First: Instagram is testing Features — horizontal videos up to 90 minutes — and pushing further onto connected TV.

But connected TV is no longer one big, complementary bucket. It’s becoming crowded.

So why should a brand choose Instagram instead of YouTube — or add it to YouTube?

YouTube already has search, discovery, subscriptions, revenue sharing and a mature TV ecosystem. Instagram has cultural relevance and creator relationships, but not yet a proven long-form business model.

When the CTV gold rush settles, distribution alone won’t be a differentiator. The question will be: what relationship do you own that another platform cannot reproduce?

Second: Amazon says Prime Video is now profitable, with a revenue run rate in the tens of billions.

Amazon Ads generated 19.6 billion dollars last quarter — just under 10% of Amazon’s total revenue. But video helps build and retain an audience Amazon can monetise through advertising, subscriptions, shopping, devices and data.

Prime Video is not just a media business. It is part of a closed commercial system.

Third: DoorDash is buying Instacart for 17 billion dollars.

For a non-American audience: DoorDash delivers restaurant meals; Instacart powers grocery shopping, delivery and retail media for almost 100,000 stores.

Put them together and you connect advertising, purchase, fulfilment, delivery and customer data.

So here’s the implication.

As technology lowers costs, retail and media will increasingly converge into proprietary audience systems.

Is traditional media finished? No.

But media companies cannot survive by selling inventory alone. They need to own distinctive IP, build direct relationships around it and connect those relationships to revenue — without outsourcing the entire strategic layer.

That is where the next media model will be built.

Five ideas from my Amsterdam speech on the future of television advertising, IPs and the value of audience relationships. This speech was made for egta members: sales houses, European broadcasters and adv operators.

At the EGTA/ICTA conference in Amsterdam, I challenged an audience of European television sales executives with a deceptively simple question:

What are broadcasters really selling?

Television is becoming increasingly digital: more measurable, addressable, automated and accountable.

But in the race to become comparable to digital platforms, are broadcasters overlooking the very thing that makes television different?

Because broadcasters don’t just deliver impressions. They create content, intellectual properties, cultural moments and relationships with audiences.

And perhaps the future of television advertising depends on learning how to capture more of that value.

Here are five short excerpts from my presentation.

1. Digital didn’t remove complexity. It absorbed it.

Digital advertising has fundamentally changed advertisers’ expectations.

Its competitive advantage isn’t just targeting, measurement or optimization. It’s the sense of control it gives advertisers over the entire process.

Television is investing heavily to offer similar capabilities. And rightly so.

But becoming comparable doesn’t mean becoming equivalent.

If television competes with digital exclusively on its terms, it risks reducing its distinctive value to another impression in the same buying interface.

And that raises a fundamental question: what are broadcasters actually selling beyond exposure?

2. The feudal media system and the journey of IPs

We no longer live in a single, shared media culture.

As Alan Wolk describes it, we inhabit a fragmented, almost feudal media landscape, made of communities, creators and platforms, each with its own cultural references.

Yet powerful IPs can travel across these territories.

Think of Sanremo: a television-born cultural phenomenon that lives on YouTube, TikTok, through creators and across countless communities.

Its content changes shape. Its audience encounters it in different moments and contexts.

The IP travels. But does its commercial value travel with it?

[VIDEO 2 — The feudal media system and the journey of IPs]

3. The IP stays. The relationship changes.

An IP doesn’t create the same experience everywhere it appears.

Watching a show on television, following its highlights on YouTube or discussing it inside a fan community are very different ways of engaging with the same content.

Yet advertising largely continues to price these experiences through exposure, with different CPMs reflecting different environments.

But different environments don’t necessarily explain the value of different relationships.

An IP can build familiarity, participation, emotional attachment and fandom across multiple touchpoints.

The opportunity is to understand whether those relationships can become part of what media companies sell, rather than remaining an indirect benefit of advertising exposure.

4. Advertising still has an imperial approach.

Content adapts. Advertising often doesn’t.

An IP travels across platforms, taking different forms and creating different relationships with its audiences.

Advertising, meanwhile, tends to follow an imperial logic: one message, distributed as widely as possible.

But here’s the problem.

Content earns the relationship. Advertising doesn’t automatically inherit it.

Being exposed alongside a successful IP doesn’t automatically make a brand part of that IP’s cultural relevance.

Perhaps it’s time to move beyond simply placing ads around content and start designing brand experiences that adapt to the different moments of the relationship.

AI could play an important role here, not just by making creative production cheaper, but by making it more adaptive.

[VIDEO 4 — Advertising’s imperial approach]

5. Beyond impressions: selling content and attention

Broadcasters invest heavily in talent, programming and original IPs.

Those investments generate far more than advertising inventory. They create cultural relevance, attention, fandom and relationships.

Yet the advertising business still largely monetizes the exposure generated by those assets.

What happens when an IP travels beyond the broadcaster’s own channels? Who captures the value of the relationships it creates?

Could broadcasters develop commercial partnerships that follow their IPs across platforms? Could brand entertainment become scalable rather than reinvented from scratch every time?

These are not just editorial questions.

They are product development and monetization questions.

And they could become increasingly important as broadcasters look for growth beyond traditional inventory sales.

Don’t confuse comparability with equivalence.

Television needs better measurement, automation and accountability. There’s no question about that.

But these improvements should make its distinctive value easier to buy, not make that value disappear.

Because content doesn’t just generate exposure.

It earns attention, creates relationships and sometimes becomes part of culture itself.

The next challenge for broadcasters may not simply be selling more impressions, but developing advertising products that capture more of the value their IPs already create.

I closed my Amsterdam presentation with one thought:

CPM can price exposure. But it cannot price the relationship.

And that’s where I believe the next commercial opportunity begins.

SEE YOU AT INTERSECTIONS

My Workshop “the influence that belongs to you” planned on 29th October at Intersections Festival in Milan is SOLD OUT. I will go through how I see monetization strategy through IPs. I will talk back some of these concepts for brands. See you there. If you don’t have access to the festival reach out I will be glad to give some accesses for free

L'influenza che ti appartiene

I’m experimenting with a new video format for Content with a View.

The idea is simple: three media stories and one business implication.

Not another news recap. There are already plenty of people telling us what happened. I’m more interested in what happens next — especially for media companies trying to turn attention, content and audience relationships into actual business.

This week, three apparently separate stories caught my attention.

Together, they raise a useful question:

When does attention become a financial asset?

Subscribers are not guaranteed distribution

A recent analysis by ThoughtLeaders looked at almost three million long-form and live YouTube videos.

The obvious headline is that sponsorships are growing. Around 6.2% of the videos analysed carried a detected sponsorship, compared with 4.8% during the same period last year.

Good news for the creator economy.

But that wasn’t the number that interested me most.

According to the analysis, a sponsored channel with between 500,000 and one million subscribers is projected to receive a median of approximately 48,000 views on its next long-form video. For channels with between one and five million subscribers, the figure is around 89,000.

The methodology has limits — Shorts, for example, are not included in the sponsorship detection — but the implication is still important.

Subscribers are not guaranteed distribution.

A large following tells us something about what happened in the past. It does not automatically tell us how many people will watch the next video, how often they will return or whether their attention can be monetised consistently.

We often talk about audiences as if they were assets already.

They aren’t.

An audience may be the raw material of an asset. But size alone is not enough.

The real questions are:

• Can you reach those people repeatedly?

• Do they return for a recognisable format?

• Can their behaviour generate predictable revenue?

• Does the relationship belong to you, or is it entirely controlled by the platform?

Without those answers, a follower count is useful visibility. It is not yet a financial asset.

The Wall Street Journal is starting with what it already owns

The second story comes from Business Insider, which reported that The Wall Street Journal had been exploring a slate of streaming shows.

The plans reportedly included a live morning programme, an interview franchise involving editor-in-chief Emma Tucker and possible collaborations with external creators.

Those plans are still evolving, and some of the individual projects may never happen.

But the direction is interesting.

The Journal is not starting from zero and saying: “We should make some video because everybody is making video.”

It is starting with assets it already has:

Its journalists.

Its authority.

Its access to business leaders.

Its affluent professional audience.

Its reputation.

The strategic move is to transform those ingredients into proprietary formats, recurring viewing habits and potentially new advertising and subscription revenues.

That is very different from simply producing more content.

The content is a vehicle. The real work is converting existing intangible value into an IP that can be distributed, repeated and monetised.

YouTube and social platforms can amplify it. A FAST channel might give it another commercial surface. Brand partnerships could add a further revenue stream.

But the starting point remains something the Journal already owns.

This is particularly relevant for traditional media companies. Many of them already possess valuable internal assets but continue to sell mainly the inventory surrounding them.

They have talent, credibility, characters, access, archives and communities.

Yet commercially, much of this value is still flattened into reach, impressions and CPMs.

Investors are beginning to finance future creator revenues

The third story completes the picture.

The Financial Times recently examined how YouTubers are financing increasingly ambitious productions.

Specialist lenders and investors are beginning to provide creators with capital based on revenues generated through advertising, sponsorships and other income streams. Some are also looking at the continuing value of existing content catalogues.

This matters because it changes the status of creator content.

A creator is no longer being assessed only as a personality, an influencer or someone with a large following.

The business can now be evaluated through future cash flows.

How much revenue does the catalogue continue to generate?

How predictable is the advertising income?

How diversified are the revenue streams?

How dependent is the business on one platform, sponsor or individual hit?

These are financial questions, not vanity-metric questions, and this is the moment when attention starts behaving like an asset.

It becomes an asset when the relationship between content and audience can produce sufficiently durable and predictable economic value.

What this means for media companies

This is where the three stories connect.

The YouTube data shows that having accumulated an audience does not guarantee future consumption.

The Wall Street Journal shows how an existing reputational asset might be turned into proprietary formats and additional revenues.

Creator financing shows what happens when those revenues become predictable enough for someone to place a financial value on them.

For media companies, the warning is fairly simple.

Reach is valuable, but reach alone is increasingly replaceable.

Once every streaming platform, publisher and creator can be bought through comparable dashboards, the commercial conversation becomes dangerously straightforward:

How many people can you reach?

At what CPM?

With what frequency?

And what conversion rate?

Those measurements are necessary. But they also make inventory easier to compare and, eventually, easier to replace.

The more interesting question is what cannot be easily replaced.

A recognisable format.

A trusted editorial voice.

A character.

A fandom.

A recurring community ritual.

A commercial relationship that allows a brand to participate in that world rather than simply place an advertisement next to it.

These are the elements that can turn media attention into IP — and IP into recurring revenues.

Of course, not every programme is an IP. Not every audience is a community. And putting a logo on a new video series does not magically create a business asset.

That is exactly why media companies need to understand what they already have, what can realistically be developed and where the revenue is supposed to come from.

Before commissioning more content, they should ask:

What existing asset are we increasing the value of?

Which revenue line should this format influence?

What will remain after the launch campaign is over?

Because if all you can sell is reach, sooner or later someone will sell it cheaper.

On October 8, in Amsterdam, I had the slot nobody wants: the last twenty minutes before lunch, in front of the broadcasters and sales houses at egta sales&marketing meeting. What best moment to prove that grabbing attention is a real difficult job?

Television is spending enormous energy trying to look like digital: easier to buy, easier to compare, easier to measure. Most of that is necessary. My worry is what happens if we mistake the modernisation of the transaction for the definition of the product.

This story has 3 parts: my keynote speech in Amsterdam, my last interview with US media veteran Rick Howe and a landing part to check the theory. Let’s start

Part 1 · Amsterdam: the ad doesn’t inherit the relationship

The diary. Thursday 8 October, 12:20. I was the last thing between the room and lunch, so I promised one argument. I spent years inside this business, at Fox and Disney, and I know the pressure on television: make the offer easier to buy, easier to compare, easier to measure.

My aim was to inspire and not to sell. I received private feedbacks from many operators and this tells me something important, we need more independent perspectives on how to read the way audience interact with content in modern tv and above all what is going to provide revenues.

Clarity was the greatest feedback I got. And this is my way.

This is what I argued.

Modernising is necessary. In the UK, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, with Thinkbox, are building Lantern to connect TV exposure to searches, website visits and purchases. In Germany, Seven.One’s MediaLytics linked a real FMCG campaign (€2.7 million, about 600 GRPs) to roughly 350,000 incremental visits and 120,000 orders: €9.2 million of short-term additional revenue, with probabilistic attribution. Television can finally prove what it drives.

But comparable is not equivalent. CPM is a good common language and a poor definition of the product. Across six major European broadcasters, content and programming costs equal about 60% of advertising revenue (FY2025, illustrative). The impression comes out of an industrial system whose main output is content, and that system makes more than impressions: attention, memory, fame, talent, fandom.

The IP travels, and the relationship changes with the place. Sanremo 2026: about 10 million people a night on television, 1.2 billion video views across platforms in five days (source: Rai). Born on TV, mostly lived in what Alan Wolk of TVREV calls the fiefdoms of feudal media. On TV it is the shared moment, on YouTube the replay, on TikTok the remix, with creators the conversation.

The content earns the relationship. The ad doesn’t inherit it. Exposure is not attention, and attention is not relationship. The industry measures the first well, is starting to measure the second, and cannot yet measure the third. And once the IP lives on rented platforms, the platform sells the impressions while the creators monetise the fandom.

That is the broadcasters’ problem. The brand’s problem is its mirror image: if the relationship belongs to the content, what does an advertiser do standing inside it?

Part 2 · Talking back to television with Rick Howe

The diary. On October 7, the day before Amsterdam, ITVT published my conversation with Rick Howe in its Televisionation series (watch it here). Rick asked me about my thesis on scrolling beating binge and what happens to advertising then.

What I argued. In the conversation I take the brand’s side of the question: why scrolling wins over binge, and why brands that rent a space where a person is there for something else should contextualise themselves much better. What I mean is adaptive dynamic creatives if you entere into a specific bubble and media and become a creator with your own bubble if you want to exploit scrolling economy.

The link with Part 1 is direct. If the relationship belongs to the content, an advertiser inside a feed, a stream or a creator’s video is a guest in someone else’s relationship, and the advertiser’s job is to earn a place in it. It is the thread of the imperial advertising idea from my previous article here

https://www.contentwithaview.com/p/imperial-advertising-in-a-feudal

Part 3 · What to do on Monday

The diary. After Amsterdam and the conversation with Rick Howe, one practical question stayed with me: does your content earn the relationship it borrows? Here is how I would start answering it.

1. Split your reporting into exposure, attention and relationship. The last column will be thin at first. Fill it with proxies: people who return by choice, branded search, follows, conversation around the content.

2. Ask what the person is there for before you buy the space. A feed, a stream and a creator’s video each have their own reason for being watched.

3. Rebuild the creative for the space, not only the format. The shared moment, the replay, the remix and the conversation call for different ads.

4. Check what you keep when the deal ends. If you rent an IP, a media company or a creator, run the Afterlife test below.

5. Measure whether your content earns engagement, not just delivery. That is where the BCS comes in. Brand Communication Score is an AI agent I built that gives you a quick cross social index of the efficiency of your social content. It is important to understand if you use those channels as a nice repository of content or an engine of engagement or sales.

Three free tools

Are you a creator or a broadcaster? Nine questions to see whether the attention you build is owned or rented. Clic here to check https://www.contentwithaview.com/p/your-brand-is-a-creator-or-a-broadcaster

The Afterlife test. For any partnership with an IP, a media company or a creator: what do you keep when the deal ends? Owned assets, a real community and first-party data rather than a borrowed list, negotiated exit terms, a measured decay curve. [LINK TEST]

The Brand Communication Score (BCS). An agent I built that scores from 0 to 100 how effective a brand’s communication and content are across social platforms, on attention and engagement parameters, against sector benchmarks drawn from public data. It does not measure the relationship itself, and I would not claim it does. It tells you whether your content earns attention and engagement or only gets delivered, which is the first step in separating the two. It is in beta, and I will run a free test for anyone who wants one: send me a DM on LinkedIn with the brand or channel you want checked.

If you try one of them, tell me what you find. I read every reply.

Shout out for a new “get your influence” - meet me at Intersections in Milan 28-29 October and book your seat at my masterclass. If you do not have a pass DM me and I will be glad to give you one.

Book your seat

This week my column about "imperial advertising" went top 10 most read in Italy and published on TVREV. And after egta conference in Amsterdam I went into a new analysis.

I discovered that for every $100 spent on advertising worldwide, about $3 equals everything the industry spends making scripted film and TV.

The ad market will reach $1.3 trillion this year (WPP Media). The new money alone, roughly $106 billion, is 2.6 times the cost of all scripted production.

Where does it go? Google’s search revenue grew 17% last quarter. But 68% of US searches now end without a click. Advertisers pay more for clicks that are harder to attribute, and according to Les Binet, advertising is 4% more efficient since Covid and 11% less effective.

Brands moved to what they can measure and control easier. And what they buy is rented. When the campaign ends, the attention goes back to the landlord.

The alternative is owned attention.
Many brands lately built this attention offline first with specific niche solution. Functional, no compromise. HOKA, On, for example. Then they started building their community through inspiration and example. They built peer to peer relationship not broadcast system top-down.

