episode feels like it’s elevating something out of the comments and into a high-production show. It’s similar to the magic of SubwayTakes — it’s easy to spitball your own “take” in the comments section and feel like you’re playing some small part in the show’s universe.

Last week I wrote about how a show is a gift to your corner of the internet. Submit Your Ick’s community submission model, then, turns the show into a platform for gift giving. It’s a gift to see your dating stories elevated into a high production show, just like it’s a gift to share your own goofy dating stories in the comments. The numbers show as much: Bowlmate’s highest viewed episode has a 0.2% share rate while Submit Your Ick has a few episodes with a 1% share rate.

In shortform, format wins championships. SubwayTakes promises a hot take, Track Star promises a music challenge, Boy Room promises a ridiculous bedroom. You come for the payoff that you’re promised, which then earns you the privilege of building depth over time. Bowlmates does a lot right, but without a big payoff or an opportunity for community involvement, Submit Your Ick is just hands down the more entertaining format.

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It’s easy for brand posts to feel above (or, more accurately, below) this truth. There is, after all, reality to contend with: budgets and targets and view counts and all the other machinery that separates “art” from “content.” But brand content, too, ends up in the bloodstream. I suspect one reason social shows are resonating so well with people is because they do feel like art — they’re explicitly designed as a gift for someone in your corner of the internet.2

Brands are acting like people, and people are status-seeking monkeys

Humans evolved to compete for social status. Pre-agriculture status would get you access to food and opportunities to procreate, post-industrialization it gets you basically everything else.

Brands, for better or worse, are acting more and more like individual people. In the simplest sense, brands post content so that they can sell more things. But concluding that is all that they do, or saying that all of their content should be used towards those ends, is akin to saying that humans only want to procreate. The reality is that brands, especially through the lens of them individuating, use content to accrue status. One possible outcome of that is to sell more things, but today I’m more interested in exploring the process by which that status is granted.

Status in an abundant environment shifts from what you own to what you gift

So how do these brands-become-individuals accrue status? I’m drawing on two reference texts that are worth reading in their entirety, one from Alex Danco on gift culture in Silicon Valley3 and Eric Steven Raymond on the incentive structure of open source software. They contrast scarce environments, where basics are difficult to get, with abundance environments, where the thing that used to be scarce is now cheap or infinite. In the former, it is more likely that resources are allocated (and therefore status accrued) through centralized command structures or a culture of exchanging X for Y. In the latter, however, those become unnecessary or inefficient. After all, we have far more of the thing than we can handle!

But even an abundant society is not so easily organized. Danco says, “Abundant environments may surprise you: even though they’re lacking in material scarcity or literal friction, there’s still plenty of work to do. It’s just a different kind of work: the work of dealing with complexity, clarity, curation, and especially synthesis.” In these environments, Raymond posits that “abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game.” Gifting, then, becomes the mechanism to clarify and accrue status that “...is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.”

The marketplace of content in particular4, especially brand content, has long shifted from one of scarcity to one of abundance.

In relatively more scarce content environments such as 2017 era news feeds, brand content functioned more like an exchange system. They had centralized control over high production content or a monopoly on a particular product, which is becoming less and less true in a world where products are more easily commodified, in commerce and software. Here’s a rare bit of well produced content, now go buy my thing, serf.

In an abundant content environment, brands begin to give away these resources, with a less clear transaction in return. They’re launching shows without any branding or prompts to shop, but instead with the intent to build status in a corner of the internet.

Homestead a corner of the internet

In a gifting culture, status is localized. Quoting from Danco at length here:

…if you went back in time 5000 years ago and asked an early villager, “how do you solve the coincidence of wants problem?” they’d look at you strangely: “We don’t have that problem. If my neighbour has grain and I need it, I take some and then I owe him one.” That concept, “I owe him one”, is really powerful. In this paradigm, money is fundamentally an IOU. It is not a representation of hard scarcity; it is a representation of trust between two people. Money, just like trust, can be originated or destroyed. It is local, and contextual. It’s made of reputation.

…

You may be wondering where is all leading up to, and it’s to make this point: status is like money.

There are versions of portable status, like real-life fame or being 6’2, but these are more shallow indicators of community standing because of their portability. Generally, the ways in which one demonstrates status in the open source software community are not the same ways one demonstrates status in the angel investing community, which are not the same ways one demonstrates status in a particular brand’s community.

The key, then, is that your gifts have to be designed for a particular corner of the internet. Abstract away from your product, and think about its philosophy or broader mission: Roomies, rent-to-reward company Bilt’s social show, is not about points software, it’s about coming-of-age as a young city dweller. It’s an attempt to fertilize a very particular plot of land for a very particular person, without asking anything in return.

Designing a good gift

In the context of social shows, a good gift would:

1. Be a story worth watching on its own accord

This is arguably the most important of a gift. It doesn’t ask for anything in return! It’s not an ad disguised with high-production quality. Think: Olivia Unplugged or Bittarverse.

2. Create new culture, not just remix or extend existing references or worlds

Flipping a trend for your own niche is fun and useful. But taking a risk on the creation of new culture, whether in literal production dollars or just creative risk, is a real gift. Think: Brita or Duolingo’s Anime.

3. An opportunity to look in the mirror or pay the gift forward

“Shares” strongly determine whether the algorithm will spread a video or not. People share things for two reasons: to represent something about themselves, or to encode a message to someone else. A good gift in this context, then, is like a base layer, something that the recipient can riff on. I wonder what percentage of Instagram Reels are DM’d with the caption “me,” or “us,” or “you.” Spotify Wrapped is perhaps the canonical modern example of “gift as mirror,” while a social show like Brooklyn Coffee Shop is a good example of “a gift that can be gifted forward to a particular person.”

Gifts, Danco says, are in some ways just a channel for information sharing. “The giver can assign all sorts of meaning to a gift about its purpose, how it was made, and what they love about it, and the recipient will actually receive that message.”

Through this lens, some of the emergent behaviours across different social networks start to make more sense. Twitter’s quote-retweet dunk culture feels like a gift to your in-group, almost literally “serving a head on a platter.” Or, even as Instagram copies everything else about Tiktok, gifts might explain why they still feel like two distinct cultures — the latter rooted in its remix culture of gifting absurdity and in-jokes to one another, while the former is still trying to shed its past of influencers stunting on your scarcity.

This was not meant to be a tactical post. I’ve been in the content mines for a month now, digital coal smeared on my face as I churn out 3,000 or so words a week, and I’m relishing the opportunity to really be in it after having spent so long quarterbacking media strategies from afar. But it’s refreshing to take a step back from the how to focus on the why. I often say that “businesses should act more like creators,” and this is a perfect example of that: you can sense when a creator is in it for the love of the game, versus just chasing some viral moment. The same is true for brands. Homestead your corner of the internet with genuine gifts, and the status you accrue will pay off in time.

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" “I don’t drive. I was too poor. And then I was too rich.” - Alex Karp” " - Amelia Dimoldenberg, presumably, as she learned to drive on the set of Passenger Princess.

F1 used to be for nerds, and then the hot people arrived.