Owned attention helps keeping demand stable and ongoing. Is it something valid only for unconventional and experience brands? No. These brands are successful because they meet people where they are and because they are relevant in their bubble. Big FMCG brands have to exit the monoculture and mainstream only and start existing in those bubbles.

in the link in comment a quick test to see wether your brand is a creator or a broadcaster.
And if you want to check the efficiency of your social content DM me for a free consultancy with a brand communication score dedicated to your brand.

Creator or broadcaster?

Do you have owned attention? A proprietary audience and not only a rented one on media? How do you build it?

Click this link to discover it. It is a free test.

The Imperial Test

Six questions to find out whether your creative belongs anywhere in particular.

1. Count the versions. How many genuinely different executions did your last campaign ship? Not crops, aspect ratios, durations or burned-in subtitles. Different work. If the honest answer is one, you ran a monoculture campaign on a feudal map. Resizing is not adapting.

2. Run the swap test. Take the execution that ran in the feed and put it where your CTV spot ran. Then do it in reverse. If both still work about as well, that is not versatility. It is placelessness.

3. Read your last brief and count the lines. How many describe the audience, and how many describe the grammar of the place the work will live in: its rhythm, its etiquette, what the viewer was doing one second before your ad arrived? If the second number is zero, you briefed a targeting problem and called it a creative brief.

4. Ask who wrote the creator’s version. If the brand wrote the script and the creator performed it, you did not buy adaptation. You bought a face, and shipped imperial creative through it at creator prices.

5. Follow the money AI saved you. Production costs came down this year. Where did the difference go? If it went back into the P&L, or into more impressions, you solved a scarcity of production. The scarcity you actually had was of adaptation.

6. Ask whether a viewer could tell. Not whether the ad was aimed at them. Whether they could tell, from the work alone, that it was made for the place they found it in. Targeting gets you through the gate. This is what gets you taken seriously once you are inside.

Score it honestly. Most brands fail five out of six, and the reason is almost never talent. It is that nobody measures whether creative belongs where it lands, so nobody is accountable for it, so it never gets fixed.

Alan Wolk called it feudal media: the monoculture collapsed into a thousand disconnected bubbles, each with its own rulers, its own borders, its own rules of entry. The diagnosis was accepted almost immediately, because everyone in the industry could feel it was true.

What nobody looked at is what happened to the advertising travelling across that map.

The territory broke into duchies. Each one developed its own language, its own rhythm, its own etiquette, its own relationship between the viewer and the thing being viewed. And the advertising that moves between them is still built exactly the way it was built for the monoculture: one message, one format, one grammar, dispatched identically into every territory, as if the empire were still standing. Not that there are no versions. We ship them by the hundred. But they vary by format, duration and crop, not by what they say, and not by the relationship they assume with the person watching.

The industry noticed the fragmentation — or said it did. Either way, it answered the wrong question.

Advertising solved addressing. It never solved language.

Confronted with a thousand bubbles, advertising responded with hypertargeting — and targeting is an addressing solution. It answers who sees this and where. It does not answer does this belong here. We spent two decades becoming surgically precise at delivering the same message to the right person inside the right bubble, and almost no time making the message native to the bubble it landed in.

This isn’t hindsight. The IPA’s databank showed it years before generative AI existed: high-performing campaigns are more likely to use big data for insight, while low-performing campaigns use it more often for targeting. The same dataset found that broader, earlier targeting consistently beat tightly targeted real-time communications tied to purchase intent.

We read that finding as a media planning note. It was a warning about language.

The variable that explains half the outcome

Meanwhile the evidence on what actually drives results kept pointing in one direction. Circana’s analysis puts creative impact at nearly half of all incremental sales generated by advertising — the single largest driver of campaign performance. Not the targeting. Not the plan. The work itself.

And the work has been getting worse at its job. When Peter Field last ran the numbers across the IPA’s twenty-four-year databank of effectiveness case studies, creatively awarded campaigns were less effective than at any point in that record — and no more effective than campaigns that won nothing at all. Field’s diagnosis was short-termism: the steady replacement of brand building with disposable tactical activation.

Put the two findings side by side. The variable that explains roughly half the outcome is the one the industry has been quietly disinvesting from, across precisely the decades it became most sophisticated at knowing where to put it.

And the market is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Retail media is the fastest-growing channel in advertising, which is to say the industry is scaling the one thing the data rewards least: communication one step from conversion, aimed at people already looking. The system is giving up on sowing and specialising in harvesting. Not because harvesting works better, but because harvesting produces a receipt and sowing doesn’t.

None of this is an argument for spending less on media. It is the opposite. If creative accounts for roughly half the incremental return, then every dollar of media currently carries a passenger: a message built for nowhere in particular. The media isn’t the waste, it is the part that still works. What we send through it is the part that stopped. Change what travels, and the same budget buys more.

AI arrived to fix the wrong scarcity

And then, at the exact moment when fragmentation made creative adaptation the central problem, a technology appeared that could finally solve it at scale. A thousand native versions for a thousand contexts. Creative that changes its grammar depending on whether it lands in a feed, a living room, a podcast, a creator’s video, a second screen at 11pm. Adapting creative as a form of hyper-personalisation to the kind of relationship with the people watching their chosen content at a given moment. Adaptation as a default condition and as a relationship builder rather than a budget line.

Instead, AI is being used to make one ad cheaper. After four or five decades of mythologising the cost of creative — Madison Avenue, Mad Men, the rock-star copywriters of the eighties and nineties — the industry decided all of it had been a colossal waste of money. It is now busy disrupting that waste. And wasting the same money again, somewhere less visible.

The industry had a scarcity of adaptation. It used the most powerful adaptive technology ever built to solve a scarcity of production. Costs came down, output went up, and the variable that drives half the result stayed exactly where it was — one message, one grammar, now manufactured more efficiently.

The money AI frees up was never meant to leave the system. It was meant to pay for the thousand versions.

I spent twenty years in branded entertainment, and one thing proved true every time: craft is not decoration. Work that lands is work built for a specific medium and a specific moment, and that fit is a skill, not a flourish. What is new is that it could finally scale. The cheap, do-it-yourself creative that AI has made free is not a democratisation of craft. It is its retirement, at the exact moment the technology could have industrialised it.

The creator economy was the answer, bought as a discount

The one genuine attempt at native creative came from outside the industry. Creators speak their duchy’s language natively, because they are from there. For a brief moment it looked like the structural fix: stop shipping foreign messages into native contexts, and have natives make the message.

Then the industry bought it the way it buys everything, as inventory, priced per unit, optimised downward.

WARC calls what followed the creator effectiveness gap: a large share of creator investment wasted, returns far more volatile than any other channel, and effectiveness hinging almost entirely on brand-creator fit and the quality of the creative work. Which is another way of saying that the thing being purchased was never the audience. It was the adaptation and adaptation is the one thing you cannot buy by the impression.

The pattern is consistent enough to be a law. Every time fragmentation hands the industry a creative problem, the industry converts it into a procurement problem, and then wonders why the numbers don’t move.

And yet the proof that native creative works is sitting in plain sight, in the cases where it is allowed to work. A creator introducing a product nobody has heard of, to people who already trust them, in the format that trust was built in, does something no media plan can buy: they supply the context the product doesn’t have yet. The clearest proof is the creators who stopped selling access to their audience and launched their own brands instead. They have no media budget. What they have is a message that is native by construction.

That is the part of the feudal break worth defending. The monoculture made brand-building a privilege of whoever could afford national reach. Fragmentation made it available to anyone fluent in one duchy’s language. Feudalism didn’t only break the map, it democratised who gets to build a brand on it. The industry still reads that as a loss of reach. It is a collapse in the cost of meaning.

Owned attention requires owned creative

I’ve argued for a while that brands have to stop renting all of their attention and start owning some of it, building audiences instead of borrowing other people’s. The feudal map forces a harder version of that argument, one level deeper.

Renting the format is as fatal as renting the audience.

A brand can buy perfectly native placement, inside a perfectly chosen bubble, from a perfectly matched creator, and still arrive as a foreign power because the creative it ships is imperial. Built elsewhere, for everyone, in a grammar that belongs to no particular place. Targeting gets you through the gate. Only personalized adaptation gets you taken seriously once you’re inside.

That is what owned creative means. Not producing more. Producing differently per territory, with the same seriousness that media planning applies to reach, and with the technology that now makes it trivially possible pointed at the right problem.

The map went feudal fifteen years ago. Advertising is still sending the same dispatch from the capital, in the capital’s language, and reading the response rate as a measurement problem.

On contentwithaview.com you will find an “imperial test” useful to understand where your brand lies.

_____

Sources: IPA Databank / Peter Field, The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness; Circana; WARC, Future of Media 2026. “Feudal media” is Alan Wolk’s framing.

A few days ago, I wrote about the Afterlife Test for brand partnerships. The question was simple: when a brand stops paying to be associated with a powerful entertainment property, what remains? Did it build a relationship of its own, or did it briefly borrow someone else’s attention?

I’ve been thinking about how that question applies to people.

For years, I worked under company names that made it easy to introduce myself. Later, when I was outside those organisations, another description began to follow me: Emanuele is good at finding clients. He can bring partnerships to agencies and media companies.

There was some truth in it. I have commercial experience. I’ve brought ideas to clients and persuaded them to back those ideas. But “the person who finds clients” was becoming the answer to a question I hadn’t asked: What should we use you for?

I began saying no to opportunities that would reinforce that answer. This wasn’t a grand, cost-free act of reinvention. Some of those opportunities might have brought in money I needed. Saying no did not immediately produce a better alternative. But continuing to say yes would have made me increasingly visible for work I no longer wanted to do.

I had to ask a harder question: what was I actually doing in the work that had felt most like mine?

I kept coming back to the same ability. I could take a complicated situation, find a point of view and give it a form other people could understand and respond to. Sometimes that meant shaping a proposal or helping an organisation explain who it was. Sometimes it meant asking the question that opened up a conversation. I had exercised that ability in different jobs without ever giving it a clear name.

A recent post from gave me another way to think about it. She suggests describing what you’re able to do across roles, rather than relying on the title of the role you held. It struck me because my title had made my work legible for years, while also hiding the part of it I could carry elsewhere.

So I started putting that part of myself in public. I wrote about media, content and attention. I began Content with a View. I also wrote about the less tidy process of trying to build a voice without a company logo beside my name.

Some of the posts about that process drew the strongest response. People wrote to tell me that my story made them think about their own. Over roughly a year, my LinkedIn following has grown organically by almost 2,000 people and is approaching 5,000. The people choosing to follow include senior figures in my industry, former colleagues and people I had never met.

More revealing than the number was what people began asking me to do. I was invited to moderate conversations, conduct interviews, speak and teach. Some of that work was paid. In smaller communication projects, I heard a related request from clients: Help us explain who we are, what we do and why it matters.

I haven’t turned that attention into a secure income. I want to be clear about that. But the invitations tell me something real: a different part of my work has become recognisable to others.

The Afterlife Test, for people

My original recent afterlife test for brands asked what survives after the borrowed IP is gone. For a person, the question is: what of your contribution remains visible when a title, employer or assignment is gone?

You can ask it while you’re still inside an organisation:

• What do people come to me for, beyond the duties in my job description?

• Is that the contribution I want to become known for, or merely the one that is easiest for others to use?

• Where can I make that contribution more visible inside the organisation?

• Which ideas can I express outside it, while respecting the work and people I’m responsible for?

• If this role ended, what work, relationships and point of view could I carry forward?

• What of my true identity and energy I can build upon to create a meaningful network?

The test isn’t an argument for turning every employee into a LinkedIn creator. Nor is it advice to refuse work you need in order to pay your bills. Sometimes the most useful move is to negotiate the role you already have: to ask for a different project, make an overlooked contribution visible, or stop letting one convenient label describe everything you can do.

An external voice can help too. It gives people another way to encounter your thinking. It does not make you immune to job loss or guarantee that an audience will pay you. I know the distance between attention and income very well. But a voice you have built over time may allow the conversation to continue when your circumstances change.

That is the part of the Afterlife Test I’m still working through myself. I know what I chose to stop reinforcing. I can see some evidence of what has begun to replace it. I don’t yet have a neat ending to the story.

I’m curious whether you recognise the same tension in your work: what do people currently seek you out for, and is it what you want to be chosen for next?

If you’re willing, reply and tell me where those two answers diverge. I’d like to understand whether this is a question others are trying to solve too.

The deal just unlocked

Yesterday (September 21, 2026) Paramount settled the last antitrust suit blocking its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — a legal battle led by a dozen state attorneys general, California chief among them (Deadline). The deal, announced on February 27, 2026 for 110 billion dollars (SEC), can now close, with combined debt estimated at 80 billion dollars (Deadline) and the largest entertainment IP portfolio ever placed under one roof: DC, Harry Potter, CBS, Nickelodeon, and more.

The dominant story is one of addition: more properties, more negotiating leverage, more opportunities for brands to rent a slice of pop culture that millions already love. It’s the model we’ve known for twenty years. Put Spider-Man on a package. Launch a limited-edition Stranger Things run. Build an activation around Harry Potter. Get distribution, visibility and sales, all at once, faster and with less risk than building something of your own from scratch.

It’s the calculation that turned licensing into a 389.8-billion-dollar market in 2025, growing 5.45%, faster than general retail (+4.52%) (Licensing International). Not every category is growing at the same pace, Sports +8.5%, Character/Entertainment +8%, Software/Video Games +12.5% (Dealroom; Licensing Source), but the overall picture is clear: sales aren’t the problem.

The measurement gap

The numbers tell an interesting story. Sponsorship and partnership spend is climbing again probably in part because of the Nike trauma, which became the industry’s cautionary tale of 2024: performance marketing alone kills brands. The lesson was absorbed fast, as a push to invest in brand building again. Maybe without the discipline needed to actually prove the return. Back in 2023 only 5% of brands were highly confident their sponsorship and partnership investments were effective (WFA/Lumency 2023). Two years later, the picture isn’t negative at all, quite the opposite: optimism about future growth has more than doubled (the net balance between those expecting increases and those expecting cuts went from +5% to +24%), activation efficiency is improving ($0.81 → $0.76 for every dollar of rights fees), and the share who don’t even know how much they spend on activation has dropped from 41% to 22% (WFA/Lumency 2025). But one number hasn’t moved: measuring and proving ROI remains the number one challenge for 76% of brands — by a wide margin, the runner-up sits at 42% and 78% still invest less than 1% of budget in verifying it (19% zero, 59% under 1%). In other words: confidence in sponsorship is growing faster than the ability to prove it works (WFA/Lumency, full report).

These deals lean psychologically on risk reduction: I attach myself to an established brand and a community of superfans, and hand them the keys you run with it. I walk away with a seasonal sales bump, some retargeting data, and a solid alibi if it flops: blame the IP. An airtight win-win mechanism. But what’s missing is the after what’s left for the brand? What ownership?

Plenty of brands surely have their own ROI and incremental-sales data they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise,but publicly, no comparable dataset exists.

There’s also a deeper difference, one about the nature of the investment itself. A deal with a strong enough IP can explode, collectibility proves it, with a return that’s probably excellent for whoever catches it. But it can also sink without warning: recent marketing history is full of collaborations that looked safe on paper and ended up as quiet flops, with no scandal and no boycott: Nike × Tiffany & Co. (2023), a $400 limited-edition Air Force 1 with a LeBron James campaign, judged by most to be little more than a regular Air Force 1 at four times the price (Discovery Design); or Lululemon × Disney (2024), a Mickey Mouse-themed collection analysts panned from the start as out of step with the brand’s core audience, with unsold inventory still being flagged more than a year later (TipRanks). There’s no model that predicts in advance which way it will go. Owned attention works differently: never guaranteed, but it responds to variables the brand controls consistency, quality, cadence not to the life cycle of an IP that belongs to someone else.

The conventional wisdom worth challenging

Meanwhile, the audience has already moved elsewhere. The Harry Potter community doesn’t merge with DC’s just because they now share a shareholder they remain separate fiefdoms, which is the very nature of the feudal attention Alan Wolk has been describing for months. What’s genuinely changed is who narrates those fiefdoms to younger audiences. Less and less the original product. More and more the creators: unfamiliar faces who open up the backstage, explain the details, work the niche with an expertise often deeper than whoever created the IP in the first place. US creator advertising spend went from 29.5 to 37 billion dollars in a year, projected to hit 44 billion in 2026 growth four times faster than the 5.7% of the overall media industry (IAB, 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report). Within that growth, micro and nano-creators are gaining ground faster than anyone else: they’ll account for 45.5% of influencer marketing spend in 2026 (eMarketer) the market is betting hard on the smallest creators, closest to their own communities, not on the biggest faces.