Back in 2003, my brother and I used to have sleepovers with a family friend who lived down the street from us, but while we were gloriously sleeping in on Saturdays, content to enjoy a rare morning with neither Normal School nor Islamic School, he would be up at the crack of dawn to watch cars drive in circles (and other circle-adjacent shapes). It made no sense to me then, and admittedly, it still makes very little sense to me now, even after Drive to Survive took the world by storm to inspire a new generation of casual fans.

It’s incredibly baller that F1 was able to create a new entry point for casual fans into what has historically been such a monocultural sport. So when they run the same strategy via a new YouTube show with Amelia Dimoldenberg of Chicken Shop Date fame, you’ve got to pay attention.

The gist of the show is:

1. Amelia doesn’t know how to drive, so she enlists four F1 drivers to teach her.

2. Each driver is responsible for a specific lesson, such as “Parallel Parking” or “Reversing.”

3. Amelia interviews each driver with her trademark dry humour as she fails each test horribly.

A few takeaways:

I. Create a new entry point to your core franchise

A media empire needs to have IP that exists beyond its core franchise. Disney is not Disney if Mickey Mouse is all it is; Cinderella and Moana and Woody are all entry points that exist independently of the core brand, but benefit from their association with the central media infrastructure. New IP is a gateway drug to pull you into a broader universe.

F1’s media empire is less diffuse than Disney’s, since every one of its media properties still revolves around the sport: Drive to Survive, the F1 movie, and their podcast. But each property still serves as a unique entry point or touchpoint for a different type of customer. Women now account for 3 in 4 new F1 fans, and Passenger Princess is purpose-built for them:

The show’s name is a TikTok joke for women who prefer to passively hang out in the passenger seat.1 But it’s fascinating how the intersection of “being a passenger princess” and “learning how to drive” gets fans to project their own driving associations onto these episodes. Just scroll through the comments, “PTSD to my dad yelling BRAKE BRAKE BRAKE”, or “Ollie is the younger brother, Carlos is the father”, etc. The magic of the show is that it takes what used to be known as an “old, rich, white man sport” and presents it in a context that feels familiar to a new audience.

II. Build for the channel you’re on

The easiest way for a brand to crack YouTube is alongside a creator who has already cracked YouTube. Passenger Princess was owned from soup to nuts by Amelia’s production company, and it’s clear they understand how to build a show that truly feels native to the channel:

Concept testing

Chicken Shop Date is the perfect environment to test which characters and angles are resonating with her audience. So when she interviewed F1 driver Lando Norris and saw an onslaught of comments from her audience wanting more, it immediately made sense to pitch a broader partnership with F1.

Historically, pilot episodes were an attempt to test audience interest around a show concept. But it’s now far easier to get contact with reality and test an angle when you already have several million people listening to your podcast or other digitally native media property. How can you use your existing channels to your audience to test new concepts without actually getting on set?

Packaging

Packaging is half the battle on YouTube, and it can immediately indicate the difference between brands that understand the platform and those that don’t. Don’t take it from me, take it from Airrack, who runs one of the fastest growing channels ever: “The first 30 seconds of a video are everything. I’m telling you. Some really smart YouTube people are meeting in a room every month, and the only conclusion they come to is that the title and the intro are more important than they thought they were last month.”

Oatly, for example, launched a show last year that seems to have totally flopped, with ~2,000 cumulative views across 10 episodes. Look at their thumbnail and titles:

What is this show about?!?! I loosely understand that the concept has something to do with a cafe and a Grandpa, but it’s certainly not clear on a passive scroll (we speak French in Canada, not Spanish.) There’s no tease of a story in the thumbnail, the title just rehashes the branding and doesn’t give any additional context, and I have no reason to click this in a sea of YouTube content. If I did happen to click the video, I would bounce away immediately while they spoon-feed context with an intro monologue instead of dropping me straight into the action with a hook or cold intro.

Compare this to Passenger Princess:

It helps that Amelia is one of the most recognizable faces on YouTube, but even if you don’t know the characters, you understand the concept in a millisecond: The “Passenger Princess” name itself is clear and evocative of a widely recognized internet joke, someone is driving, and it seems like something interesting is about to happen (look at her face). The title of the video is another layer of context, and includes both “F1” and “Oscar Piastri” to maximize its surface area with new audiences. As soon as you click into a video, the first three seconds are a cold open that gets straight into the action, and then they back into some more context for the viewer.

I am neither an F1 fan nor a close follower of Amelia’s, so this show was obviously not designed with me in mind. I loved the concept, and I think it’s a great template for future F1 expansion products, but I just don’t think it’s that great as an entertainment product. The episodes have some funny moments, and Amelia’s dry humour really shines when she’s under pressure, but 8-minute episodes aren’t enough time for in-depth conversations, nor are they enough time for real high-action episodes. So we’re left with neither. To be fair, she had only 2 hours to film all 4 episodes, so it’s an incredible feat of showmanship that she was able to pull this off at all. But seeing as each episode has cleared a million views already, I suspect there’s more to come from this partnership.2

Things I’m learning from this week:

• Investing and the Media Business by Will Manidis. I’d eventually like to write about tech’s “New Media” hard-on, but I keep getting distracted by all the other good takes.

• Your Phone Isn’t a Drug. It’s a Portal to the Otherworld. Katherine Dee, “Default Friend,” is doing some of my favourite writing on internet culture.

• Los, the world’s first appstar, is making you the main character of the Timothee Chalamet stunt. “Software at the speed of culture” is a cool evolution of the form.

Somewhere in the multiverse, there’s a timeline where the tech industry got its “distribution” hard-on from Verse’s “Internet Bedroom” instead of Cluely’s launch video. One year later, the pendulum is swinging and tech is finally realizing that not all attention is given equally. Attention stolen with ragebait leaves us embittered, jumping into the comments section to prove someone wrong on the internet; attention earned with active participation makes a big world feel small, connecting us to micro-communities that we never could have found in-person.

Jamie Cho’s fantastic Internet Bedroom stunt from September 2024 is a great example of the latter. Back in 2017, it was a novel idea to give away a self-contained media product as a top-of-funnel “lead magnet” for your business — you could generate leads by offering some resource in exchange for a prospect’s contact information. It sounds embarrassingly basic now, but one of the most successful ad campaigns I once ran for an ecommerce brand would just point traffic to a free eBook with “10 tips to sleep better.” People would sign up for my email list to access the document, and then I would slowly upsell them on a related paid offer over time.

As coding models improve, and building software1 becomes as simple as writing a PDF, the best lead magnets will be digital experiences, not downloads.

Verse2 was a “creative platform where users build personalized digital collages.” You can see a video of the Internet Bedroom in action here, but the gist is:

1. You connect your Spotify or Apple Music account.

2. Verse generates you a personalized mini-site, decorated in the colours and symbols that represent the musicians you love.

3. You get offered a chance to “customize your internet bedroom,” which lands you on a download prompt for Verse.

A few lessons for anyone trying to architect more interactive brand moments:

I. Build it where they already are.

This stunt was tailor-made in a laboratory to infiltrate Stan Twitter/Stan TikTok. Verse did post examples of the web app on their own socials, but it seems the real virality began from seeding the experience on various pop culture fandom accounts, which then led to people organically posting the experience themselves.

It’s a good reminder you never really have to start from zero when you’re spreading an idea. Hijack existing symbols or audiences, what MSCHF refers to as “cultural readymades,” so that other authority figures or in-groups do the heavy lifting for you. Read more about designing a contagious stunt here.