There’s an old piece of conventional wisdom worth challenging head-on: building your own narrative, your own audience, costs too much and doesn’t scale, while renting a strong IP is fast and profitable. That was true when distribution itself was the bottleneck, you needed TV networks, newsstands, infrastructure only a few could afford. Today distribution is nearly free, algorithmic, open to anyone consistent and credible. The cost is no longer infrastructural. It’s editorial: the ability to tell your own story, not just to buy access to someone else’s. The real cost is identifying the right metrics, building real contact and membership rather than a purely transactional one. It’s the difference between building a house and renting one for a vacation. It’s not entirely black and white, though. Managing what you buy from feudal media has changed too, and it matters to understand what you’re actually buying through what I call the “afterlife” test, which I go into in more detail on my newsletter, contentwithaview.com.

What would I do?

I wouldn’t stop licensing or tapping into media distribution the numbers say it works, in the short term, and will keep working. But before signing the next deal with a media company, I’d ask myself a question the industry has no incentive to ask for you: what’s left, the day after, once the IP stops lending me its community? And I’d build, in parallel, a piece of ground I don’t have to give back a format, a voice, an audience that returns because it recognizes me, not because a rented algorithm happens to surface me for a week. You don’t need to build costly infrastructure or become the next Red Bull Media House. What it takes is consistency, measuring the right metrics, and establishing a direct relationship with your reference community. In dealing with big media as much as with creators, the point is learning to avoid the shortcut, and to build as much “afterlife” as possible, one more brick after the spike of any given special initiative.

The Afterlife Test: How to Know If a Brand Partnership Was Worth It

Every brand collaboration looks good on the pitch deck. The IP is beloved, the audience is engaged, the visibility numbers are real. What almost nobody asks — because the industry has no incentive to ask it for you — is what happens the day after the campaign ends. Not the sales bump. The afterlife.

Here’s a working test. Run any partnership through it before you sign, not after you regret it.

1. What’s actually in your hands when the lights go off?

Strip away the campaign visuals and ask what’s left that you own outright. Not impressions. Not a nice case study for the deck. An asset — creative, community, or data — that survives the contract’s expiration date. If the honest answer is “a good memory,” that’s your answer.

2. Who keeps the cool?

Some partnerships are genuine collaborations: the brand contributes something real to the table, not just a check. Others are pure rental: you get proximity to something desirable, and the desirability stays exactly where it started, with the IP. Be honest about the starting asymmetry. If you’re bringing nothing distinctive to the exchange beyond budget, you’re not partnering. You’re borrowing.

3. Have you closed the asymmetry gap — or does it show?

This is where the cringe-guest effect lives: huge exposure, painfully forced output. It’s not limited to cheap execution: it happens even with premium products nobody in that specific context would actually choose. High production value doesn’t fix a mismatch; it just makes the mismatch better lit. If closing the asymmetry means genuinely earning your place in the room, do that work upfront, before signing not in production phase or post-production. Do not give in to what I call “stage-hype” or FOMO from big IPs but think about if you are ready to manage this stage.

4. Real community, or just a longer CRM list?

There’s a meaningful difference between “we collected 50,000 emails” and “we transferred something durable toward our own audience ecosystem.” A list is inert. A community is people who chose to follow you specifically, not the IP that briefly lent you its spotlight. Ask what actually moved: attention, or a relationship. Before going into a partnership start building your own home.

5. Whose data is it, really?

Even when you do collect something, check where it lives. If the audience that responded to you stays locked inside the partner’s platform or CRM, you didn’t bring anyone home — you watched them pass by. The sharp test: if the deal ended tomorrow, could you still reach those people directly, or does the whole thing vanish with the lease?

6. Did you negotiate the exit, not just the entry?

Most contracts obsess over what you can do during — usage rights, exclusivity, territory. Almost none specify what remains yours after: the creative assets produced together, the content, a format that was born inside the partnership but could keep living outside it. It’s the most neglected clause, because nobody’s thinking about the “after” while they’re still negotiating the euphoria of “now.”

7. Do you have a decay curve, or just a launch spike?

Knowing what’s left isn’t enough — you need to know for how long. If you don’t design the measurement upfront (branded tracking, social mentions, 30/60/90-day return rate), you’ll never know. This is exactly the gap the industry’s own data confirms: almost nobody measures this systematically. So it belongs in the test itself — if you haven’t planned how you’ll measure the afterlife before signing, you almost certainly won’t measure it after.

8. Since nobody will benchmark it for you, benchmark it yourself.

There’s no public, comparable dataset across brand partnerships — we checked. The only way to know if a deal actually worked is to apply the same test to every collaboration and build your own track record over time. The industry will never hand you the benchmark. You build it, deal by deal.

The point of any of this isn’t to stop doing IP partnerships — the short-term numbers still work, and will keep working. The point is to stop confusing exposure with ownership. Every partnership should move you toward your own audience ecosystem, not just rent someone else’s for an afternoon.

The goal is transferring people from one bubble into your own — not renting the Bolshoi for your daughter’s recital.

Sources

● Deadline — Paramount Settles Antitrust Suit, Set To Seal Deal For Warner Bros Discovery — antitrust settlement on September 21, 2026, combined debt ~80 billion

● SEC — Discovery to Form Next-Generation Global Media and Entertainment Company — deal announcement, February 27, 2026, valued at 110 billion

● Licensing International — 2026 Global Study — global licensing market $389.8B, +5.45% in 2025

● Dealroom — Global licensing industry hits $389.8B — growth by category (Sports +8.5%, Character/Entertainment +8%)

● Licensing Source — 2026 Global Licensing Industry Study details — Software/Video Games/App is the fastest-growing category (+12.5%)

● Lumency — The Evolution of Sponsorship (WFA, 2023) — 5% of brands highly confident in sponsorship effectiveness

● WFA × Lumency — Global Sponsorships and Partnerships 2025 (full report, PDF) — ROI measurement is the #1 challenge for 76% of brands; 78% spend under 1% of budget measuring it; NET optimism +5%→+24%

● Discovery Design — Best Brand Collaborations And How They Got It Right — Nike × Tiffany & Co. Air Force 1 case (2023)

● TipRanks — Lululemon Faces Sell Rating Amid Markdowns, Product Missteps — unsold Lululemon × Disney collection inventory (2024)

● IAB — Creator Economy Ad Spend to Reach $37 Billion in 2025, Growing 4x Faster than Total Media Industry — US creator ad spend: $13.9B (2021) → $29.5B (2024) → $37B (2025) → $44B (2026 projected), +26% YoY, ~4x the growth of overall media (5.7%)

● eMarketer — Creator Economy 2026 — micro and nano-creators at 45.5% of influencer marketing spend in 2026

● Broadcast Management Group — The Rise Of Brand-Owned Media — global content marketing market, over $500 billion

Alan Wolk has spent a good part of this year mapping how feudal media broke the mass-audience playbook for publishers and platforms — the monoculture split into loyal, self-contained fiefdoms that barely know what’s happening outside their own borders. What gets less attention is what that same fragmentation does to the business of renting access to those fiefdoms: sponsorship, licensing, entertainment IP. The short version: the industry is still selling, and buying, a metric built for a kingdom that no longer exists.

For years, branded entertainment sold brands one exact promise: leave the advertising that interrupts and step inside the story. Become part of a narrative, a show, a cultural moment, instead of standing outside it.

I know this world well. I spent a large part of my career building these kinds of projects inside television and media companies.

And looking back, I keep asking myself a question that only now makes sense to ask: did we really create value for brands, or did we just find a better way for media owners to monetise their audience?

Because the economics, for the publisher, the broadcaster or the rights holder, were always crystal clear. A standard ad slot has a price. Add access to a talent, an editorial integration, production, exclusivity, a major IP or a bespoke activation, and that price goes up. The project looks more curated, more special, certainly less invasive.

But does it really build a stronger relationship between the consumer and the brand? We rarely knew. And, to some extent, we still don’t.

The measurement gap

The industry has become far more sophisticated in how it builds branded entertainment. Measurement hasn’t evolved at the same pace.

In Italy, data from the Osservatorio Branded Entertainment shows companies invest mainly in brand awareness (61%), brand image (53%) and consideration (44%). Trust drops to 24%, advocacy to 20%, loyalty to just 12%.

Globally, the picture doesn’t change. A 2025 WFA/Lumency study, covering over $8.2 billion in sponsorship investment, found that nearly three in four practitioners consider ROI measurement a major challenge. 84% measure awareness, 65% consideration; commercial attribution lags far behind. Less than 1% of sponsorship budgets is typically allocated to measurement.

There’s a detail in that same study that goes almost unnoticed: of all the metrics measured, advocacy is tracked the least — just 6% of brands follow it, down from 15% two years earlier. While awareness climbs to 84%, the one metric that actually tells you whether someone has adopted you is being measured less and less.

It isn’t distraction. It’s the need for data you can put in front of a board or a CFO — data that assumes advertising, deep down, isn’t sexy enough on its own.

Awareness was the right metric for a world of media monoculture: broad and generic enough for a single audience, reachable with one message, where being noticed by enough people was all that mattered. Alan Wolk calls it feudal media: that world broke, and in its place came fiefdoms — podcasts, Substacks, TikTok channels, streaming communities — each with its own loyal audience that’s largely unaware of what’s happening outside its own borders.

If that’s true for news and entertainment, why wouldn’t it be true for advertising? In a feudal landscape, aggregate awareness measures loyalty to a kingdom that no longer exists. Advocacy — being remembered and recommended inside a specific fiefdom — is the metric that tells you whether a brand has actually entered a community. And it’s exactly the one the industry has stopped watching.

The Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum, analysing 92 public case studies from sports sponsorship — the most mature, most measured segment of the industry — found an even sharper pattern: brand effects are reported five times more often than sales effects. And yet, among the best-designed, most rigorously measured cases, 73% generated sales effects and 54% business effects. If that’s true in the segment that measures best, it’s reasonable to assume the gap in branded entertainment is at least as wide, if not wider.

That detail matters. It says partnerships aren’t inherently incapable of generating real value. The problem is that most were never designed to — or never measured as if they should.

Even award-winning branded content confirms it. A 2026 academic analysis of 23 Cannes-winning campaigns found that 43% relied exclusively on audience metrics, while sales metrics appeared in roughly 30% of cases. The formats changed enormously over ten years. The sophistication of the metrics, much less.

Which opens an uncomfortable possibility: a large part of branded entertainment has become very good at proving that people watched, noticed, liked or remembered something. But that isn’t the same as proving the brand became more important to them.

The stronger the IP, the easier it is for the brand to disappear

This becomes especially interesting when the partnership involves a very powerful entertainment IP.

Spider-Man doesn’t need help being culturally relevant. Neither do Star Wars, Frozen or Stranger Things. They already have narratives, symbols, characters, rituals and fandoms that people carry with them for decades.

For whoever owns the IP, that’s an enormous asset. Disney figured this out long ago: the story becomes fandom, the fandom becomes merchandising, the merchandising becomes experience, the experience feeds the fandom again. The commercial flywheel is extraordinary.

But what happens when a consumer brand steps into that flywheel? Put Spider-Man on a package. Launch a limited Stranger Things edition. Build an activation around Star Wars. You can grab attention, create scarcity, even generate meaningful incremental sales.

But one question remains: once the IP disappears, what’s left for the brand?

The fan still loves Spider-Man. Still loves Stranger Things. But does he now care more about the pasta, the soda, the sneakers or the phone that happened to be there too?

This is the paradox: the stronger the IP, the higher the potential value — but also the higher the risk that the brand becomes a temporary accessory to someone else’s culture. It can be a beautiful campaign, work for three weeks, win an award. And then disappear.

Meanwhile, the media environment changed

The problem gets more interesting because the way cultural influence works has changed.

For most of the mass-media era, cultural influence was hierarchical: a handful of broadcasters, publishers, celebrities and major entertainment IPs sat at the top. The audience watched from below.

Technology and fragmentation broke that hierarchy. The creator economy didn’t just produce millions of extra pieces of content: it created a different kind of cultural authority.

Today you can become influential by talking obsessively about mechanical keyboards, Korean skincare, running shoes, Roman history, vintage watches or a single video game. And the relationship that forms is often different from the one people once had with a distant celebrity.

The creator feels like someone who shares my exact passion. I watch because I do that thing too. I recognise myself. I comment. I recommend. I disagree. I remix. I participate.

This explains why affinity has become such a powerful economic force. But I think there’s a step beyond affinity.

From Affinity Economy to Participation Economy

coined Affinity Economy that explains why I gravitate toward a person, a community or a cultural world. Participation explains what happens once I start contributing to it.

The difference matters economically. Affinity is emotional capital. Participation turns it into productive capital.

Look at businesses built on this logic from day one, instead of grafting it onto a campaign. WeRoad is an interesting case: the formal product is organised travel, but most of the real experience is created by the people who take the trip. The company provides infrastructure, itineraries, coordinators and the brand; the travellers produce most of the value — relationships, shared experiences, stories, rituals, social connection.

The model has reached real scale: WeRoad in Europe, reports more than 300,000 people have travelled with the company since launch, 100,000 in the last year alone, with a community of over 4,000 coordinators. Its WeMeet platform generated 2,000 events and 50,000 participants in 2025.

The point isn’t that every brand needs to become WeRoad. It’s that participation can be part of the product, not just a marketing mechanic.

LEGO Ideas applies a similar principle to product creation. Fortnite and Roblox apply it to entertainment. Creator platforms apply it to culture. Community-led brands apply it to product, recommendation and distribution.

In all of these systems, the consumer is no longer just someone who receives value. They become one of its producers.

But can an FMCG brand do this?

Here comes the obvious objection. Participation works for Fortnite, fine. It works for LEGO, fine. But a pasta company? A biscuit? A detergent? Barilla certainly can’t let the internet decide what Barilla is.

Probably not. But maybe that’s the wrong definition of participation.

A brand doesn’t have to give up control of the brand. It can give up agency. There’s a difference.

A pasta company still has to control food safety, product quality, manufacturing, trademark, margins and core brand principles. It doesn’t necessarily need to control every interpretation of how pasta lives in culture.

It can let creators show how pasta genuinely exists in their lives, without scripting every message. A community can invent rituals, recipes, occasions. Creators and consumers can propose formats, designs, limited editions. The community can signal demand before a product ever reaches industrial production. The company still decides what actually gets manufactured.

This isn’t brand anarchy. It’s a controlled transfer of agency. The brand stops approving every single cultural output and starts designing the rules within which others can create value around it.

And we already know this can work commercially. PepsiCo’s Do Us a Flavor programme let consumers propose and vote on new Lay’s flavours, becoming a repeatable international platform and generating meaningful incremental sales in multiple markets. The real innovation wasn’t the contest itself — it was redistributing one piece of product development: the company kept control of manufacturing and brand, consumers got agency over invention and selection.

Now put a powerful IP into that system

This is where brand partnerships could get a lot more interesting.

Traditional model: Netflix owns the IP. The brand rents it. The agency builds the activation. The audience consumes.

Now imagine a different architecture: whoever owns the IP opens a cultural world. The brand defines a playground inside it. Creators and fans build things. The community selects, remixes or adopts. The brand turns some of those things into real products or experiences. Participation continues even after the media moment has passed.

The difference is profound. The audience is no longer the destination of the partnership — it becomes one of its producers. And the IP no longer simply lends fame to the brand: it gives the brand permission to create something together with a community that already genuinely cares.

Maybe that’s the missing step. Not a transfer of affinity. A transfer of participation.

From renting fandom to earning a role inside it

This also changes the strategic question a brand should ask before buying a partnership.

Not: how visible will my brand be? Not even: how engaging will the activation be? But: what can this brand let this fandom do that it couldn’t do without us?

It’s a much harder question. And maybe a much better one.

Because if the answer is just a limited edition, some custom media and a QR code, the partnership can still work perfectly well — but it’s still essentially advertising and licensing.

The more interesting opportunity is when the consumer brand earns a role: it enables creation, enables access, enables status, brings people together, turns fan creativity into real products, helps a community perform the culture it already loves.

At that point, the consumer doesn’t just associate the brand with an IP. The brand has done something inside the consumer’s relationship with that IP. And that’s potentially far more valuable.

The Afterlife Test

Maybe every major brand partnership should have to pass one final test: what survives once the IP is gone?

If the answer is views, recall, awareness, purchase intent, a short-lived sales spike, then we probably built a very successful campaign. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But if the goal was belonging, community or cultural relevance, we should expect more. Did people come back? Did they keep interacting? Did the brand gain new first-party relationships? Did creators keep producing? Did a ritual survive? Did customers buy again? Did the brand create an asset that still exists once it stops paying for the IP?

These are much more demanding measures. And they’re also much closer to the economic promise branded entertainment has been making for decades.

The next partnership economy

The old media-partnership model was born in an era of scarce distribution and hierarchical culture. Media owners controlled the audience. Brands paid for access.

Today culture is increasingly fragmented, participatory, bottom-up. Generative AI will accelerate that break even further, making the production of content, images, video and ideas far more abundant.

What becomes scarce isn’t content. It might not even be attention. What becomes scarce is voluntary participation: people’s willingness to put time, identity, creativity and social capital around something they actually care about.

This changes the opportunity for brands. The next generation of partnerships won’t be about finding ever more sophisticated ways to slot brands inside powerful entertainment IP. It will be about using that IP to build systems where people participate — and making sure part of that relationship belongs to the brand too.

A great IP can lend a brand attention. It can lend it affinity. But maybe the real opportunity starts one step later.

The old partnership model rented attention. The next one will have to earn participation. And the brands that learn how to do that will discover something far more valuable than a successful campaign: influence that remains even after the media spend ends.

Sources:

Osservatorio Branded Entertainment (OBE), OBE Summit 2024 — Il valore del mercato del BE
https://osservatoriobe.com/obe-summit-2024-9-il-valore-del-mercato-del-be/

WFA / Lumency, 4 changes taking place in sponsorships and partnerships (dicembre 2025)
https://wfanet.org/knowledge/item/2025/12/17/4-changes-taking-place-in-sponsorships-and-partnerships

Lumency, WFA Global Sponsorships & Partnerships 2025 (report completo, gennaio 2026) — questa è la fonte del dato sull’advocacy al 6%/15%
https://lumency.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/WFA_Global-Sponsorships-Partnerships-2025.pdf

IPA / Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum, Is sponsorship the channel for our new era, hiding in plain sight?
https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/ipa-blog/is-sponsorship-the-channel-for-our-new-era-hiding-in-plain-sight

Frontiers in Communication (2026), analisi accademica delle 23 campagne vincitrici a Cannes
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1871070/full

WeRoad, WeRoad closes a $58 million launch US (company blog, dati su viaggiatori e WeMeet)
https://www.weroad.com/blog/weroad-closes-a-58-million-launch-us

Wolk’s Fearless Predictions 2026: The Year of Feudal Media — https://www.streamtvinsider.com/content/wolks-fearless-predictions-2026-year-feudal-media

Wolk’s Week in Review: The Rise of Feudal Media, AI Panic Grips Publishers — https://www.tvrev.com/news/wir20250718

YouTube just doubled the thresholds for its Partner Program: starting February 1, 2027, creators will need 8,000 watch hours a year or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days — double the previous bar. That same month, Netflix added the Stokes Twins to its roster of non-exclusive creator deals, following Ms. Rachel, Mark Rober, the Sidemen, Rhett & Link, and Nick DiGiovanni. And on August 19, Bloomberg revealed the third move: YouTube is offering its top creators multi-million-dollar packages — direct show financing, a cut of brand deals negotiated on-platform, upfront cash — just to buy exclusivity windows and keep them away from Netflix; anyone who signs with Netflix anyway risks being cut out of marketing campaigns, corporate events, and ad-revenue splits. Three moves that look unrelated. They aren’t. It’s the same war fought on three fronts.

The thesis is simple, and I stand by it: addiction sells, and it sells because it makes revenue predictable. Scrolling delivers a higher retention dividend than binge-watching, regardless of content quality, because it turns consumption into a recurring, potentially endless behavior — exactly like the low-cost filler programming that filled daytime TV forty years ago: cheap to produce, good at keeping you company. Binge-watching was the taboo streaming broke, flooding subscribers with dopamine on a subscription. Scroll is its evolution — an avalanche of dopamine built for the age of continuous ad harvesting. And capital knows it: in the second quarter of 2026, for the first time, all five major streamers turned a profit simultaneously — Netflix posted $12.6 billion in revenue (+13%) and $3.4 billion in profit, Disney+/Hulu $5.5 billion (+11%) and $712 million in profit, even Peacock swung to a profit after a loss the year before. They’re not rewarding the best content. They’re rewarding the most predictable retention.

That’s exactly why streamers are opening their doors to the social model, and why YouTube knows it and is raising the barriers to entry right now. But not every opening carries the same weight. Netflix signing YouTube creators dilutes their native performance, but it does so behind a paywall — low replicability, since watching Ms. Rachel on Netflix still requires a subscription, and compulsive scrolling remains a behavior native to YouTube or TikTok, not to a premium catalog. Disney opening up to TikTok is a different story: it hands creators free access to Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars — no subscription friction — while content born on TikTok now flows into Disney+’s new Verts section. Disney is handing TikTok exactly the fuel it lacked to attack YouTube on its own turf — free, native, viral — and paying for it, on top of everything, with creator labor that’s largely unpaid. If Netflix is building a second, paywalled living room, Disney is arming YouTube’s direct rival. Meanwhile, Disney itself is weighing a free, ad-supported tier to capture price-sensitive viewers, even as it has already sold out ad space for the next Super Bowl. The signal is unmistakable: subscription-based players are fast learning the grammar of those who live on free attention.

That said — someone else is footing this bill. Not YouTube, not the streamers: the brand doing the spending. Because the result is an inventory with pristine dashboards — massive reach, brutal frequency, ever-sharper CPMs — and distribution that keeps getting more personalized. But that personalization often stops at delivery: the machine knows exactly who to show the message to, while the message itself stays surprisingly standard. The same spot, better optimized and delivered with more precision. And the numbers back this up; it’s not just a hunch. A Taboola study of 300 advertisers found that 75% of performance marketers are seeing diminishing returns on social ad spend, hitting 30% of their budgets. eMarketer finds that among U.S. marketers, confidence in attention metrics is the lowest-scoring metric of all. Dashboards can stay pristine because they measure very well what the system makes observable — reach, frequency, conversions, behavioral signals — and far less a harder question few are willing to sit with: how much of that exposure was still capturing real attention, and how much was just an already-exhausted audience?

Most trade coverage frames this moment as a war for talent — who lands the next creator star, who wins the creator war. That’s not the point. The point is that brands are footing this war’s bill because they still haven’t figured out how to convert vertical dopamine into real effectiveness: they keep buying reach and affinity data to run the same broadcast spot they used to run on TV, just better distributed, or they rent a creator for a discount-code sponsorship — same ad, different wrapper. And it works, but it works almost only where direct response has always worked: highly convertible, functional products with no brand equity to build — a course, a gadget, an on-demand service. Not because exposure is easier to measure there, but because the creative itself is different: built to pay for itself in a few seconds — immediate demonstration, proof instead of promises, an explicit offer — not to carry a brand’s story forward. For an enterprise brand that has to build memory, preference, and meaning over time, the game is far more complex: either build messages with extreme creative personalization and context, native enough to belong in the user’s feed as if born there — not a repurposed spot, but new content — or stop renting someone else’s attention and start building an owned media and content strategy as autonomous and relevant as a creator’s: proprietary attention, not just borrowed. It’s the same logic I opened this piece with: capital rewards whoever owns predictable retention, not whoever rents it one CPM at a time. Scroll beats binge. But it only pays off for whoever owns the attention — not whoever buys it wholesale.

Sources

• YouTube doubles its monetization threshold — hwupgrade.it, dataconomy.it

• Netflix signs non-exclusive deals with YouTube creators — cryptobriefing.com

• Netflix Creator Land Grab — netinfluencer.com

• YouTube offers creators millions to stop Netflix’s raid — key4biz.it

• YouTube starts funding shows to keep creators from licensing to Netflix — thenextweb.com (via Bloomberg, 8/19/2026)

• The Streaming Wars are Becoming the Creator Wars — news.thepublishpress.com

• How the Streamers Stack Up: Subscribers, Revenue and Profits — thewrap.com

• Disney-TikTok content-sharing deal — thewaltdisneycompany.com, inc.com, hollywoodreporter.com

• Disney weighs free ad-supported streaming — qz.com

• 60/40 Rule — IPA 996 studies — deepmarketing.it

• Brand vs Performance on a Startup Budget: Why 60/40 Breaks — marqeable.com

• Industry leaders spar over brand building — ppc.land

• Diminishing returns on social ad spend — Taboola/Qualtrics via barchart.com

• Marketers are still catching up to the future of media — emarketer.com

• Why TikTok Ads That Convert Look More Like Infomercials — infomercial.com

• TikTok’s direct response capabilities don’t resonate with performance marketers yet — digiday.com

• FAQ on ad avoidance and ad fatigue — emarketer.com

• Creator War: Netflix is Coming for YouTube — theankler.com

• YouTube is TV — Evan Shapiro, eshap.substack.com

• An Interview with Matthew Ball About Gaming and the Fight for Attention — stratechery.com

Last take before a short summer pause.

When I was asked to review Tim Hwang’s book, I felt a brief jolt — the way you do when you pick up an essay that smells faintly of heresy and forbidden truth, but also of real insight into an advertising industry going through one of the most seismic transformations it has ever seen.

The book came out in 2020, and today it reads like it was written in the Paleolithic. That’s the first impression it leaves — not because it’s old in itself, but because the pace of change in the media industry, pre- and post-AI, is closer to pre- and post-wheel, or pre- and post-electricity.

The book draws an apocalyptic parallel between the subprime mortgage crisis and the ad tech “bubble,” but with a difference I consider decisive: in the mortgage crisis, default is an event — it arrives on a specific day, when the debtor stops paying. In digital advertising, the default is already here; it’s simply never declared, because the system never measures the real attention people give to the advertising of the new millennium — it only measures their exposure. The day we actually started measuring it, the default wouldn’t surface as a single event. We’d find it spread across every single impression, as a chronic gap between what gets billed and what actually gets perceived.

Five years after the original release of Subprime Attention Crisis, programmatic now handles 89.3% of global display ad spend — over $380 billion, on its way to $800 billion by 2028. The opacity the book describes hasn’t changed; it has simply moved from human intermediation to exchange and bidding platforms, now governed by metrics that measure not attention but hyper-optimized exposure. A large share of brand money isn’t funding a real outcome in attention, sales, or brand-building — it’s funding a giant closed system.

What the book gets right

Credit where due: on the plumbing of the system, Hwang is precise, and the numbers he cites — many updated in the Italian preface itself — hold up well against the present. The ISBA/PwC study of the UK programmatic supply chain, which in 2020 found only 12% of spend fully traceable and 15% vanishing into an “unknown delta” never explained. The J.P. Morgan Chase case, which cut the number of sites it advertised on from 400,000 to 5,000 — a 99% reduction — without campaign results changing by a hair. Facebook’s video metrics, which reportedly overstated average view times by 60 to 80%, by dividing total watch time across a smaller audience than the real one. The same platform sells the inventory, defines the metric, and certifies the result. You don’t even need the bubble theory to see something’s off — you just need to notice who’s grading their own homework.

Then there’s the single data point that says more than any theoretical framework: in 1994, the first online banner ads posted a 44% click-through rate. By 2018, a comparable display ad had fallen to 0.46% — roughly one person in two hundred, and nearly half of mobile clicks were accidental anyway. Thirty years of technical optimization, ever-finer targeting, ever more sophisticated auctions, to arrive at a behavioral return that’s one-hundredth of where it started. If that isn’t a symptom of an industry that stopped producing real attention and settled for producing occasions of exposure, I don’t know what would be.

What the book doesn’t see

And here’s where the problem starts — with a caveat on timing that’s only fair. The original text is from 2020: it couldn’t have cited Netflix or Disney+ running ads, which only arrived in November and December of 2022, nor a creator economy that, as a recognized investment category, emerged around the same time the book was being written. On that, the silence is understandable. Less understandable is that the 2026 Italian edition — with Marco Carnevale’s preface, which extensively updates the numbers on programmatic, opacity, and market share right up to today — doesn’t also widen the conceptual frame. Connected TV already existed as an advertising category in 2020, smaller and more fragmented, sure, but eMarketer was already tracking it with its own figures — and yet six years and a preface later, it still gets a single mention, in a footnote. And then there’s “creativity,” a word with no expiration date: it doesn’t need to be current to be relevant, and yet it never appears once in a hundred and seventy pages, not in the original text, not in the update. That last absence can’t be blamed on the calendar.

It’s an absence that says a great deal, because it isn’t accidental — it’s built into the lens Hwang chooses. If the problem is the financialization of attention — its transformation into an undifferentiated stock, buyable and sellable in bulk — then creativity, context, and the moment an ad appears barely matter at all: only volume and price do. That’s exactly the logic the industry has adopted, and it’s exactly why the book, even while criticizing that logic from the outside, ends up accepting its categories from the inside. It treats attention as though it were purely a measurement problem (which it partly is, as long as the system keeps grading its own homework). No — it was never just that.

Because the real question — the one none of Hwang’s numbers can capture — is a different one: why do we keep seeing, on every screen, out of context, disconnected from the genre of the programme, the time of day, the moment, the same thirty-second spots built for an audience and a medium that no longer exist? Advertising creativity is nowhere near as optimized as the auctions that distribute it. If anything, the more automated the system gets downstream, the more frozen it seems to get upstream. Costs get cut through agency mergers and automation, but the first thing cut is almost always the part of the business considered “unproductive” — creativity — while the teams overseeing data and platforms keep growing. The spreadsheets get more sophisticated, and the content those spreadsheets are supposed to measure gets less care.

Where real attention seems to vote (and where the vote is already rigged)

The point is that the market, without waiting for the “controlled demolition” Hwang proposes as a regulatory fix, is already moving budget elsewhere. Creator economy spend in the US — the only market with genuinely solid data, per the latest IAB report — went from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $37 billion in 2025, and is expected to reach nearly $44 billion in 2026: growing four times faster than the ad market as a whole. Over the same period, global linear TV spend has fallen to $139 billion, its lowest level since 2005, while US digital video spend will pass $80 billion this year — nearly double the market’s average growth rate.

The thing is, connected and digital TV — which promised granularity, transparency, and control compared to old linear TV — may in practice have delivered only the perception of control, while importing linear TV’s same approximations. It’s no accident that almost every statistic describing it as a high-attention environment comes from whoever is selling that inventory.

A survey by All About Cookies of a thousand American adults, conducted in March 2026, finds that only 24% of viewers actually pay attention to streaming ads, while the rest multitask or disengage — and 76% still think there’s too much advertising regardless. Consumer Reports, surveying a representative sample of over two thousand adults, finds that only 3% of subscribers on ad-supported plans don’t find the ads annoying at all: the main complaint is repetition — the same spots keep coming back, despite inventory supposedly being limited. Tellingly, when asked to account for the quality of that attention, Netflix — through its president of advertising, Amy Reinhard — simply stated that viewers pay as much attention to ad breaks as to the content itself, despite having had an independent attention-measurement partner in place for two months by then (Lumen Research, though live in only five European markets), without citing that data to support the claim.

Even the last line of defence — little advertising, scarce inventory, frequency capped by a hard ceiling — is giving way under competitive pressure: Netflix and Prime Video CPMs have both dropped noticeably over the past year, while ad load is increasing, not shrinking. The pattern is the same one playing out in programmatic display, just arriving a few years later: as long as the environment stays scarce, price holds and the attention narrative holds with it; the moment supply widens, the system goes back to behaving the way it always has.

The measurement paradox

There’s one last irony the book brushes against but never develops, and it may be the most useful one for understanding where we really stand. The formats with the most “scientific” measurement standard — viewability down to the pixel, the exact second in which 50% of the ad must stay visible — are also the ones with the lowest behavioral return of all: that 0.46% display CTR, again. The formats that claim to perform better — creator content, connected TV, quality editorial contexts — are still measured with blunt proxies, often produced by parties with an interest in making them look good: engagement rate, completion rate, the old television GRP. Standardizing the measurement hasn’t standardized the value. If anything, the opposite: the more precise the measurement has become, the further it has drifted from what it’s supposed to represent — and where the measurement stays blunt, it’s also easier to tell yourself everything is working.

Hwang calls for an independent authority to audit the industry’s metrics, more transparency, protection for whistleblowers. Reasonable asks — but they assume the problem is mainly one of oversight and rules. It isn’t, or not only. No regulatory body builds a better ad by itself, or the right context to show it in. Something, for what it’s worth, is already moving in that direction without waiting for a regulator — Amazon and Google have just started letting an attention score, still imperfect, weigh on the price of an impression itself, not only in the report that lands once the campaign is over. It’s a signal, not a solution: until building real attention becomes, for whoever is allocating a media budget, the easier choice — not just the more honest one — we’ll keep measuring, with ever more precision, something that keeps being worth less.

Netflix closed the second quarter of 2026 with double-digit revenue growth, and the stock fell anyway, on softer-than-expected guidance. In the same period, Disney+ is reportedly discussing a free, ad-supported tier with no subscription at all. These are different stories, but they point to the same instinct: everyone, right now, is trying to widen the audience. The fastest way to do that is to cut price — streaming CPMs, according to eMarketer’s estimates, have fallen consistently over the past three years, and now sit well below where they launched.

There’s a question this scale race tends to leave in the background, and it might be worth bringing back to the center: that wider audience how much of it is actually watching? And how much are we paying, proportionally, not for declared reach, but for the real time people spend with what we buy?

It’s not a question with a clean, definitive answer, but it can be approached with concrete data. The UK — probably the most transparent advertising market in the world — is, for the first time since 2024, a place where you can divide ad revenue by measured viewing minutes, separately for linear TV and for streamers’ ad-supported tiers. The result is an anomaly that gets surprisingly little airtime: broadcaster TV generates roughly £1.50 per thousand minutes of viewing; the same thousand minutes on streamers’ ad tiers are worth roughly £0.85 almost half. (That figure rests on an estimate of ad-tier viewing minutes, based on subscriber share disclosed by the platforms the one input in this comparison that isn’t directly measured.) While TV’s ad revenue is essentially flat, streamers’ is growing at double-digit rates every year.