II. People love to be told who they are.

Astrology, Tarot, personality tests — they all hand you an artifact with a novel perspective or categorization on who you are. We’re all scavenging for proof that we’re special little snowflakes.

Spotify Wrapped, the canonical modern example of this, effectively just has us promoting their product as a way of promoting ourselves. There are a ton of derivatives of the Wrapped format, from Goodreads to Substack, but they mostly miss the mark. People don’t want data on themselves. People want stories about themselves. Verse used users’ listening history as a proxy for what kind of person they might be, and then packaged that aesthetic into a visual form. It’s the sort of absurd internet catnip that people love to share, whether it ends up being accurate or not.

III. Bridge the gap.

It sounds obvious, but it’s worth underlining: a useful top-of-funnel lead magnet has to actually be representative of your bottom-of-funnel product. It makes no sense to send people a free PDF on how to sleep better and then try to upsell them on a t-shirt brand. There’s a whole host of reasons why ragebait doesn’t accrue any useful version of attention, but if I had to distill it down to one, it’s because it is not representative of the actual experience you’re trying to sell.

I’m excited about the idea of web apps as a lead magnet, because they can be a more accurate proxy of the final experience, especially when compared to a PDF that has no opportunity for participation. Verse’s Internet Bedroom, for example, ends with a clear next step to “download the app to edit your digital bedroom.”

It’s a clear bridge that takes you from “this is the teaser,” to “I know what I’m getting with the entire experience.”

Within a few weeks, 8 million people had tried the Internet Bedroom, and 160k of them installed the app. Who knows how retentive the users were, but I suspect that’s more of a product problem than a marketing problem.

There are a few other examples of interactive stunts like this, such as They See Your Photos (which gives you a great sharable artifact) or Umax (which could’ve done their face scan via a webapp instead of in the app itself.) But this type of micro experience is an arbitrage when the rest of the consumer app industry is still milking Jenni AI’s (fantastic) UGC playbook from 2023.

If scaled UGC content is something of an internet-native teaser trailer for your app, then Verse’s Internet Bedroom is more like an internet-native gateway drug.

Thanks for reading! I write about branded entertainment, exploring how brands and startups become media companies.

Just a reminder that there’ll be no Thursday post this week because of American Thanksgiving. I will instead be busy on my short-form video thinkboi grind.

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I, like all you fellow gifted-kids-turned-laptop-workers, can’t imagine a life where I’m not creating new things. For a particular type of person, no degree of consumption, neither in quantity nor quality, can fill the gaping hole left by lack of creation.

It’s a compulsion.

I love riding the waves of our collective unconscious, speculating around what discourse might bubble up next, riffing on a concept to get ahead and around it, shitposting on Twitter to test different angles, moodboarding art directions and worldbuilding. In short, I, like many of you, was born, bred, or made in some other way with this delusion that I can, in a small way, disturb the universe.

I spent a decade cycling through anonymous pen names, building silly little projects off the side of my desk to scratch this itch where various full-time jobs couldn’t. The reality is that it was an integration problem, an inability for my “work-self” and “creative-self” to co-exist, both philosophically and pragmatically. But I’ve now had some space away from a full-time job for a while, and I’ve been wondering: What could an integrated role, or life, look like? Could a sensitive young man/woman scratch the itch for real creativity, while still fitting into the realities of being on someone’s payroll?

You might think that working in a broad content or social media role would accomplish this, and, with the right constraints, maybe it does. And maybe it doesn’t matter! We with the hubris to create things are not owed anything, certainly not a steady paycheck and an outlet for artistic dreams. But, just to humour the thought experiment, for a role like this to exist and actually make sense for all parties involved, I bet it would look something like a “creator-in-residence.”

It would be an employment relationship that prioritizes creating new IP and shares in its upside.

Prioritize New IP — Create an adjacent media property

The line between “employee” and “content creator”1 continues to blur. Eugene Healey has a fantastic video on employee-generated-content, but I don’t think that trend is really getting to the heart of what I’m talking about with the “creator-in-residence.” Companies like Starbucks and Ulta are smart to incentivize their employees to post content, but in this context, the act of creation is still rooted in the company’s products. The Starbucks creators talk about coffee, the Ulta creators talk about makeup. For a hopeful creative, a more interesting version of this job would be to abstract away from the product that your company sells, and towards the broader thesis statement or problem set it covers. Then, you give the creator-in-residence the freedom to create new IP within those constraints. Just to illustrate: if the Starbucks brand is more about community than coffee, what if their creator produced and starred in a short-form show about a group of laptop workers who hang out in a coffee shop?

One of the best examples of this is Macy Gilliam’s “Out There” show with Morning Brew, a standalone series that lives within the media company’s broader YouTube channel. She started working there in ~June 2023, but in April of this year, her agents at UTA2 negotiated her a new contract, in which Morning Brew continues to own the show IP, but gives her a cut of all show revenue and traffic to her own socials. “It’s a really safe way to be an entrepreneur…” in her own words.3

Pushing creator tendencies on your employees has long been a topic of contention in legacy media, but it’s finding a new foothold in tech.4 Ara Kharazian is fintech company Ramp’s “In-house Economist,” producing “public-facing economic research with first-party data.” He isn’t writing about Ramp and its slate of finance products. He’s using Ramp’s data to write about the things that will be enjoyed by those who might buy Ramp’s suite of finance products. Stripe just hired a Chief Economist. Anthropic had a recent job posting up for a policy writer. Opal spun off its own edutainment creator to talk about screen time.

A creator-in-residence is less about creating content about your company and more about building a media property around the mission of your company.

Share In The Upside — Compound their personal leverage

People start side hustles for the chance at unlimited upside, and they start them while they’re still employed for the downside protection. Startups have long known that equity compensation is one way to get employees to go “all-in” on their jobs — they’re meaningfully invested in the long-term success of a business, but they’ll still collect a paycheque as long as they stick around. A “creator-in-residence” role, then, might be another way to strike this balance that doesn’t rely on future equity liquidity.

The exact execution depends on the business model. For Macy Gilliam, it makes sense for Morning Brew to sell ads against her show and then cut her into the pie. Their entire business model is built around ads! For Ramp, though, it probably doesn’t make sense to sell ads5 against Ara’s newsletter, but maybe it makes sense to bonus him on attributable booked demos or something of that sort. On the other hand, it might not make sense for Morning Brew to let Macy own the IP to “Out There”, while it might make sense for Ramp and Ara to share ownership over the email list that he’s building (privacy laws permitting.)

This isn’t exactly the creator-in-residence model, but another proof point is Money With Katie. She was making something like $250K in topline revenue as an independent, but since her acquihire by Morning Brew in 2022 she has at least 4x’d her business. Practically speaking she still presents like an independent creator to her audience, separate IP and accounts and all, but she now has a shared backoffice with the rest of Morning Brew. They get to bundle her and her audience as a complementary ad product to their existing advertisers, and she gets to offload the operational work to focus on what she does best: create.

The key is to strike a happy medium where the business wins and the creator feels that every incremental unit of work is building their long-term personal leverage.

It is deeply satisfying to be an independent creative, but as I’ve become intimately familiar with over the last ~month since launching this newsletter, it is also grueling. If companies are looking to evolve into media empires, and creatives want to make good art and build their personal leverage, the creator-in-residence model feels like the rare opportunity where both are actually aligned.