This is where it gets interesting for anyone watching streamers closely. Their strategy, at this stage, looks clear: win advertising market share by taking ground from linear TV, pushing on volume and low price. The price they charge — and pay — is worth, per minute, almost half of TV’s. What’s missing is that nobody has yet run, for streamers, the equivalent of the exercise coming up shortly for TV, YouTube and social: measuring real attention against price paid, format by format. Until that calculation exists, the question stays open — whether the volume they’re building today is the solid foundation they think it is, or just the latest version of the same trade: more impressions, not necessarily more value.

None of this proves one model is wrong and the other right. It’s a signal that price, right now, is moving faster than the attention that should justify it and that gap almost never makes it into the reports that circulate.

A similar exercise, run not across the whole market but format by format, comes from another angle entirely and it isn’t even recent. Back in 2021, a UK panel had already used eye-tracking, applied to the average CPMs of a single UK client, to measure not just whether an ad was shown, but for how many seconds people actually looked at it. The cost per thousand seconds of observed attention, for the main ad formats, produced a list worth reading in full:

• TV, 30-second spot: £1.70

• YouTube mobile, non-skippable: £1.98

• YouTube mobile, bumper: £2.67

• Instagram, story: £2.90

• Instagram, feed: £5.49

• Facebook, feed: £8.34

• Display, banner: £13.02

Here too, the point isn’t to crown a winning format — each serves different purposes, and context matters as much as format itself. But looking at the list, it’s hard not to wonder whether the price we pay for each of these actually reflects that gap or whether we’ve simply never asked the question closely enough.

Maybe there’s a simple reason this gap stays under-discussed: the way we habitually measure advertising — impressions, reach, CPM — is built to answer short-term questions, not this one. And whoever is deciding a budget, under quarterly pressure, has few tools and even less time to ask the different question.

There’s still a piece of this that depends entirely on the buyer, not on the market at large: generative AI now makes it possible to build different creative for every environment, at a cost that would have been prohibitive not long ago. Using it to produce more, faster, in the same format everywhere, is the obvious choice — but probably also the least useful one, if the actual problem is the gap between what gets spent and how much real attention it earns back.

The pieces to do this properly already exist, and are more mature than they might seem. Contextual DCO for CTV is an established category platforms like Adzymic and Hunch already adjust creative to content genre, daypart, weather and other real-time signals, and Equativ’s “Contextual Intelligence” analyzes on-screen mood and narrative beats to place, say, a luxury travel ad inside a high-end destination documentary. None of this is hypothetical; it’s already sold, named, and reasonably widespread. What seems narrower, and still open, is using attention itself not just thematic relevance as the signal that decides how a piece of creative should be built for a given moment: a fuller, more narrative treatment for a high-attention slot, a two-second hook for a low-attention one, chosen because of what the moment is worth in attention terms, not only because of what it’s about.

A shadow metric for the media plan

If this gap is real, the question becomes practical fairly quickly: what can a CMO actually do with it, without waiting for the whole industry to agree on a new currency?

One option, floated in effectiveness circles more often than it’s actually used: track something like aCPM as a shadow metric a private, in-house calculation run alongside the standard CPM-based reporting an agency already delivers, not instead of it. Nobody needs to renegotiate a contract to start. Take the CPM a plan is already paying by channel and format, and apply, even loosely, the kind of attention hierarchy public research already publishes TV formats near the efficient end, open-web display near the expensive end, video platforms somewhere in between depending on format. What comes out isn’t a new number to report upward. It’s a private lens for asking a sharper question about where a plan’s money is actually going.

What a rough attention audit could look like, using only what already exists

None of this requires new panels, new vendors, or new budget just a different way of reading numbers that are usually already sitting in a plan.

1. Map the current plan against the attention hierarchy. Sort the mix, even crudely, into higher- and lower-attention formats using the kind of ranking above.

2. Apply a shadow aCPM to the largest line items first. Where the current CPM is known, and it usually is, apply published attention ratios to the two or three biggest budget lines, not the whole plan at once. That’s where the exercise pays off fastest.

3. Look for the widest gaps, not the average. The average tells you little. The formats where price and attention diverge most are the ones worth a second look often the ones nobody has questioned in years, simply because they look cheap on paper.

4. Ask the agency for the same view, not a different plan. The point isn’t to walk into a renegotiation with a weapon. It’s to ask a specific question about specific line items, and see how the answer compares with the shadow numbers.

And in Italy, specifically

The UK exercise works because the underlying numbers are already public, assembled once and published for anyone to use. Italy’s version isn’t blocked by a lack of data the pieces are simply scattered rather than assembled. Auditel holds minute-level viewing data by platform. Media agencies and sales houses run attention-adjacent metrics inside their own planning tools, often bought from the same international vendors cited above. The building blocks are already in the building. What’s missing is someone doing the work of putting them together into a single, usable view the same shadow-metric exercise described above, just applied locally instead of imported.

It’s the same question, from another angle, that I’d already tried to raise around qualitative GRP: reach measures the opportunity to be seen, not actually having been seen. In the UK, the numbers to close that gap are already public. In Italy, the data and the tools to try exist too the real difference is knowing how to connect them, not owning them.

Maybe the question worth asking, the next time a cost-per-thousand-impressions figure lands on a planning table, isn’t whether it’s high or low. It’s how much of that price is really buying attention and how much is simply buying its shadow.

Sources: Netflix Q2 2026 shareholder letter; eMarketer, “Digital Video and Forecast Trends Q4 2025”; Thinkbox / Advertising Association-WARC Expenditure Report (2024 data); BARB / Ofcom Media Nations; Thinkbox, aCPM data by format — Ebiquity/Lumen/TVision, “The Cost of Attention Across Media”, 2021 (CPMs used are the average for a single, anonymous UK client; the underlying attention data, by contrast, is a market-wide average across thousands of ads — attention sources: TVision/Lumen UK TV Panel and Lumen digital panels; CPM source: Ebiquity); industry overviews of contextual DCO for CTV (Starti, “Top 15 Dynamic Creative Optimization Platforms for CTV”, 2026; Equativ, “CTV Advertising: What It Is, How It Works, Trends for 2026”).

In the last few weeks, the ball has started rolling fast. M&A wars are accelerating, streamer-legacy media partnerships are multiplying. Commentators are calling it: 'finally, legacy media is fighting back against the platforms.' There is no fight. We are witnessing the biggest, most seismic shift in pop culture legitimacy ever recorded. Traditional linear TV, which once shaped and mirrored culture, is now working the lowest part of the funnel — distribution — to defend what's left of its reach-based advertising business, or handing its content over to streamers chasing audiences where they already are, with content still shaped for the previous generation. Brands need to watch this turmoil closely, to understand the new rules of connection with the customers and fans who actually choose them.

italian version of this column available for free on advexpress

Let’s go into this.

Samsung TV Plus just produced its first original scripted series. It didn’t hire a writer’s room. It partnered with Dhar Mann, a YouTuber known for morality-tale videos with tens of millions of subscribers, and lined up a dedicated channel with Mark Rober, the former NASA engineer turned science YouTuber, on the same FAST platform. Netflix, Tubi, Paramount and Roku are chasing the same land grab — the trend now includes creators like Jesser and Dude Perfect, per Adweek, which reported the whole shift under one blunt line: platforms producing “YouTube-style” content at a fraction of studio cost.

Read that again. The companies that spent a century building the machinery to manufacture stars — casting departments, writers’ rooms, promotion budgets, decades of institutional memory on what makes an audience fall in love with someone — are now buying access to stars that machinery didn’t make. They’re renting credibility instead of building it, because building it, apparently, no longer fits the timeline or the balance sheet.

This isn’t a side story. It’s happening at the exact moment the same companies are spending tens of billions defending what’s left of mass reach. Streaming passed the combined viewership of broadcast and cable in May 2025; by March 2026 it was at 47.6%, per Nielsen. Fox paid $22 billion for Roku, whose infrastructure now carries 44% of all US streaming hours — more than triple its nearest competitor. Comcast split NBCUniversal from Sky over how capital markets value content versus infrastructure, then had Sky buy ITV’s broadcast arm a week later, pushing the combined company past 70% of the UK TV ad market. None of that is growth. It’s consolidation on shrinking ground — the last reservation where mass advertising still behaves the way it did twenty years ago, defended because it’s the only thing left that’s still purchasable with the old playbook.

And on that same shrinking ground, the players with the most resources to build something new are choosing to rent instead. That’s the part worth sitting with.

The obvious defense is that a company fighting for survival doesn’t have seven years to spend building anything. Fair — except defending the shrinking room while doing nothing to build a foothold in the next one is closer to repainting the walls while the fire is still burning downstairs. Consolidating faster doesn’t renegotiate the mortgage on the next thirty years. Only new content and new faces, in front of the audience nobody’s currently fighting for, does that.

Nobody planned this. Someone still cashed in on it

Pop culture used to be born on television and trickle down. That machine is broken, and not just for the reasons above. For two decades, ordinary people uploaded videos, argued in comment sections, and built communities around shared jokes and shared taste — with no strategy, no expectation that any of it would be worth anything. YouTube didn’t plant that. It just happened to own the field where it grew, and twenty years later it’s harvesting a cultural dividend nobody, including YouTube itself in its early years, saw coming. Meanwhile a generation that grew up disintermediated — no gatekeeper between them and the people they actually want to hear from — has simply stopped waiting for television to tell them what matters.

European broadcasters spent decades holding something no platform has yet replicated: the deep cultural roots of their own countries — the shows, the fiction, the new local talent that defined how a nation talked to itself. What the current wave of consolidation actually trades away is that position. Fox, Sky and MFE (Mediaset’s pan-European holding company) are buying five, maybe ten more years of the audience that still watches linear — an audience that skews older every year. Social platforms, in the meantime, have already mortgaged the next thirty: an entire generation is forming its cultural vocabulary somewhere broadcasters don’t control and, increasingly, can’t even see.

Brands do the exact same thing, and call it strategy

A company pays a creator for a three-month campaign, gets a burst of borrowed relevance, and calls it influencer marketing. It’s the same transaction Samsung just made with Dhar Mann, just smaller and with a product placed instead of a plot. The credibility isn’t transferred — it’s leased. When the contract ends, the creator’s audience stays exactly where it always was: with the creator. The brand is right back where it started, except now it needs a bigger budget to rent the next one.

Two cases from this year show what the alternative actually looks like — not because they’re unusually cool, but because neither started with anything to rent.

Niccolò Moriconi — stage name Ultimo — was playing to 500 people at a Milan club in January 2018. He won Sanremo Giovani, Italy’s national song contest, that December, sold out Rome’s Olympic Stadium eighteen months later, and by 2022 was drawing 70,000 people to the Circus Maximus with almost no media coverage in between. On July 4, 2026, he gathered 250,000 paying fans at Tor Vergata — the largest paid concert in Italian history, and among the largest paid concerts ever recorded anywhere. Seven and a half years, fifty-three stadium shows, over two million tickets, built one date at a time. The contest gave him exposure once. Everything that actually moved a quarter-million people to camp out for two weeks came after it, built by him, offline, with nobody renting anybody.

Sides — the fried chicken chain launched by British creator collective the Sidemen — started as a group chat about who made the best fried chicken. No media moment, no launch campaign borrowed from anyone else. First store opening: a 38-hour queue. Today: five UK locations, a Singapore outpost, plans for fifteen more. Whatever risk the model carries — and the May 2026 departure of member KSI shows there is one — it isn’t the risk of having rented someone else’s relevance and having it expire.

Neither of these required being interesting in an obvious way

A guy playing a 500-capacity club. A group chat about chicken. Nothing here started with a competitive edge worth renting out. What both had was something more specific and less flashy: an honest point of view that nobody else in their exact lane was saying out loud, built and rebuilt in public until it became something people would show up for without being told to.

That’s available to a mid-market software company as much as it is to a singer or a chicken shop — a real position on a real tension its customers live with, that no competitor is naming. Companies that skip that step and go straight to renting a creator aren’t doing something cheaper. They’re doing the Samsung TV Plus move: buying a temporary shell of relevance from someone who actually built it, on ground that gets more expensive and more contested every quarter it isn’t their own.

__________

italian version

Le media company hanno smesso di creare star. Ora le affittano.

Samsung TV Plus ha appena prodotto la sua prima serie scripted originale. Non ha assunto una writer’s room. Ha fatto squadra con Dhar Mann, uno YouTuber noto per video motivazionali con decine di milioni di iscritti, e ha aperto un canale dedicato con Mark Rober, ex ingegnere NASA oggi tra i più seguiti creator scientifici, sulla stessa piattaforma FAST. Netflix, Tubi, Paramount e Roku stanno inseguendo la stessa corsa all’accaparramento — un trend che secondo Adweek include ormai anche creator come Jesser e Dude Perfect, riassunto in una riga sola: piattaforme che producono contenuto “in stile YouTube” a una frazione del costo di uno studio.

Rileggila. Le aziende che hanno passato un secolo a costruire la macchina per fabbricare le star — casting department, writer’s room, budget promozionali, decenni di memoria istituzionale su cosa fa innamorare un pubblico di qualcuno — oggi comprano l’accesso a star che quella macchina non ha creato. Stanno affittando credibilità invece di costruirla, perché costruirla, evidentemente, non rientra più nei tempi né nel bilancio.

Non è una notizia laterale. Succede nello stesso momento in cui le stesse aziende spendono decine di miliardi per difendere quel poco che resta della reach di massa. Lo streaming ha superato la visione combinata di broadcast e cavo a maggio 2025; a marzo 2026 era già al 47,6%, secondo Nielsen. Fox ha pagato 22 miliardi di dollari per Roku, la cui infrastruttura oggi porta il 44% di tutte le ore di streaming USA — più del triplo del concorrente più vicino. Comcast ha separato NBCUniversal da Sky per come il mercato dei capitali valuta diversamente contenuto e infrastruttura, e una settimana dopo Sky ha comprato la divisione broadcast di ITV, portando la società combinata oltre il 70% del mercato pubblicitario TV britannico. MFE ha fatto un passo in più, creare un player pan europeo, una strada migliore guidata da un aumento della reach e scala tecnologica. Niente di tutto questo però è crescita. È consolidamento su un terreno che si restringe — l’ultima riserva dove la pubblicità di massa si comporta ancora come vent’anni fa, difesa perché è l’unica cosa rimasta ancora comprabile con il vecchio manuale.

E su quello stesso terreno che si restringe, chi ha più risorse per costruire qualcosa di nuovo sceglie invece di affittare. È questo il punto su cui vale la pena fermarsi.

La difesa ovvia è che un’azienda in lotta per la sopravvivenza non ha sette anni da dedicare a costruire alcunché. Giusto — se non fosse che difendere la stanza che si restringe senza fare nulla per mettere un piede in quella successiva assomiglia più a ridipingere le pareti mentre l’incendio brucia ancora al piano di sotto. Consolidarsi più in fretta non rinegozia l’ipoteca sui prossimi trent’anni. Solo nuovi contenuti e volti nuovi, davanti al pubblico per cui oggi nessuno sta competendo, possono farlo.

Nessuno l’ha pianificato. Qualcuno ha comunque incassato

La cultura pop nasceva in televisione e colava a cascata verso il basso. Quella macchina si è rotta, e non solo per i motivi sopra. Per vent’anni, persone comuni hanno caricato video, discusso nei commenti, costruito community attorno a battute e gusti condivisi — senza strategia, senza aspettarsi che ne uscisse qualcosa di valore. YouTube non ha piantato nulla di tutto questo. Si è semplicemente trovata proprietaria del campo dove tutto questo cresceva, e vent’anni dopo sta raccogliendo un dividendo culturale che nessuno, nemmeno YouTube nei suoi primi anni, aveva previsto. Nel frattempo una generazione cresciuta senza intermediari — nessun gatekeeper tra loro e le persone che vogliono davvero ascoltare — ha semplicemente smesso di aspettare che fosse la televisione a dirgli cosa conta.

I broadcaster europei hanno passato decenni a custodire qualcosa che nessuna piattaforma ha ancora replicato: le radici culturali profonde dei loro paesi — i programmi, la fiction, i nuovi talenti locali che definivano il modo in cui una nazione parlava a se stessa. Quello che l’attuale ondata di consolidamento sta davvero svendendo è proprio quella posizione. Fox, Sky e MFE (la holding pan-europea di Mediaset) stanno comprando cinque, forse dieci anni in più del pubblico che guarda ancora il lineare — un pubblico che invecchia ogni anno di più. Le piattaforme social, nel frattempo, hanno già ipotecato i prossimi trenta: un’intera generazione sta formando il proprio vocabolario culturale in un posto che i broadcaster non controllano e, sempre di più, non riescono nemmeno a vedere.

I brand fanno esattamente la stessa cosa, e la chiamano strategia

Un’azienda paga un creator per una campagna di tre mesi, ottiene un’esplosione di rilevanza presa in prestito, e la chiama influencer marketing. È la stessa transazione che Samsung ha appena fatto con Dhar Mann, solo più piccola e con un prodotto piazzato al posto di una trama. La credibilità non si trasferisce — si affitta. Quando il contratto finisce, il pubblico del creator resta esattamente dov’era sempre stato: con il creator. Il brand è punto e a capo, solo che ora gli serve un budget più grande per affittarne un altro.

Due casi di quest’anno mostrano come appare davvero l’alternativa — non perché siano insolitamente cool, ma perché nessuno dei due aveva niente da affittare all’inizio.

Niccolò Moriconi — nome d’arte Ultimo — suonava per 500 persone in un locale di Milano nel gennaio 2018. Ha vinto Sanremo Giovani, il contest canoro nazionale italiano, quel dicembre, ha fatto sold-out all’Olimpico di Roma diciotto mesi dopo, e nel 2022 radunava già 70.000 persone al Circo Massimo con quasi nessuna copertura mediatica nel mezzo. Il 4 luglio 2026 ha riunito 250.000 fan paganti a Tor Vergata — il concerto a pagamento più grande nella storia italiana, e tra i più grandi mai registrati al mondo. Sette anni e mezzo, cinquantatré date negli stadi, oltre due milioni di biglietti, costruiti una data alla volta. Il contest gli ha dato visibilità, una volta sola. Tutto quello che ha davvero spinto un quarto di milione di persone ad accamparsi per due settimane è arrivato dopo, costruito da lui, offline, senza che nessuno affittasse nessuno.

Sides — la catena di pollo fritto lanciata dal collettivo di creator britannici Sidemen — è nata da una chat di gruppo su chi facesse il pollo fritto migliore. Nessun momento mediatico, nessuna campagna di lancio presa in prestito da altri. Apertura del primo negozio: 38 ore di coda. Oggi: cinque locali nel Regno Unito, un avamposto a Singapore, piani per altre quindici aperture. Qualunque rischio porti con sé questo modello — e l’uscita di KSI dal gruppo a maggio 2026 dimostra che un rischio c’è — non è il rischio di aver affittato la rilevanza di qualcun altro e di vedersela scadere.

Nessuno dei due doveva essere interessante in modo ovvio

Un ragazzo che suona in un locale da 500 posti. Una chat di gruppo sul pollo fritto. Niente di tutto questo partiva da un vantaggio competitivo da affittare. Quello che entrambi avevano era qualcosa di più specifico e meno appariscente: un punto di vista onesto che nessun altro, nella loro esatta nicchia, stava dicendo ad alta voce — costruito e ricostruito in pubblico finché non è diventato qualcosa per cui la gente si presentava senza che nessuno glielo chiedesse.

Questo vale per un’azienda di software di fascia media tanto quanto per un cantante o un marchio di pollo fritto — una posizione reale su una tensione reale che i suoi clienti vivono, che nessun competitor sta nominando. Le aziende che saltano questo passaggio e vanno dritte ad affittare un creator non stanno facendo qualcosa di più economico. Stanno facendo la mossa di Samsung TV Plus: comprare un guscio temporaneo di rilevanza da chi l’ha davvero costruita, su un terreno che diventa più caro e più conteso ogni trimestre in cui non è il tuo.

I went back to Cannes after a few years away. The headlines I’m bringing home: AI will “kill” every adman who answers it by chanting “more creativity”; a festival about fragmentation managed to fragment its own panels; and mental availability does not materialize in punishing, shade-melting heat. The fragmented stage is the fragmented market in miniature: when audiences scatter, putting the message in the right place is precisely the part that commoditizes.

But the most serious thing that week wasn’t on a stage. It was in a report. Havas published The Science of Desire, eighty-seven thousand respondents across twenty-four hundred brands, to establish that eighty-four percent of brands live in indifference, and to land on a single conclusion: visibility and optimization aren’t enough anymore, and what makes people choose a brand is meaning. They’re right. And the fact that this comes from a holding company, one that sells optimization at industrial scale, is the real news: the diagnosis is closed. It has become consensus. I made the case here in early June from the price side: capital markets already pay multiples for brands that own meaning, e.l.f. bought rhode for close to five times revenue. Here I look at it from the opposite end: construction.

So this isn’t one more piece telling a CEO that meaning matters; you already read that in the report. The real question is how you build it from zero. And there the tools go quiet.

Why the diagnosis scales and the building doesn’t

TL;DR: Optimization harvests the demand that already exists. It can’t manufacture the meaning that creates demand in the first place.

The short answer: the diagnosis can be measured and the construction can’t. A brand’s journey has split into two layers. There’s the address, putting the brand in front of the right person at the right moment, and the industry has thrown all its power here, because it’s the problem of scale, and scale automates. AI agents buy the media, platforms own the data, production keeps getting cheaper: the address commoditizes precisely as it perfects.

Then there’s meaning, the reason someone moves. And here the machine stops, for a precise reason worth stating well: it isn’t that the machine doesn’t convert. It converts beautifully, for people who were already about to move. It harvests the intention that exists; it doesn’t manufacture it. And the loop tightens: the report itself notes that the brands with the most cultural conversation are up to four times likelier to be cited by AI. Meaning is not an escape from the machine; it is becoming the machine’s input, which makes building it worth more, not less.

The last strongholds, and the reserves running out

TL;DR: Sport and music are inherited capital, finite and shared. The real question is who builds the cultural capital nobody inherited.

Without knowing how to build meaning, the industry reaches for what already exists: sport and music, the last territories of shared mass emotion. Adidas won two Grands Prix riding the Oasis reunion, a sale a second at the peak. It works because the depth is already there. But Adidas didn’t create that depth; it activated cultural capital from the Britpop nineties it had been part of for thirty years. Call it inherited meaning: legitimate, and largely unrepeatable. Inherited capital is finite, and it’s shared. If everyone draws from the same reservoirs, even the inheritance flattens into commodity, as much as the reach it was meant to replace. The question no report asks is the next one: the cultural capital nobody inherited, who builds it, and how?

How you build new meaning

TL;DR: New meaning holds only when it is intense, still latent, and co-owned by the community, the way Deportivo Municipal’s fans built it.

Here’s the missing piece, and it isn’t philosophy. A brand’s meaning is the signature of distinction that already lives inside it and has to be made shareable, one person at a time. This isn’t how brands grow in general; most grow through availability, distinctiveness and habit, the Ehrenberg-Bass discipline, and on that they’re right. I’m after the narrower, harder thing: cultural capital a competitor can’t simply outbid. New meaning holds only if it meets three conditions. It’s a filter, not a slogan.

Intensity. There has to be a real stake of identity, not mild interest. Most categories don’t have it, which is why they must attach to an adjacent passion where their identity can live, instead of manufacturing one at a desk.

Latency. That intensity must not already be a crowded stronghold. The value is in finding it before it’s commercialized. Gaming was latent fifteen years ago; today it’s as mined as the rest. The frontier moves, and the work is getting there first.

Co-ownership. The community has to co-build the meaning, not receive it. Borrowed meaning gets outbid; anyone can buy the same band. Co-built meaning can’t: it belongs to whoever built it, and it isn’t for sale. It’s the difference between having an audience and having an engine.

Deportivo Municipal, the Peruvian club that turned its own thousand fans into its sponsors, passes all three: intensity sky-high, the territory latent, the meaning co-owned by the people who made it. It won its Grand Prix the same night Adidas won its two. That pairing is the whole argument: on one stage, inherited meaning activated brilliantly; on the other, new meaning built out of a crisis by the community itself. Cannes rewarded both. It could systematize neither.

What doesn’t automate

TL;DR: Building meaning is friction that won’t mass-produce, which is exactly why the machine makes it worth more, not less.

The world removes friction wherever it can. Building new meaning is friction in its purest form: slow, costly, unpredictable. It isn’t a flaw to automate; it’s the last thing that’s valuable precisely because it doesn’t mass-produce. The same machine that erases everything else drives up the price of the one effort it can’t erase. And meaning stays human, not because the machine never will (the frontier keeps moving), but because at the bottom there’s a core someone has to own: deciding what a brand means is a responsibility, and when the call is wrong, a person answers for it, not a model.

• • •

An AI agent can tell you where every fish already is: faster, cheaper, soon better than anyone. It can’t tell you why this brand, in this sea, is the one they’ll swim toward. The machine optimizes toward a target. Someone still has to build the target itself: the meaning, the reason for the movement.

The diagnosis is for sale now: the holding companies bought it, and they were right. The construction isn’t. That gets made by hand, one community at a time. And it’s the only part that wasn’t in any of those pages.

And the construction runs through media, just not the kind you buy by the slot. CTV and the streamers have made context almost infinite and almost free to produce, and that’s exactly why almost no one builds it anymore: they buy it. The value has gone back to whoever can turn a context into a moment. More on that soon, from the method side: where you read the signals, and how you build meaning inside the new media, not beside it.

___________

Attention Is Not All You Need

La diagnosi è finita: che l’ottimizzazione non basti e che conti il significato lo sanno ormai tutti — lo pubblicano persino le holding. La domanda vera comincia dove la ricerca si ferma: come si costruisce un significato che prima non c’era.

• • •

Sono tornato a Cannes dopo anni. I principali punti che mi porto a casa: l’AI “ucciderà” tutti i pubblicitari che inneggeranno a “più creatività”, la frammentazione ha frammentato tutti i panelisti ed il pubblico presente in cerca di una boccata di ossigeno, la mental availability non si materializza con 70 gradi celsius all’ombra.

Ma la cosa più seria della settimana non era su un palco. Era in un report. Havas ha pubblicato The Science of Desire — una ricerca enorme, più di ottantamila intervistati, per stabilire che l’ottantaquattro per cento dei brand vive nell’indifferenza — e arrivare a una conclusione sola: che la visibilità e l’ottimizzazione non bastano più, e che ciò che fa scegliere un brand è il significato. Hanno ragione. E il fatto che a dirlo sia una holding — che l’ottimizzazione la vende su scala industriale, e che ha fatto una super ricerca per confermare una cosa intuibile a ragionarci — è la vera notizia: la diagnosi è chiusa. È diventata consenso. Ne avevo scritto il 2 giugno su TVREV, guardandolo dal lato del prezzo: i mercati pagano multipli per i brand che possiedono significato — e.l.f. ha comprato rhode a cinque volte i ricavi. Qui lo guardo dal lato opposto, quello della costruzione.

Quindi mettiamoci d’accordo subito, in lingua di bilancio. Questo non è l’ennesimo pezzo che spiega a un CEO che il significato conta più della reach. Lo sapete già. L’avete letto nel report, ci avete speso un budget per farvelo confermare. La parte interessante è quella che il report — come tutti gli altri — non contiene. La domanda vera non è se il significato conti. È come si costruisce un significato che prima non c’era. E lì, improvvisamente, non c’è più nessuno.

Perché tutti diagnosticano e nessuno costruisce

La risposta breve: perché la diagnosi si misura e la costruzione no.

Il viaggio di un brand si è spezzato in due strati. C’è l’indirizzo — mettere il brand davanti alla persona giusta, al momento giusto — e l’industria ci ha buttato dentro tutta la sua potenza, perché è il problema della scala, e la scala si automatizza. Gli agenti AI comprano i media al posto nostro, i mezzi corrono a possedere il dato di prima parte, la produzione costa sempre meno: l’indirizzo si commoditizza proprio mentre si perfeziona. È misurabile, vendibile, e ogni mese più economico.

Poi c’è il significato — il motivo per cui qualcuno si muove. E qui la macchina si ferma, per una ragione precisa che conviene dire bene: non è vero che la macchina non converte. La macchina converte benissimo chi stava già per muoversi. Raccoglie l’intenzione che esiste; non la fabbrica. Trasformare un indifferente in interessato, e un interessato in fedele, è l’unico passo che nessun sistema ha ancora agganciato. Si può misurare quanto manca — l’hanno fatto tutti — ma misurare il buco non è riempirlo.

Gli ultimi bastioni, e le riserve che finiscono

Senza saper costruire significato, l’industria preleva quello che già esiste: sport e musica, gli ultimi territori di emozione condivisa di massa. A Cannes ci si è ammassata sopra. Adidas ha vinto due Grand Prix cavalcando la reunion degli Oasis — una vendita al secondo al picco. Funziona, perché la profondità è già lì.

Ma è un prestito, e i prestiti si esauriscono. Oasis è capitale culturale degli anni Novanta, costruito in vent’anni: Adidas non l’ha creato, l’ha prelevato. Se tutti prelevano dagli stessi giacimenti — la band del momento, lo sport, il volto giusto — il significato preso in prestito si affolla e si appiattisce, commodity quanto la reach che doveva sostituire. La domanda che nessun report pone è questa: i prossimi capitali culturali, chi li costruisce? E come?

Come si costruisce un significato nuovo

Qui sta il pezzo che manca, e non è filosofia. Il significato identitario di un brand non è un’idea nobile da cercare in cielo: è la cifra di distinzione che vive dentro quel brand e va resa condivisibile, una alla volta. I mass media possono ancora amplificarla, le piattaforme trasmetterla — ma costruirla richiede un’interpretazione specifica che nessun preset produce. E un significato nuovo regge solo se soddisfa tre condizioni. È un filtro, non uno slogan.

Intensità. Deve esserci una posta identitaria reale, non un interesse tiepido. Sport e musica ce l’hanno; la maggior parte delle categorie no — ed è per questo che devono agganciarsi a una passione adiacente in cui la propria identità possa vivere, invece di fabbricarne una a tavolino.

Latenza. Quell’intensità non dev’essere ancora un bastione commerciale affollato. Il valore sta nel trovarla prima che si commercializzi. Il gaming era latente quindici anni fa; oggi è scavato come gli altri. La frontiera si sposta, e il lavoro è arrivarci prima.

Co-proprietà. La community deve poter co-costruire il significato, non riceverlo. Perché il significato preso in prestito si surclassa a colpi di budget — chiunque può comprare lo stesso ingaggio con la stessa band. Quello co-costruito no: appartiene a chi l’ha costruito, e non si compra. È la differenza tra avere un pubblico e avere un motore.

Una squadra come il Deportivo Municipal, che ha fatto diventare sponsor i propri mille tifosi, passa tutte e tre le condizioni: intensità altissima, latente, resa co-proprietà. Sport e musica, oggi, stanno scavando la seconda — ed è per questo che si svuotano di valore mentre si riempiono di brand. I fenomeni musicali culturali globali sono pochi. I campioni sportivi assoluti sono ai saluti finali.

Resta il problema di trovarle, quelle intensità latenti. Un tempo era ricerca culturale a mano, lenta. C’è qui un’ipotesi che lascio dichiaratamente aperta, perché non ho numeri per chiuderla: che l’AI, leggendo affinità e cluster diversi dalla ricerca umana, possa aiutare a individuare comunità prima invisibili. Forse. Ma anche allora troverebbe solo il giacimento. Decidere se è oro, e fonderlo in appartenenza, resta una chiamata umana.

Ciò che non si automatizza

C’è una logica sotto tutto questo, e la dico da pragmatico. Il mondo elimina la frizione ovunque può, perché costa fatica, soldi, e non si lascia prevedere. Costruire un significato nuovo è frizione allo stato puro: lento, costoso, imprevedibile. Non è un difetto da automatizzare — è l’ultima cosa che vale proprio perché non si produce in serie. E c’è il paradosso che chiude il cerchio: la stessa macchina che cancella tutto il resto fa salire il prezzo di quell’unica fatica che non sa cancellare.

Senza diventare la consolazione di chi ha paura: la linea tra ciò che la macchina sa fare e ciò che non sa si sposta, e arretra. Non è una fortezza, è una frontiera. Il significato non resta umano perché “l’AI non potrà mai”, ma perché al fondo c’è un nucleo che qualcuno deve possedere — decidere cosa un brand significa è una responsabilità, e quando la scelta è sbagliata ne risponde una persona, non un modello.

• • •

Un agente AI può dirti dove sono tutti i pesci. Sempre più in fretta, sempre più a buon mercato, e tra poco meglio di chiunque. Non può dirti perché questo brand, oggi, in questo mare, debba essere quello che scelgono. La macchina ottimizza verso un bersaglio. Ma il bersaglio — il significato, il motivo del movimento — qualcuno lo deve ancora costruire.

La diagnosi ormai si compra: l’hanno comprata le holding, e avevano ragione. La costruzione, no. Quella si fa a mano, una comunità alla volta. Ed è l’unica parte che non c’era in nessuna delle pagine.

A year ago I thought my career was over.

Not because I had no work. Because I had no identity. For twenty years I had introduced myself through the logos on my slides — FOX, Disney. I sold attention at scale for a living. Then the slides were gone, and so, apparently, was I.

It took me a while to understand what had actually happened. My identity had been rented. It belonged to the brands I represented, and when the lease ended, it went back to the landlord.

I’m telling you this because the same thing is happening to brands themselves. They just haven’t noticed yet.

Here’s the number that should keep a CMO up at night.

The classic brand-building model — rent attention at scale, year after year, until familiarity hardens into equity — assumes you have decades. You don’t.

And while the slow model runs out of runway, something else keeps happening. It happened again two weeks ago.

A film called Backrooms opened in late May. Budget: under $10 million. Marketing campaign: essentially none. Result: roughly $89 million domestic — A24’s biggest opening ever — directed by a twenty-year-old making his first film.