Thanks for reading! I write about branded entertainment, exploring how brands and startups become media companies.

This post is part of my weekly strategy series, which is typically reserved for paid subscribers. If you enjoyed this, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or sharing it with a homie <3

I always joke that I discovered movies, like, a year ago.1

I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for the first time last week (banger), and nothing makes me happier than watching a classic and then messaging my cinephile2 friends that “I think this whole movie thing has some legs to it.” This is probably more a testament to my cooked attention span than anything else, but it does imply that I haven’t really been inspired by many movie rollouts. Which is why I was surprised to be laughing out loud at Marty Supreme’s fantastic marketing meeting stunt.

It’s worth watching the entire video above if you haven’t already, but the gist is:

1. A marketing team gets on a Zoom call, waiting to pitch some campaign ideas to Timothée Chalamet, who plays Marty.
   

2. Chalamet mogs them and takes over the call to pitch them his own ideas.
   

3. He proceeds to pitch totally absurd ideas, from owning the colour orange the same way Barbie owns the colour pink, to recolouring the Statue Of Liberty so people will think of Marty Supreme “when they arrive to New York, whether it’s for tourism or out of dire need.”

This stunt isn’t directly applicable to a brand or startup trying to build a branded entertainment property, since it relies on a lot of Timothée’s existing celebrity for it to work, but there are still a few broader content learnings to underline:

I. Exaggerate the absurdity of the spicy present

MSCHF, the GOATs of modern stunt marketing, tell us to “look for ways to exacerbate the Spicy Present, to extrapolate it into absurdity. It is not fiction or future; it is the accelerated and intensified present.” Where other movie rollouts are trying to go viral on the coattails of an existing trend, this one opts for a more meta commentary: what if we exaggerated how absurd it is to brainstorm a viral moment?

The “Spicy Present” is a good framework for brainstorming a stunt of any kind, but in this specific context, it’s also a good opportunity for the audience to feel like they’re in on the joke. Even as someone who doesn’t really watch movies, I know that Chalamet is the people’s champ with a reputation as an earnest king. So manufacturing a moment that leans into that earnestness feels like a wink towards how the audience already perceives him.

II. Design self-contained clippable moments

Clips, for better or worse, are taking over the internet. Longform content has to increase its surface area for shareability through self-contained moments — slices that can be consumed without any context on the broader work. This stunt feels as though it was scripted like a Twitch livestream, with several baked-in shareable segments, including:

SHWEP

There is no greater power than introducing a new word or phrase to someone’s lexicon. Every time Chalamet compliments one of director Josh Safdie’s previous movies, he punctuates it with a SHWEP. I’m pretty online with a prolific range of slang and even I’ve never heard that phrase before, which makes it a perfectly absurd hook for folks to clip or echo in the comments section.

Culmination, Integration, Fruitionizing

Chalamet repeats a bunch of inane mantras over the course of the call, including “MARTY SUPREME CHRISTMAS DAY,” “Greatness, greatness, greatness,” (which the entire group chants along with) and maybe the most ridiculous, “Culmination, Integration, Fruitionilizing.” It’s the sort of absurdity that is pure internet catnip, and you can see him already doubling down on it on his own socials.

Easter eggs

The meeting gets more and more absurd as it progresses, and at one point Chalamet shares his laptop screen and his background picture is of himself. Of course people are going to inspect his screen for easter eggs — this is obviously clip bait!

III. Visual form should be in service of your concept

Most content creators are still treating a “hook” as though it can only be a pithy one-liner to kick off your video. But that’s obviously not true — a hook can be any mechanism to get someone’s attention in the first ~3 seconds.3 My favourite visual hooks also manage to tee up or magnify the concept of the video itself, such as the Fashion Neurosis podcast and its fantastic bird’s-eye-view of a therapist’s couch. The visual form primes you for the concept itself: you know you’re about to witness a therapy session.

The Zoom call might seem like the obvious format to land this concept — the laptop class can empathize with the feeling of tiles slowly popping up on your screen, warming up before an external party joins, the ridiculousness of five minutes of introductions before the call begins, etc. But you can also easily imagine the team having opted for something else, such as the suddenly hyper popular The Office mockumentary format. The magic, then, is in choosing an immediately recognizable format that both stands out on the infinite scroll of socials and magnifies your concept.

I don’t think you can remix this campaign without meaningful celebrity power or some incredibly high-context brand lore. But you can dissect it for its fundamental strategy: exaggerate the absurdity of the present moment, design self-contained clippable moments, and choose a visual form that magnifies your concept.

God, I would love it if the tech industry could be this funny.

Things I’m consuming this week:

• Jackson Dahl’s fantastic interview with the TBPN boys. It’s fascinating to see how calculated most of their worldbuilding has been, such as their trademark Gong as a mechanism to spike the energy levels during high-variance guest segments. TBPN in many ways has indirectly inspired this newsletter — there is so much care that goes into the details of building a media business, and it’s exciting to study game tape from the pros.

• A new animated series, heavily inspired by Indian epics, is working with some animators from the League Of Legend show, Arcane. I often joke that Zohran has officially kicked off the brown boy decade, but I’m unironically excited that there’ll be some high-production storytelling to offset the brutal anti-brown sentiment of the last few years.

• Rachel Karten’s great essay on the future of the feed. Rage bait is not the only way forward!

A stunt is an orchestrated public intervention: you hijack attention in an unexpected moment and redirect it towards an unexpected objective. These should lean closer to entertainment (e.g. The Portal) than utility (e.g. a planned retail pop-up).

In this three-part series, you’ll learn:

1. The categories of stunts, and which makes the most sense for you.

2. A framework for brainstorming a stunt. ← This post

3. How to maximize the success of a stunt.

When you’re deeply attuned to your audience, sometimes inspiration will strike and an idea for a stunt will come to you fully formed. But for those of us not so graced by God, it’s overwhelmingly more likely that we want to do a stunt but have no idea where to begin brainstorming.

I’ve been studying legends of the form such as MSCHF, The Yes Men, and Eva & Franco in an attempt to find some common threads in their processes. Frameworks are ultimately just guardrails for intuition, so there’s only so much I can distill their art down to a science, but here’s one attempt at a formula:

You don’t necessarily have to brainstorm these sequentially! Inspiration can strike from any part of the equation, and the key is to think of each of these variables as prompts that give you the broadest possible surface area for creativity. If you don’t have an answer for one variable, you can get around a creative block by moving on to the next section.

Let’s break down each entry point:

I. Current reality: Stunts should exaggerate the spicy present.

II. Existing association: Hijack symbols that already mean something.

III. Define an audience: Build it where they are.

IV. Concept: Synthesize the most transmissible version of your idea.

V. Intended emotion: If they don’t feel something, you’ve lost.

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I. Current reality: Stunts exaggerate the spicy present.

First, define your spicy present

Stunts are a public intervention, so by definition they require something for you to intervene with. The Yes Men refer to this as your “target”. This could be an entity (e.g. a company or a person) or it could be a norm (e.g. an expected behaviour or presentation of a thing).

Having a clear thesis statement grounds the rest of your brainstorming, so your stunt doesn’t try to say too much at once. Just write this out as a sentence on how the world currently operates:

• Ramp hires Kevin from The Office as their CFO : “Manual expense reports are stupidly slow.”