Except he wasn’t. He’d been making it for four years, on YouTube, with his audience, 190 million views at a time. Backrooms started in 2019 as internet folklore: one photo of an empty yellow office, and a community that couldn’t stop building on it. Nobody owned it, so everybody did. By the time A24 sold the first ticket, the marketing had been done — for free, by the audience, years in advance.

If you’re thinking The Blair Witch Project, you’re half right — and the comparison deserves a pause.

1999: three unknown filmmakers shoot a horror movie for about $60,000. The distributor builds a marketing campaign disguised as reality — a website insisting the students really disappeared, missing-person flyers handed out at Sundance — and the film grosses roughly $248 million worldwide. It was the Backrooms playbook, executed brilliantly, once.

But here’s what strikes me most, almost thirty years later: the phenomenon died right there. YouTube was six years away. There was no platform where that community could keep building, no place for the myth to live between the theater and nowhere. Blair Witch had to fake participation because real participation had no infrastructure yet. Backrooms ran the sequence in reverse: four years of real, compounding participation first — then the theatrical release as the harvest. Same trick, separated by three decades of infrastructure. One rented the illusion of a community. The other owns an actual one. And I keep asking myself: what would Blair Witch have become with YouTube underneath it?

So here is my thesis, and I’ll spend the rest of this piece earning it with numbers:

Brand cultural capital has a new generation model. It’s no longer accumulated slowly through rented attention. It’s generated fast, through participation — attention that is chosen, owned, compounding. It also decays faster, fails far more often, and cannot be bought on a rate card. I’m not here to tell you the old model is dead or to defend the new one. I’m here to help you tell the difference — because your media budget currently can’t.

I know how this story goes. I rented for twenty years. Then I had to learn to own.

This is a pattern, not a lottery ticket

One viral film is an anecdote. So let’s leave cinema and go to the least glamorous category imaginable: a chocolate bar.

MrBeast launched Feastables in 2022. Revenue went from $33 million that year to $96 million in 2023 to $250 million in 2024 — with $20 million in profit. Projections for 2025 sit around half a billion. It’s on shelves in more than 30,000 retail locations.

Now the detail that matters. In 2024, MrBeast’s media operation — the YouTube channel with over 100 billion lifetime views, the Amazon show — lost roughly $80 million on $246 million of revenue. The chocolate bar out-earned the most-watched channel in the history of the medium.

Read that again from a media planner’s chair. The content isn’t the product. The content is the substrate — the place where attention accumulates, freely given, years before anything is sold. The bar is just what gets attached to it. And even the bar is participatory: golden-ticket promotions turn each purchase into a lottery entry for appearing in a video. Fans aren’t buying chocolate. They’re buying a stake in the story.

The mechanism has a name in behavioral economics: the endowment effect. People defend and propagate what they helped build. Rented attention buys you reach. Participation makes the audience co-owners of the meaning — and co-owners do your marketing for you, with more credibility than any campaign you could buy. That’s why Backrooms “didn’t need marketing.” The marketing was the community.

And if two categories aren’t enough, take a third: Five Nights at Freddy’s, an indie video game built in a bedroom in 2014, whose lore was assembled collaboratively by a decade of YouTube theory channels. The 2023 film adaptation opened to $80 million — the highest-grossing horror movie of its year. The sequel, last December, opened to $63 million and passed $200 million worldwide while the rest of its studio’s slate struggled.

A creepypasta, a chocolate bar, a bedroom video game. Three categories, one engine. That’s not luck. That’s infrastructure — twenty years of YouTube maturing into an IP-generation system.

02 · The counter-case. Same shelf, opposite destinies

Here’s where I’m supposed to tell you the new model always wins. It doesn’t. And the cleanest proof sits in a single product category: water in a can, fronted by internet celebrities.

Case one: Prime, launched in 2022 by Logan Paul and KSI — a combined audience of 60 million subscribers. Peak: roughly $1.2 billion in global sales in 2023, a billion bottles sold in under two years, briefly outselling Gatorade at Walmart. UK retailers put anti-theft tags on individual bottles.

Then: by late 2025, revenue projections had crashed about 76 percent from peak, to around $300 million. UK revenue fell from £112 million to £33 million in a single year. Share of the sports-drink market: from 41 percent to 10. The bottles that resold for £1,200 now sit in clearance bins at 31 pence.

Case two: Liquid Death. Founder Mike Cessario ran social video ads before the product existed — he wanted to know whether the attention was real before building the company. Revenue: $45 million in 2021, $110 million, $263 million, $333 million in 2024. Valuation: $1.4 billion. 133,000 stores. Growth is decelerating — from 139 percent to 27 percent — but decelerating is not collapsing. The curve is flattening, not falling off a cliff

Same shelf. Same playbook on the surface — celebrity, content, spectacle. Opposite outcomes. Why?

Prime rented its founders’ fame. One enormous, brilliant burst of scarcity and FOMO — and when distribution killed the scarcity, the reason to buy evaporated. The attention always belonged to Logan Paul and KSI; the brand was subletting. Liquid Death owns its attention: an entertainment engine that runs continuously, a community that performs the brand (you can literally “sell your soul” on their website), an asset that compounds instead of expiring.

Rented attention is reach you pay for on someone else’s inventory, and it stops the moment you stop paying. Owned attention is an audience that chose you, participates in you, and keeps working between campaigns.

And the decay rates are not the same. True brand loyalty fell to 29 percent in 2025, down five points in a year. Twenty-nine percent of consumers say they lose interest in a product as soon as it stops trending. If your brand lives on trend, it dies on schedule.

03 · The objection ”That’s Gen Z stuff” — and why it’s worse than you think

Every time I present this to a legacy-brand audience, the same hand goes up. Nice stories. Creepypastas and chocolate bars. Our customers are adults buying serious things.

Fine. Let’s look at the most adult, highest-consideration purchase a household makes: a car.

BYD — a brand most Europeans couldn’t name five years ago — sold about 2.25 million battery-electric vehicles in 2025, overtaking Tesla globally for the first time. In Europe it tripled sales and passed Tesla month after month from mid-2025, growing its EU share from 0.4 to 1.5 percent in a single year. People are handing tens of thousands of euros to a brand with zero accumulated equity in their market.

Or look at the most mainstream, most mature audience there is: grocery shoppers. Private label has reached a record 50 percent unit share across Europe’s six biggest grocery markets — 59 percent in Spain, 52 percent in the UK and Germany, 36 percent and climbing in Italy. Hundreds of billions of euros that used to flow through “irreplaceable” brand equity, gone to the retailer’s own label.

Now, intellectual honesty — because this is where most takes on this subject cheat. BYD and private label are not participatory phenomena. Nobody is co-creating a myth around store-brand pasta. These are value disruptions: better price, good-enough or better product.

But that’s exactly why they belong in this argument. Legacy brands are being squeezed by two convergent forces, not one. From below, participatory generation — Backrooms, MrBeast, Liquid Death — building cultural capital faster than any media plan can. From the side, value disruption — BYD, private label — proving that twenty years of accumulated equity is a much shallower moat than the balance sheet assumes. It can be crossed in three years by anyone with a better offer.

The old mid-market brand — built on rented mass attention, defended by familiarity — is caught between the two. One force you can answer with media strategy. The other you can’t: no amount of owned attention saves you if the retailer’s label is genuinely better value. That’s an operations problem wearing a marketing costume, and I won’t sell you communication as the cure. Knowing which force is eating you is the first real decision.

04 · The defense. What a legacy brand can actually do

If the disruption is participatory — the one media strategy can answer — there are three moves. Each comes with a failure mode, because that’s the part the conference-keynote version always omits.

First: invert the stack. The legacy model makes the product first and rents media to push it. The new model builds an attention asset first and attaches products to it. The provocation, stated plainly: your media budget is currently an operating expense that rents decaying attention; part of it should become capital expenditure in an attention asset you own. The constraint: this is a multi-year commitment, and corporate finance is built to treat media as a cost to optimize down, not an asset to capitalize. If your CFO can’t fund patience, you can’t play.

Second: open participation — on the right layer. You cannot make the core utility of a serious product co-creatable; nobody crowdsources brake systems. But you can open a governed channel on the meaning layer. LEGO Ideas has done it for nearly two decades: fans design sets, the community votes, winners go into production with the creator’s name on the box. Real participation, real governance. The constraint: it only works if you genuinely cede a slice of authorship. Staged participation — the rigged contest, the domesticated UGC campaign — gets detected instantly and produces the opposite of trust.

Third: spin off, and accept the math. Your accumulated equity is both your asset and your prison: too much downside to let the mother brand play an open, high-variance game. So you separate small bets with no equity to protect, firewalled so a failure doesn’t contaminate the house. This is the organizational form of an uncomfortable truth: participatory phenomena follow a power-law. For every Backrooms there are ten thousand dead memes. You cannot engineer the hit; you can only afford many cheap attempts. The constraint is governance: the parent almost never resists the urge to control, and “owned by Megacorp” can kill the very authenticity the spin-off was built to find.

05 · The real obstacle. It isn’t strategy

Notice what these three moves have in common. None of them is conceptually difficult. Invert the stack, cede some authorship, tolerate dead bets, fund patience. Any strategy team can write that deck by Friday.

What they share is that each one violates the operating system of a legacy organization. Quarterly media budgets. Brand guidelines as legal documents. Risk committees. The institutional reflex that authority comes with the logo. I spent twenty years inside that system; I know its immune response intimately. It rejects precisely the antibodies that would save it.

So the question I’d leave in your next budget meeting isn’t “should we do a TikTok.”

A year ago I had to answer that question about my own career. The lease was over. Building was slower, lonelier, and statistically unreasonable. Twelve months later, the attention I own — small as it is — brings me clients the rented kind never did.

Brands are about to learn the same lesson. The only choice is whether to learn it before the lease runs out.

___________

Sources: Innosight Corporate Longevity Forecast · Box Office Mojo / Variety (Backrooms, FNAF) · Bloomberg / Fortune / Sacra (Feastables, Liquid Death) · Circana / City AM (Prime) · ACEA / JATO (BYD) · Circana / PLMA (private label) · Emarsys-SAP loyalty research 2025.

__________

L’attenzione in affitto è un asset che si scioglie. Lo so — la mia l’ho persa.

Un anno fa pensavo che la mia carriera fosse finita.

Non perché fossi senza lavoro. Perché non avevo più un’identità. Per vent’anni mi ero presentato attraverso i loghi sulle mie slide — FOX, Disney. Vendere attenzione su larga scala era il mio mestiere. Poi le slide sono sparite, e con loro, a quanto pareva, anch’io.

Ci ho messo un po’ a capire cosa fosse successo davvero. La mia identità era stata in affitto. Apparteneva ai brand che rappresentavo, e quando il contratto è scaduto è tornata al proprietario.

Te lo racconto perché ai brand sta succedendo la stessa cosa. Solo che non se ne sono ancora accorti.

Ecco il numero che dovrebbe tenere sveglio un CMO la notte. Nel 1958 un’azienda restava nell’indice S&P 500 in media 61 anni. Oggi siamo intorno ai quindici, in discesa verso dodici, secondo la ricerca di Innosight sulla longevità aziendale. Metà dell’indice si rinnoverà entro un decennio. Il modello classico di brand building — affittare attenzione su larga scala, anno dopo anno, finché la familiarità si indurisce in equity — presuppone che tu abbia decenni davanti. Non li hai.

E mentre il modello lento esaurisce la pista, succede qualcos’altro. È successo di nuovo due settimane fa.

A fine maggio è uscito un film, Backrooms. Budget: sotto i 10 milioni di dollari. Campagna marketing: praticamente nessuna. Risultato: 81 milioni di dollari di apertura solo negli Stati Uniti — il più alto nella storia di A24, il triplo del record precedente dello studio — e oltre 212 milioni nel mondo in dieci giorni, il film più redditizio mai distribuito da A24, diretto da un ventenne al suo primo film. Il più giovane regista di sempre ad aprire un film al primo posto.

Solo che non era il primo. Lo costruiva da quattro anni, su YouTube, con il suo pubblico, 190 milioni di visualizzazioni alla volta. Backrooms nasce nel 2019 come folklore di internet: la foto di un ufficio giallo e vuoto, e una community che non smetteva di costruirci sopra. Nessuno lo possedeva, quindi lo possedevano tutti. Quando A24 ha venduto il primo biglietto, il marketing era già stato fatto — gratis, dal pubblico, con anni di anticipo.

Se stai pensando a The Blair Witch Project, hai ragione a metà — e il confronto merita una pausa. 1999: tre registi sconosciuti girano un horror con un budget tra i 35.000 e i 60.000 dollari; il film finito, dopo la post-produzione, costa qualche centinaio di migliaia. Artisan lo compra al Sundance per poco più di un milione, costruisce una campagna travestita da realtà — un sito che insisteva che gli studenti fossero spariti davvero, volantini di persone scomparse distribuiti al festival — e spende, secondo le stime, 6-8 milioni di dollari solo di marketing domestico. Il film incassa 248,6 milioni nel mondo. Era il copione di Backrooms, eseguito alla perfezione, una volta sola.

Ma ecco quello che mi colpisce di più, quasi trent’anni dopo: il fenomeno è morto lì. A YouTube mancavano sei anni. Non c’era una piattaforma dove quella community potesse continuare a costruire, nessun posto dove il mito potesse vivere tra la sala e il nulla. Blair Witch ha dovuto fingere la partecipazione perché la partecipazione vera non aveva ancora un’infrastruttura. Il mito ha toccato il picco al botteghino ed è evaporato. Backrooms ha percorso la sequenza al contrario: prima quattro anni di partecipazione vera, che fa compounding — poi l’uscita al cinema come raccolto. Stesso trucco, separati da tre decenni di infrastruttura. Uno affittava l’illusione di una community. L’altro ne possiede una vera. E continuo a chiedermelo: cosa sarebbe diventato Blair Witch con YouTube sotto?

Quindi ecco la mia tesi, e passerò il resto del pezzo a guadagnarmela coi numeri:

Il capitale culturale del brand ha un nuovo modello di generazione. Non si accumula più lentamente attraverso attenzione affittata. Si genera in fretta, attraverso la partecipazione — attenzione scelta, di proprietà, che fa compounding. Decade anche più in fretta, fallisce molto più spesso, e non si compra a listino. Non sono qui per dirti che il vecchio modello è morto, né per difendere quello nuovo. Sono qui per aiutarti a distinguerli — perché il tuo budget media, oggi, non ci riesce.

So come va a finire questa storia. Ho affittato per vent’anni. Poi ho dovuto imparare a possedere.

È un pattern, non un biglietto della lotteria

Un film virale è un aneddoto. Allora lasciamo il cinema e andiamo nella categoria meno glamour che esista: una barretta di cioccolato.

MrBeast ha lanciato Feastables nel 2022. I ricavi sono passati da 33 milioni quell’anno a 96 milioni nel 2023 a 250 milioni nel 2024 — con 20 milioni di utile. Le proiezioni per il 2025 si aggirano sul mezzo miliardo. È sugli scaffali di oltre 30.000 punti vendita.

Ora il dettaglio che conta. Nel 2024 la divisione media di MrBeast — il canale YouTube con oltre 100 miliardi di visualizzazioni storiche, lo show su Amazon — ha perso circa 80 milioni su 246 di ricavi. La barretta di cioccolato ha guadagnato più del canale più visto nella storia del mezzo.

Rileggilo dalla sedia di un media planner. Il contenuto non è il prodotto. Il contenuto è il substrato — il luogo dove l’attenzione si accumula, donata, anni prima che ci sia qualcosa da vendere. La barretta è solo ciò che ci si attacca. E persino la barretta è partecipata: le promozioni “golden ticket” trasformano ogni acquisto in un biglietto della lotteria per comparire in un video. I fan non comprano cioccolato. Comprano una quota nella storia.

Il meccanismo ha un nome in economia comportamentale: l’effetto dotazione. Le persone difendono e diffondono ciò che hanno contribuito a costruire. L’attenzione affittata ti compra reach. La partecipazione rende il pubblico comproprietario del significato — e i comproprietari fanno il tuo marketing al posto tuo, con più credibilità di qualsiasi campagna tu possa comprare. Ecco perché Backrooms “non aveva bisogno di marketing”. Il marketing era la community.

E se due categorie non bastano, prendine una terza: Five Nights at Freddy’s, un videogioco indie costruito in una cameretta nel 2014, la cui lore è stata assemblata collettivamente da dieci anni di canali YouTube di teorie. L’adattamento cinematografico del 2023 ha aperto a 80 milioni — l’horror col maggiore incasso dell’anno. Il sequel, lo scorso dicembre, ha aperto a 63 milioni e superato i 200 milioni nel mondo mentre il resto del listino dello stesso studio arrancava.

Una creepypasta, una barretta di cioccolato, un videogioco fatto in cameretta. Tre categorie, un solo motore. Non è fortuna. È infrastruttura — vent’anni di YouTube maturati in un sistema di generazione di IP.