• Airrack makes The World’s Largest Pizza: “Pizzas serve 10 people.”

• The Last Exorcism’s Chat Roulette striptease: “People can’t keep their pants on in internet chat rooms.”

Then, dial up the absurdity to its most exaggerated version

MSCHF’s employee handbook advises people to “Look for ways to exacerbate the Spicy Present, to extrapolate it into absurdity. It is not fiction or future; it is the accelerated and intensified present.”

You see this across all of their stunts, for example:

• Key4All: “from Universal Basic Car to Public Universal Car”.

  • Current reality: “The sharing economy”

  • Most exaggerated version: What if thousands of people had their own individual keys to a literal shared car?

• The Free Movie: “a distributed animated studio”, where “we are redrawing The Bee Movie by hand, frame by frame.”

  • Current reality: The Bee Movie was already a movie that had been adopted by the internet

  • Most exaggerated version: What if we could literally rebirth the movie through the internet? “Bees are collectivist and so are we. Join us as we liberate this movie one hand-drawn frame at a time.”

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II. Existing association: Hijack symbols that already mean something.

As a general rule for getting attention, don’t make your life harder by starting from ground zero. The quickest way for an audience to build an emotional connection with your stunt is to hijack and subvert an association they already have. MSCHF refers to this as “cultural readymades,” and says, “Using materials that people have strong associations with = people will have strong reactions to your work.”

Some angles to approach this:

• Characters: When Ramp built their stunt around Kevin from The Office, not only are they able to use him as a visual hook for their intended audience, but he also immediately acts as a shorthand symbol for their topic of “incompetence in the workplace.”

• Expectations/Behaviours: Internet chat rooms have long been trying to solve “The Penis Problem.” “The Last Exorcism” teases that expected behaviour and then subverts it with a jumpscare.

• Existing IP: Again, The Bee Movie already has a lot built up internet lore, so MSCHF took a shortcut to an emotional connection by building a stunt around it.

• Phrases: I don’t think I’m chic enough to ever have placed an order at a restaurant by saying, “I’ll have the number two,” but The Yes Men have a classic stunt where they flip this line into a meal that is literally a “number two.”

• News stories: When a bunch of idiots started throwing dildos onto the court during WNBA games, Polymarket tastelessly took their shot and put up a prediction market for it.1

  

III. Define an audience: Build it where they are.

In the same way that you might have an ideal customer profile (ICP) for the rest of your business, you need a clear idea of who your stunt is for. Remember that every part of this brainstorming formula is a variable — the same core idea can become something wildly different if you swap out one component and build it for Zoomer Girlies instead of for Boomer Finance Men.

Beyond basic demographic details (age, gender, employment, location, etc.), it’s worth considering:

Their relationship to your brand

Are they new to the category, customers of a competitor, current customers of yours, former customers, loyal customers, gift purchasers within the category, or category skeptics? This decision will also likely indicate whether you should do a prank, spectacle, or performance art.

The role you want your audience to play in the stunt

MSCHF’s employee manual teaches “Active participation > passive consumption”…“The truest audience for a reality TV show is its participants, not the viewers. Interactive absurdity creates distributed reality TV.2 Everyone’s a participant!”

I’d stretch their philosophy into a spectrum:

• Stars (Active participation): Is your audience playing a core role in bringing the stunt to life, as with The Free Movie?

• Co-conspirators (active consumption): Is there an opportunity for your audience to get involved in the stunt from afar, even if they’re not playing a core role in the stunt?

• Witnesses (passive consumption): Is your audience just meant to watch, and hopefully share the stunt, as with the Severance Grand Station pop-up?

Where your audience is spending time

MSCHF often pushes back on the idea of “Build it and they will come”, and is far more confident that you should “build it where they already are.” Where is your audience already spending time, whether online or in-person? Which cultural subgroups do they belong to, and where do those people congregate?3 For example, Made On Verse’s Internet Bedroom, a stunt that turns your Spotify/Apple Music history into a blog that reflects your music taste, allegedly got its initial traction via cold outreach out to Kpop Fandom accounts on Twitter.

It’s also important to think about competing off-platform vs on-platform. A natively on-platform stunt (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube), will flatten you to compete against every other short-form vertical video. Competing off-platform (IRL, native web apps) is then a forcing function — you get to flourish on your own terms, but also have to be interesting enough to get organically posted back on-platform.4

Topics on their mind right now

Anthpo dropped some free game at ZCON, “If you’re a brand saying, ‘I want to make content for Gen Z boys,’ and you’re not watching 10 billion hours of Gen Z boy content, you’re out of the loop.” Brands can never be as online as their audience, so if you’re not working with a creator to lead your stunt, you should at the very least have a list of: extremely current news, inside jokes, in-group lore or language, and shared enemies. All of this can then be fodder for the previous variable, “Existing Associations”.

IV. Concept: Synthesize the most transmissible version of your idea.

Remix existing ideas

Good ideas beget good ideas.5 Become a student of the game, explore stunts that have already worked from directories like MSCHF’s drops, The Yes Men, Eva and Franco, or Actipedia, and then swap out variables to make it your own novel concept.6 We know great artists steal etc etc, but how?

Jon Youshaie and Airrack dive into some great frameworks on remixing ideas (@19:20 but the whole interview is worth a watch), and there are three to call out in particular: find the intersection of winning ideas, synthesize and spin off winning concepts, and filter existing ideas through your brand:

1. Find the intersection of winning ideas

In “I Secretly Hid In Kai Cenat’s Livesteam”, Airrack tries to disguise himself and sneak into livestreams without the chat noticing that it’s him. In “How Long Could You Secretly Live In A Grocery Store?”, he tries to hide in a grocery store without getting caught by employees. Both of those concepts were clear winners (8M and 20M views respectively), so he found the intersection of them to create “I Secretly Live In Kai Cenat’s House.” (15M views)

You don’t have to take a swing at a wildly new concept — you can create something novel at the intersection of two already validated ideas.

2. Spin off winning concepts

Airrack’s newest rule is that he won’t make any video that doesn’t have the potential to become a series. It’s just too difficult and expensive to validate new ideas, and he wants his team to become the best in the world at formats that specifically work for him. He synthesizes the core part of a winning concept (e.g. “Sneaking in…”, “I Secretly Hid…”, “I Tried…”), and spins them off into new contexts.

3. Filter existing ideas through your brand

Early in his YouTube career, Airrack was known for burning hundreds of thousands of dollars on extravagant video concepts. But he learned that he can’t exclusively compete on spectacle, because that’s Mr. Beast’s competitive advantage. Instead, he realized that his competitive advantage was “mischief.” Now, he funnels winning ideas from other creators through that lens to find his own unique winners.

For example, if “Disney World” is your target or current reality, then:

• Mr. Beast might filter it through his lens of “Spectacle” to create “$1 vs $500,000 Date”

• Ryan Trahan might filter it through his lens of “Quirky” to create “I Stayed In Every Hotel at Disney World”

• Airrack might filter it through his lens of “Mischief” to create “I Secretly Lived In Disney Land for 7 Days.”

Define your concept in one sentence, three sentences, and five sentences.

Gabe Whaley, MSCHF’s founder, says “an idea…has got to slap in one sentence. It’s got to slap harder in three. [Only five] when the crowd takes it.”

Your idea needs to be intrinsically simple for it to accomplish any sort of meaningful scale online — you only have a millisecond to win someone’s attention off a thumbnail, email header, or video hook. But a great idea, one that can be stretched to “five sentences”, accomplishes simplicity while also harbouring enough depth for the audience to project their own interpretations onto it.7 I wish there were more stunts that accomplished this.

V. Intended emotion: If they don’t feel something, you’ve already lost.

You’re at the end of the equation. Revisit your entire idea through the lens of the emotion that you’re trying to elicit. Is your stunt…

😂 LOL - Hilarious

😡 WTF - Outrageous

😲 OMG - Incredible

😍 AWW - Heartwarming

Shaan Puri synthesizes this well (@3:06), borrowing frameworks from both Jonah Peretti and Steven Bartlett:

Imagine “Jenny in her bed,” a stand-in for a casual viewer loafing around at home, mindlessly scrolling social media. Unless a piece of content gets her to stop, think or feel something, and then share it with a friend,8 then there was no reason to make that thing in the first place. When you’re optimizing for reach, work backwards: choose the desired reaction you want, then make the content to provoke it.9 And then watch it back and ask yourself, do you really think you’re getting the emotion you wanted? If not, recreate the thing until it does.

Once again, even if you keep the other variables of the stunt constant (e.g. “Current Reality,” “Existing Associations,” “Audience,”) you can get to a wildly different stunt when you decide to optimize for, say, humour instead of outrage. Use this to brainstorm permutations of your concept.

I hate to keep harping on the Ramp CFO stunt, but it’s a recent one with a clear narrative. Through the lens of this equation, a very basic interpretation of the stunt might be something like:

[Most finance teams are archaic], and [Kevin From The Office is a good representation of workplace incompetence] for [White Collar Millennials who are now in some position of power at a tech company].

It’d make them [laugh] if we [got Kevin to do a livestream race against our expense management software.]

Make this equation your own! Frameworks are helpful because they’re modular. You can take the parts that work for you, and ignore the parts that don’t. I don’t think that all of my favourite stunts apply perfectly to this outline, but I do think it’s a helpful onramp for your brainstorming time. The key is to maximize your surface area for creativity. At any given moment, a good idea is a three millimeter change away from being a great idea.

Thanks for reading! I write about branded entertainment, exploring how brands and startups become media companies.

This post is part of my weekly strategy series, which is typically reserved for paid subscribers. If you enjoyed this, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or sharing it with a homie <3

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Not to be all sir-glaze-a-lot, but Anthpo has truly been on a generational run of stunts over the last year: the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest, the Cheeseball Man, the recent reveal that he was behind John Chungus. He has a knack for bringing internet absurdity to IRL moments, and in a sea of ragebait, I never regret the time I spend with his work. To celebrate all the chaos that is surely incoming with his new stunts agency, I thought I’d break down one of his early swings at branded entertainment: Kid With Crocs.

Anthpo’s an odd character as far as creators1 go. He shuns his 2M YouTube subscribers in the name of anonymity, often creating new 0-follower account and then hiding his face/voice on camera entirely. There’s no doubt that the culture is embracing each stunt on its own merit, and not because of his past success or audience. So when he inked a deal with Crocs, a product already synonymous with an ironic degree of whimsy, it was the perfect opportunity for him to take a swing at the holy grail of branding: creating a cultural moment around a product.2

The purest version of brand marketing is when you’re able to exist naturally inside an interesting story. The issue, of course, is that genuinely novel stories are hard to come by, let alone one that happens to have your brand at the heart of it. That’s why this entire stunt was a masterclass on how branded entertainment can create culture, not just ride on the coattails of an existing moment.

I strongly suggest watching all thirteen videos, but the gist is:

1. An anonymous masked character (from a fresh 0-follower TikTok account!) posts an elaborate video of him staging a beauty pageant for the Hans Christian Anderson “Ugly Duckling” statue in Central Park. It ends with him giving the statue a custom pair of Crocs.

   

2. He teases that there are seven other statues that he’ll be dripping out.
   

   

3. Over the course of the next ~30 days he brings his (rapidly growing) audience along on truly absurd sidequests as he Crocs up all eight statues. He hosts a honey tasting event before he gets the Bear statue, raps over a Tyler The Creator song as he gets the Dog statue, and eventually pulls an elaborate heist-type video to get the Statue of Liberty.
   

4. He ends the stunt having amassed ~400,000 followers, an in-person meetup to sign his Giant Croc, and then reveals that this was an art series in collaboration with Crocs.

A few learnings for anyone trying to architect more interesting brand moments:

I. Branded entertainment should empower creators to take bigger creative risks. Create IP that exists beyond your product!

The standard brand deal is a loan on someone else’s reputation: I, the brand, will pay $X to have a respected person deploy a percentage of their reputation to shill my product in front of their audience. That can be boring and straightforward, or it can backfire brilliantly. As a marketer, a standard brand deal like this is not getting you fired, but it’s surely not getting you a promotion.

Branded entertainment, then, is more like a loan on someone else’s creativity. You’re trying to create some IP that lives beyond the brand itself. The key is that Crocs found someone whose flavour of creativity matched their own, and then let him run wild with it. Crocs was already a dream brand for him to work with, but in his own words Anthpo “...just wanted to do an art project, and they [Crocs] funded it.” Putting Anthpo at the helm of an entire campaign — not just a scripted ad read — allowed him to take a bigger creative risk with his particular brand of absurdity.3

II. Remind yourself which part of the funnel you’re optimizing for

If you measure a top-of-funnel fish by its ability to attribute bottom-of-funnel sales, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid. Or something like that. Branded entertainment is almost definitionally meant for awareness, and should be measured as such: views, brand lift on other platforms, or search metrics. Middle-of-funnel consideration should be a task for niche experts, and micro-influencers are often best equipped to drive attributable sales.

The only public number Anthpo has shared is that he drove 55M views over the course of the month. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, and doesn’t account for any earned media after the fact, but the average CPM for the Brand Awareness objective on Meta Ads in April was $2.50. Even if you ignore the cultural impact for a moment, from a purely CPM perspective Crocs would’ve come out ahead as long as this brand deal cost them under ~$150,000.

Positive sentiment and top-of-funnel awareness are just ways to lower your future customer acquisition cost.

III. The best way to build an audience is to take them on a mission

The best series have a palpable sense of tension in the comments: when’s the next video coming out? Anthpo does a masterful job of bringing the audience along with him throughout the series via a few levers:

Open Loops

An Open loop is a narrative technique that keeps people engaged through unanswered questions. He does this at a few levels:

• The checklist of future statues he’s going to get to (which statue is he getting this time?)

• Stories-within-the-story (why is he hosting a beauty pageant when he just said he was going to design a custom Croc for this statue?)

• Side quests for side characters (why is he stopping the beauty pageant to print a tophat?)

Inside Jokes

Inside jokes make you feel a part of the in-group. That’s a tough prospect for an account that only existed for 30 days! But Anthpo builds in a few recurring bits that reward you for watching successive videos:

• He constantly jokes about being unemployed, a nod to the “your most unemployed at 2pm on a Monday” meme

• He jokes that “nobody can stop me” in his first video, and then references it in a text conversation with his mom, and then uses it again in the first verse when he sings about the Bear statue

High-Effort, Low Stakes

High-effort is the opposite of slop. The more that viewers develop an ick against content shortcuts with AI, the more they’ll value extreme high effort. Why is he 3D printing a baby snail for the snail statue in the background of the video? Why is he hosting a honey tasting competition? Why is he reaching for such elaborate means to do any of this in the first place?

It makes no sense. And that’s why viewers keep coming back.

It’d be tough to remix Kid With Crocs in any meaningful way without feeling like a direct ripoff. But it’s a good example of the power of branded entertainment — enabling creators to take big risks with their brand deals gives you a chance at existing in the heart of a cultural moment.

Things I’m consuming this week:

• TikTok Launches Podcast Network with iHeartMedia: There is no such thing as Peak Podcast, and in the year 2040 everyone will be granted their state mandated podcast equipment when they turn 18.

• How Airrack Made YouTube’s Greatest Comeback: This is from a few weeks ago but it’s a truly excellent breakdown of how YouTubers think about videos from ideation, to concept, to packaging.

• Welcome to Girl Room: Gymnasium’s Boy Room has a sister show.

In this three-part series, you’ll learn:

1. The categories of stunts, and which makes the most sense for you. ← This post

2. A framework for brainstorming a stunt.

3. How to maximize the success of a stunt.

It feels like everyone is stuntin’ nowadays.1 But stunts aren’t a monolith, and if you play stupid attention games, you win stupid attention prizes.2

What are we actually talking about when we refer to something as a “stunt”? And, more importantly, what are we actually trying to achieve for our businesses? I’ll be the first to admit that taxonomies can feel masturbatory — a way for pundits to make themselves feel good and smart by unnecessarily organizing information. But if you’re going to spend time and money on a marketing stunt, especially with incremental dollars that could have been spent on a more measurable acquisition channel like paid ads, upfront precision is important.

Different types of stunts map to different business objectives, and can be a footgun if you pursue them blindly. Let’s map them onto a spectrum of three distinct but related points of a triangle:

3

Point A: Pranks optimize for pure awareness through information asymmetry

Point B: Spectacles optimize for brand narrative by engineering an improbable event

Point C: Performance Art optimizes for depth by making a statement

Stunts are almost exclusively a top-of-funnel activity. They’re designed to drive awareness, not purchasing decisions. But these three categories represent a progressively deeper funnel of their own:

Pranks are at the top as a pure awareness play for net new audiences, spectacles are slightly lower funnel because they double down on an existing narrative, and performance art is the lowest funnel stunt because it draws a political line in the sand around your brand’s point of view.

Before you start brainstorming a stunt (which I’ll cover in next week’s post), you need to clarify why you’re running a stunt and which type of stunt makes the most sense for your business objective.

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A) Pranks: Optimizing for pure awareness through information asymmetry

Pranks are funny or shareable because you have information that the “victim” does not: an unwitting participant enters an interaction that you control, and the entertainment comes from the reaction or the reveal. These work best for pure awareness because pranks clip well on social platforms and have high entertainment value with very little context required.

Pranks are cheap, high-variance, and reaction-driven, which means they’re uniquely suited for content volume and shareability. I’d suggest trying a prank-style stunt if:

• You’re trying to build a recurring content format. Again, the most entertaining moment of a prank is the reaction or the reveal. So once you find an angle that works, you can just find new participants to farm over and over.

• You’re experimenting with a small budget, and your sole objective is shareability and/or cheap CPMs.

• You want interactivity to play a core part in the stunt. Pranks are a good opportunity for you to interface directly with people.

• You have low risk tolerance. Pranks can be extremely offline and localized — if it flops, there’s a low opportunity cost to just not post the content anywhere.

Branded examples:

• The Last Exorcism turns sexytime on Chat Roulette into a jumpscare

• Made on Verse’s Internet Bedroom4

• Lyft’s undercover comedian series

B) Spectacles: Optimizing for brand narrative by engineering an improbable event

Spectacles are perhaps the most purely distilled version of a stunt, and often the thing that people are actually referring to when they colloquially say “stunt.” They’re an opportunity to orchestrate something so absurd or exaggerated that you can interrupt people and redirect their attention elsewhere. These can, of course, work with a net-new audience, but are often slightly more down-funnel than pranks because they’re most memorable when there’s some degree of brand familiarity.

Spectacles are often expensive and long-lasting, best for scale or narrative control. I’d suggest trying a spectacle-style stunt if:

• You’re trying to build a single artifact that you can point to, such as an IRL moment or a longform piece of media. Unlike pranks, which can be low-gravitas or repeatable, a spectacle’s entertainment value comes from its one-off magnitude. A good one becomes a part of your brand mythology that fans feel a part of forever (“remember when they did X?”)

• You’re solidifying awareness among semi-warm audiences. Pranks are a good way to introduce you to strangers. Performance art pushes people towards true believers. Spectacles sit in the middle: They give the casually aware something to get more curious about. They can solidify an existing brand narrative or combat clear misconceptions. They’re an opportunity to put a stake in the ground around who you are and are not.

• You’re in a category where proof-of-scale matters. A large enough spectacle is a display of credibility. Just be careful to be precise about who you’re showing credibility to.5

• You have a B2B audience and/or you’re trying to impress other advertisers. The agency award shows are apparently a big corrupt circlejerk that peaked a decade ago, but if you for some reason really want to win one, other advertisers seem to go crazy over a very particular type of spectacle.

Branded examples:

• Airrack and Pizza Hut make the world’s largest pizza

• Severance Grand Central Terminal Pop-Up

• Ramp’s CFO stunt

C) Performance Art: Optimizing for depth by making a statement

Performance art dramatizes or exaggerates a philosophy that your brand holds dear. These are still an awareness play, but, again, I’d argue they’re lower in the funnel than pranks or spectacles. When done well, this type of stunt allows you to contrast your brand’s point of view against some sort of antagonist, which sparks more of an emotional connection than a prank or a spectacle. These are more likely to move customers into the consideration phase of the buying journey.

Performance art is ideological and polarizing — best to build depth and conviction. I’d suggest a swing at performance art if:

• Your buyers have ideology as a core part of their purchasing decision. This works well for brands who lean on marketing angles such as: Us vs Them, critiquing the status quo, or mobilizing alongside a social cause. Just make sure you’re punching up, not down.

• You’re optimizing for earned media or cultural authority: op-eds, legacy media commentary, video essays, or TikTok reactions. If you have something truly novel to say, people will use the opportunity to mine you for their own content.

• You have a significant budget to take a big swing, and a high enough risk tolerance in case the stunt doesn’t land. Nothing’s more painful than trying to make a point and then getting dunked on.

Branded examples:

• Anthpo puts Crocs on a bunch of famous NYC sculptures6

• Payless Shoes’s fake italian designer “Bruno Palessi”

• Lush’s animal test subject

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If you want to come up with a good stunt, you need to become a student of the game. Stunts are often a remix of something that came before them, like how The Last Exorcism learned from Eva & Franco’s “No Fun”, or how Ramp’s CFO stunt learned from Severance’s Grand Central Pop-Up. A nuanced taxonomy, then, also helps you to become more precise in your hunt for inspiration for your own stunt. For example, if you know that your business needs to make an ideological statement to stand out in a crowded market, you want to specifically brainstorm on top of existing performance art examples.

Here’s a Deep Research query I sent to ChatGPT to find some good inspiration for branded performance art:

I’m looking for examples of brands doing “performance art” stunts. Based on the below context, could you please find me examples of BRANDED “Performance Art” stunts? I define performance art as “Performance art dramatizes or exaggerates a philosophy that your brand holds dear. These are still an awareness play, but I’d argue they’re lower in the funnel than pranks or spectacles. When done well, this type of stunt allows you to contrast your brand’s point of view against some sort of antagonist, which spurs more of an emotional connection than a prank or a spectacle.”

Could you please find me ten good examples over the last 5 years of a brand doing this well?

This post was concerned with the taxonomy of a stunt, and deciding which type of stunt makes sense for your business. Next week, we’ll get into some more theory around how to brainstorm a good stunt.

Thanks for reading! I write about branded entertainment, exploring how brands and tech companies can build better media properties.

This post is part of my weekly strategy series, which is typically reserved for paid subscribers. If you enjoyed this, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or sharing it with a homie.

Subscribe now

It has never been easier to make new things, and it has never been harder to get people to pay attention.

Everyone knows that creators are becoming businesses, but the reality is that businesses also need to become creators. Brands and tech companies have the opportunity to become modern entertainment studios. If you look at the shows, stunts, and box-office hits of 2025, it’s clear that we’re entering a renaissance of branded entertainment.1

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The first time I tried to get a job at Shopify, the ecommerce company, I knew so little about it that I referred to it in a cold DM as “Spotify,” the music streaming service. I had just turned twenty years old, a sweaty, eager undergrad, and all I knew was that something interesting was happening in “tech,” and I had to be a part of it.2

When I eventually started working there in 2017, one of my first sales calls was with what I thought to be a frantic woman, telling me all about this thing she was selling called a “fidget spinner.” The store was on track to eclipse my annual salary in that month alone, and her gadgetry only plunged deeper into my heart when I later found out that I was actually speaking to a fourteen-year-old boy. His trick was simple: he made really funny Instagram Ads. I never ended up closing that deal, but it irreversibly changed how I saw the spread of ad inventory across my social feeds. I, an internet-native child of forums, MMORPGs, and Twitter, naively didn’t realize that people were actually clicking ads.

I tucked away the idea that you could entertain your way into building a real business, and I ended up finding some crumb of success with a brand in maybe the most competitive category out there: women’s apparel. The business, in hindsight the embarrassing sidequest of a 20-something-year-old degenerate trying to make a buck online, found its edge in producing entertainment around a good core story: No Prince Charming Apparel, “Don’t we deserve some new fairytales?”

There was nothing special about the clothing itself — the brand was effectively a media company whose product was a physical manifestation of its narrative. We were genuinely proud of the videos we produced, the UFC fighters who wore our clothes unsolicited, and the thousands of loving messages we got for the brand story. My brother, sister-in-law, and I cycled something like a million dollars through the business over the next few years. Every dollar that didn’t go to inventory went right back into producing entertaining Instagram Ads, in an attempt to hit the sort of scale I whiffed in that early sales call. But alas, as Apple’s pixel changes in 2020 sent Meta’s ad business into a multi-year spiral, we lived and died by the rising cost of customer acquisition. As the death knell tolled for the end of our ecommerce dream, my chronic onlineness saved me,3 and I ended up getting a job at a small startup named Substack.

My degeneracy on Instagram Ads had taught me that entertaining media was a means to an end — to help me better anonymously shill women’s clothing. Substack had a different vision, where entertaining media was the end — a world where the media itself was worth paying for. I spent five years working behind the scenes on a new independent media ecosystem where the underlying business model could support good work, and I had a front-row seat working directly with publishers as they went from $0 to millions in annual recurring subscriptions. I’m incredibly bullish on how that ecosystem will evolve from here.4

Brands are modern entertainment studios

Now, on the other side, I see these two worlds converging in branded entertainment, an old phenomenon ripe for a return:

1. The easiest days of direct response ads are over. Social ads are more expensive than ever, consumers are getting smarter about them, and everyone is extra opinionated on what good marketing looks like.

2. Creator economics. We now have a class of potential showrunners who are format-fluent, have direct distribution, and can actually influence purchasing decisions. Many of them have been pursuing social media full-time for over a decade, and want to move beyond being “YouTubers” or “creators”. They’re ready to take bigger creative swings and need bold financiers.

3. YouTube just won’t stop growing. Connected TVs are taking over living rooms, more people now watch YouTube on TV than on mobile, and YouTube gets more TV watch time than all the major streamers. Long-form drives real loyalty.

4. Some brands have already gone through the painful process of setting up their own entertainment arms, but there is now far more scaffolding in the form of specialized third party branded entertainment studios.

In a world where products are more easily commodified, in commerce and software, brands and tech companies need to realize that everything’s entertainment. Attention has long been the global reserve currency, and incremental product advantages will matter less and less as every company becomes a media company. But don’t take my word at face value: top YouTube talent managers are launching their own content studios, Crocs signed Anthpo to create a branded stunt, Duolingo learned from Mr. Beast and launched an animated show, F1 started a YouTube show with Amelia Dimoldenberg, B2B SaaS companies are doing marketing stunts, a screentime app created its own edutainment creator, Ridge gave MKBHD an equity stake in the business to accelerate into a creator-first brand, a rent-to-rewards tech company launched a short-form TV show, Amazon Prime is collaborating on the spinoff to Gymnasium’s short-form series “Boy Room”.

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The future of this newsletter

All of this brings me to my overwhelming question: how can brands and tech companies become modern entertainment studios?

I’m confident that the best brands and tech companies of tomorrow will be the ones who build entertainment properties that start compounding today. I’ve lived at the intersection of these worlds for the last ~decade — between my time at Shopify and Substack, I’ve worked directly with something like >5,000 internet businesses to help define their voice online. But the attention games of the internet are evolving every day, and the businesses that win will be the ones who build for the long-term, not the ones who get caught up in day-to-day growth hacks.

If your brand or startup is building its own media properties, for $12/month, I’m confident this newsletter will make you better at your job.

Your subscription supports your career in three ways:

1. Weekly case studies on what’s working. I’ll highlight and critique a stunt, show, or other branded media property, so that you can remix what’s already working elsewhere.5

2. Insights on building your own branded entertainment property. On top of the case studies, paying subscribers will get a weekly post with frameworks, guides, essays on relevant trends, and anything else I feel may help you build a media company. If the case studies are an outline of what’s working today, then think of these as an outline of what will work tomorrow.

3. Me fucking around and finding out. In obnoxious tech parlance, I will forever be an “operator.” I’m going to try some dumb stuff on the internet6 to test/prove whether my theories actually work. Some stunts will land and others will not, but either way, paying subscribers will get to read about what I did and how they might apply it to their career. And of course, let me know if you and your team would like to work on a stunt together <3

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If you lead content at a growth-stage company and use just one new approach to start or scale your media property, the weekly newsletter pays for itself. Change is afoot on the internet, and it’d be wise to pay attention.

(I love my trickster fox stealing fire from the gods <3)

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I’M STUCK IN MY COMPUTER HELP!!!! (finally a new profile pic across socials)