Stesso scaffale, destini opposti

È qui che dovrei dirti che il nuovo modello vince sempre. Non è così. E la prova più pulita sta in un’unica categoria di prodotto: acqua in lattina, con la faccia di celebrità di internet.

Caso uno: Prime, lanciato nel 2022 da Logan Paul e KSI — un pubblico combinato di 60 milioni di iscritti. Picco: circa 1,2 miliardi di vendite globali nel 2023, un miliardo di bottiglie in meno di due anni, per un attimo più di Gatorade da Walmart. Nel Regno Unito i rivenditori mettevano l’antitaccheggio sulle singole bottiglie.

Poi: entro fine 2025 le proiezioni di ricavi erano crollate di circa il 76% dal picco, a circa 300 milioni. Nel Regno Unito i ricavi sono scesi da 112 a 33 milioni di sterline in un solo anno. Quota nel mercato degli sport drink: dal 41% al 10%. Le bottiglie che si rivendevano a 1.200 sterline ora stanno nei cestoni delle svendite a 31 penny.

Le cause su sostanze chimiche e contenuto di caffeina si sono accumulate dal 2023 — ma erano acceleranti, non il motore. La vulnerabilità più profonda era strutturale: l’attenzione affittata non ha fiducia accumulata per assorbire uno shock. Coca-Cola è sopravvissuta a decenni di polemiche su zucchero e plastica; Prime non aveva fedeltà stratificata da spendere, solo trend. E affittare attenzione da una persona significa ereditarne l’intero profilo di rischio — il brand era ostaggio della reputazione dei suoi fondatori, controversie passate incluse. L’attenzione di proprietà distribuisce il rischio su una community. Quella affittata lo concentra in un unico punto di rottura.

Caso due: Liquid Death. Il fondatore Mike Cessario ha mandato pubblicità video sui social prima che il prodotto esistesse — voleva sapere se l’attenzione fosse reale prima di costruire l’azienda. Ricavi: 45 milioni nel 2021, 110, 263, 333 milioni nel 2024. Valutazione: 1,4 miliardi. 133.000 negozi. La crescita rallenta — dal 139% al 27% — ma rallentare non è crollare. La curva si appiattisce, non precipita.

Stesso scaffale. Stesso copione in superficie — celebrità, contenuto, spettacolo. Esiti opposti. Perché?

Prime ha affittato la fama dei suoi fondatori. Un’unica, geniale esplosione di scarsità e FOMO — e quando la distribuzione ha ucciso la scarsità, la ragione d’acquisto è evaporata. L’attenzione è sempre appartenuta a Logan Paul e KSI; il brand era in subaffitto. Liquid Death possiede la sua attenzione: un motore di intrattenimento che gira di continuo, una community che mette in scena il brand (sul loro sito puoi letteralmente “vendere l’anima”), un asset che fa compounding invece di scadere.

È questa la distinzione che voglio tu porti al prossimo budget meeting: attenzione in affitto contro attenzione di proprietà. L’attenzione affittata è reach che paghi sull’inventory di qualcun altro, e si ferma nel momento in cui smetti di pagare. L’attenzione di proprietà è un pubblico che ti ha scelto, che partecipa, e che continua a lavorare tra una campagna e l’altra. La prima è un costo operativo. La seconda è un asset di capitale.

E i tassi di decadimento non sono uguali. La fedeltà che i brand credono di avere è in larga parte del tipo fragile — da punti, sconti, abitudine: secondo l’indice Emarsys 2025, solo il 29% dei consumatori dichiara un attaccamento reale a un marchio, e il resto evapora nel momento in cui arriva un’alternativa più economica o più di moda. Se il tuo brand vive di trend, muore secondo calendario.

“È roba da Gen Z” — l’obiezione, e perché è peggio di quanto pensi

Ogni volta che presento questa tesi a un’audience di brand legacy, si alza sempre la stessa mano. Belle storie. Creepypasta e barrette di cioccolato. I nostri clienti sono adulti che comprano cose serie.

Bene. Prendiamo l’acquisto più adulto e ad alto coinvolgimento che una famiglia faccia: l’auto.

BYD — un marchio che cinque anni fa la maggior parte degli europei non sapeva nominare — ha venduto circa 2,25 milioni di auto elettriche nel 2025, superando Tesla a livello globale per la prima volta. In Europa ha triplicato le vendite e ha superato Tesla mese dopo mese dalla metà del 2025, portando la sua quota UE dallo 0,4% all’1,5% in un solo anno. Le persone consegnano decine di migliaia di euro a un marchio con zero equity accumulata nel loro mercato.

Oppure guarda l’audience più mainstream e più matura che esista: chi fa la spesa. La marca del distributore ha raggiunto un record del 50% di quota a volume nei sei maggiori mercati grocery europei — 59% in Spagna, 52% nel Regno Unito e in Germania, 36% e in crescita in Italia. Centinaia di miliardi di euro che un tempo passavano per l’equity “insostituibile” del brand, finiti alla marca del retailer.

Ora, onestà intellettuale — perché è qui che la maggior parte delle analisi su questo tema bara. BYD e private label non sono fenomeni partecipativi. Nessuno co-costruisce un mito attorno alla pasta a marchio del distributore. Sono disruption di valore: prezzo migliore, prodotto buono o migliore.

Ma è proprio per questo che appartengono a questo discorso. I brand legacy sono schiacciati da due forze convergenti, non una. Dal basso, la generazione partecipata — Backrooms, MrBeast, Liquid Death — che costruisce capitale culturale più in fretta di qualsiasi piano media. Di lato, la disruption di valore — BYD, private label — che dimostra come vent’anni di equity accumulata siano un fossato molto più basso di quanto creda il bilancio. Si attraversa in tre anni, da chiunque abbia un’offerta migliore.

Il vecchio brand di fascia media — costruito su attenzione di massa affittata, difeso dalla familiarità — è preso in mezzo tra le due. Una forza la puoi affrontare con la strategia media. L’altra no: nessuna quantità di attenzione di proprietà ti salva se la marca del retailer vale davvero di più. Quello è un problema di operations travestito da problema di marketing, e non ti venderò la comunicazione come cura. Capire quale delle due ti sta mangiando è la prima decisione vera.

Cosa può fare davvero un brand legacy

Se la disruption è partecipativa — quella a cui la strategia media può rispondere — ci sono tre mosse. Ognuna con il suo punto di rottura, perché è la parte che la versione da keynote omette sempre.

Primo: invertire lo stack. Il modello legacy fa prima il prodotto e affitta media per spingerlo. Il modello nuovo costruisce prima un asset di attenzione e ci appende i prodotti. Non è nemmeno una novità: Michelin l’aveva capito nel 1900, quando un’azienda di pneumatici pubblicò una guida che diventò l’autorità mondiale sui ristoranti — un asset di contenuto sopravvissuto a ogni campagna pubblicitaria mai fatta nella categoria, e che vende ancora pneumatici facendo venire alla gente voglia di guidare da qualche parte. La provocazione, detta chiara: il tuo budget media oggi è una spesa operativa che affitta attenzione in decadenza; una parte dovrebbe diventare spesa in conto capitale su un asset di attenzione di tua proprietà.

Per essere chiari, questo non è un argomento contro la pubblicità. La reach a pagamento fa ancora ciò che nient’altro fa — mantiene la mental availability, difende l’equity a scaffale, raggiunge persone che la tua community non toccherà mai. L’argomento è contro la pubblicità come unica voce: 100% affitto, 0% proprietà. E sì, i contabili obietteranno che il marketing non può stare a bilancio con gli standard attuali. Va bene — trattalo come capex nella governance, non nella contabilità: un orizzonte pluriennale, un responsabile che risponde dell’asset, una mentalità da ammortamento invece che da campagna. Il vincolo resta: la finanza aziendale è costruita per trattare il media come un costo da ottimizzare al ribasso. Se il tuo CFO non sa finanziare la pazienza, non puoi giocare questa partita.

Secondo: aprire la partecipazione — sul layer giusto. Non puoi rendere co-costruibile l’utilità core di un prodotto serio; nessuno fa crowdsourcing degli impianti frenanti. Ma puoi aprire un canale governato sul layer del significato. LEGO Ideas lo fa da quasi vent’anni: i fan progettano i set, la community vota, i vincitori vanno in produzione col nome del creatore sulla scatola. Partecipazione vera, governance vera. Il vincolo: funziona solo se cedi davvero una fetta di autorialità. La partecipazione recitata — il concorso pilotato, la campagna UGC addomesticata — viene fiutata all’istante e produce l’opposto della fiducia.

Terzo: scorporare, e accettare la matematica. La tua equity accumulata è insieme il tuo asset e la tua prigione: troppo downside per lasciare che il brand madre giochi una partita aperta e ad alta varianza. Quindi separi piccole scommesse senza equity da proteggere, isolate da un firewall così che un fallimento non contamini la casa madre. È la forma organizzativa di una verità scomoda: i fenomeni partecipativi seguono una power-law. Per ogni Backrooms ci sono diecimila meme morti. Non puoi ingegnerizzare il successo; puoi solo permetterti molti tentativi a basso costo. Il vincolo è la governance: il genitore quasi mai resiste all’impulso di controllare, e “posseduto da una multinazionale” può uccidere proprio l’autenticità che lo scorporo doveva trovare.

L’ostacolo vero non è la strategia

Nota cosa hanno in comune queste tre mosse. Nessuna è concettualmente difficile. Invertire lo stack, cedere un po’ di autorialità, tollerare le scommesse morte, finanziare la pazienza. Qualsiasi team strategico scrive quella presentazione entro venerdì.

Ciò che le accomuna è che ognuna viola il sistema operativo di un’organizzazione legacy. Budget media trimestrali. Brand guideline come documenti legali. Comitati di rischio. Il riflesso istituzionale per cui l’autorità arriva col logo. Ho passato vent’anni dentro quel sistema; ne conosco intimamente la risposta immunitaria. Rigetta proprio gli anticorpi che lo salverebbero.

Quindi la domanda che lascerei al tuo prossimo budget meeting non è “facciamo un TikTok?”.

È questa: quanta parte del tuo budget media è affitto, e quanta è proprietà? E chi, nella tua governance, ha davvero il mandato di costruire invece di noleggiare?

Un anno fa ho dovuto rispondere a quella domanda sulla mia carriera. Il contratto d’affitto era finito. Costruire era più lento, più solitario e statisticamente irragionevole. Dodici mesi dopo, l’attenzione che possiedo — per quanto piccola — mi porta clienti che quella affittata non mi ha mai portato.

I brand stanno per imparare la stessa lezione. L’unica scelta è se impararla prima che scada il contratto.

Fonti e dati

Permanenza nell’S&P 500: Innosight, Corporate Longevity Forecast (aggiornamento 2021). Incassi Backrooms: Deadline e Variety, giugno 2026 (dati all’8 giugno 2026 — film ancora in sala). Blair Witch Project: The Hollywood Reporter (acquisizione Artisan e spesa marketing); Box Office Mojo (incassi). Feastables / Beast Industries: dati aziendali riportati da Bloomberg e Business Insider, 2025. Prime Hydration: dati retail Circana e proiezioni aziendali riportati da City AM e Bloomberg; dettagli sulle cause da atti dei tribunali distrettuali USA (N.D. Cal. e S.D.N.Y.) riportati da Reuters e USA Today. Liquid Death: ricavi e round di finanziamento dichiarati dall’azienda, riportati da Forbes e CNBC. Five Nights at Freddy’s: Box Office Mojo; Deadline. BYD Europa: report vendite aziendali; dati immatricolazioni JATO Dynamics e ACEA, 2025. Marca del distributore: PLMA International e Circana, Private Label in Western Europe 2025; NIQ. Fedeltà al brand: SAP Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index 2025; McKinsey & Company, State of the Consumer 2025.

Cosmico ha preso il business più vecchio del mondo — lo staffing, cioè affittare professionisti alle aziende — e l’ha reso una cosa che la gente vuole. Da una parte e dall’altra: i freelance ci vogliono entrare, le aziende ci vogliono lavorare. Pochi giorni fa ha chiuso un round da 12 milioni e punta a 100 milioni di fatturato. In questa puntata Matteo Roversi, co-founder e Chief Community Officer, mi ha raccontato come.

Non è una storia di tecnologia. È una storia di posizionamento. Te la spacchetto in cinque mosse.

1. Il business più vecchio del mondo, reso sexy

TL;DR — Cosmico non ha inventato un mercato nuovo. Ha preso lo staffing, la cosa più banale che esista, e ne ha riscritto la percezione. È branding, non innovazione di prodotto.

Roversi lo dice senza giri: il modello economico, sotto, è classico, esiste da una vita. La domanda che gli fanno gli amici è sempre la stessa — come avete fatto a prendere una roba così vecchia e renderla cool?

La risposta è la definizione stessa di branding: rendere straordinario ciò che è normale, e familiare ciò che sembra straordinario. Hanno lavorato prima di tutto sull’identità e sui vincoli: cosa Cosmico non avrebbe mai accettato. Da lì sono nati i principi — il lavoro come scelta reciproca tra azienda e professionista, le ville di co-living, la community. La commodity è rimasta uguale. È cambiato tutto il resto.

2. Perché NON hanno copiato Upwork

TL;DR — Posizionarsi è anche dire dei no clamorosi. Importare il modello USA in Italia li avrebbe distrutti. Hanno scelto l’opposto della piattaforma scalabile: un modello umano, relazionale, “non scalabile”.

Sul sito di Cosmico non trovi la lista dei professionisti con i prezzi a confronto, alla Upwork o Fiverr. Se vuoi lavorare con loro, parli con una persona. Quella persona, in mezzo, è ciò che garantisce equilibrio nella trattativa tra chi offre lavoro e chi lo cerca.

«Se la fai vedere a un americano ti dice che siamo pazzi, perché non è scalabile» — e infatti è una scelta, non un limite. In un mercato pieno di storture (price-sensitivity, freelance trattato come “lo sfigato che tira a campare”), hanno deciso di mitigare le storture invece di cavalcarle. Posizionamento per sottrazione: vinco perché rinuncio a quello che fanno tutti.

3. Innovare un mercato saturo

TL;DR — Visione enorme, ingresso chirurgico. Non hanno provato a cambiare tutto il mercato del lavoro subito: sono partiti dal segmento già pronto e poi hanno allargato.

Cosmico ha un progetto ambizioso.: ridefinire il rapporto tra esseri umani e lavoro. Ingresso: il segmento che già lavorava così — società di consulenza, network creativi, agenzie.

Quella fetta era l’80% del fatturato. Poi 70%. Oggi è intorno al 50%, perché si sono aperti a scale-up tech e grandi aziende. La visione non si è annacquata: si è realizzata per gradi. È la differenza tra avere un’idea e avere una traiettoria.

4. L’azienda che si comporta da media company

TL;DR — Questa è la parte che vale il biglietto. Cosmico spende come una media company e fattura come una società di talenti. Il prodotto vero non è il servizio: è la community.

La frase della puntata: «Quasi nessuno sa come fa i soldi Cosmico. Tutti sanno che è una media company.»

Producono una quantità enorme di contenuti — social, newsletter, video, un evento quasi ogni giorno — e ci spendono cifre che, viste dall’esterno, sembrano fuori di testa. Non è una voce “adv” nel budget: sono persone pagate per fare ricerca e produzione su come cambia il lavoro. Perché quel contenuto alimenta una domanda e costruisce l’unico asset che, dicono loro, conta davvero: la community.

È il ribaltamento che predico da sempre. Non parti dal prodotto e ci attacchi sopra la comunicazione interruttiva. Parti da qualcosa di utile, costruisci attenzione (non esposizione) dal basso, diventi un media che genera attenzione significativa — e quell’attenzione diventa mercato. Per chi fa marketing B2B, dove tutti gridano “la fuffa del branding”, è il caso-studio da mostrare.

5. Sta iniziando a piovere

TL;DR — L’AI azzera i vantaggi acquisiti. Chi era primo può sbattere alla prima curva; chi era ventesimo può vincere. La domanda non è “come mi difendo”, ma “dove si sta spostando il valore”.

La metafora con cui Roversi chiude è bellissima: siamo in una corsa di macchine e all’improvviso comincia a piovere — e pioverà tutti i giorni, finché non emergerà un clima nuovo. In quelle condizioni la macchina migliore conta meno. Tutto si rimescola.

Per questo il ruolo di Cosmico sta migrando: non “ti proteggo dal caos” (impossibile), ma “ti aiuto a capire dove va il valore del lavoro”. E qui la tesi più affilata: i loro “super agent” non sono le macchine, sono le persone — professionisti aumentati che decidono cosa farci con l’intelligenza disponibile. Il 99% del lavoro cognitivo lo faranno le macchine. La domanda umana resta: tu, di tutto questo, che cosa vuoi fare?

Cosa ti porti a casa (anche se non sei Cosmico)

Nessuno deve diventare imprenditore come Matteo. Ma il principio vale per un’azienda da 100 milioni come per una company of one che lavora da casa con un PC e un microfono:

• Il posizionamento batte il prodotto. La commodity la vendono in mille. Come la racconti, no.

• Costruisci attenzione, non esposizione. Un media tuo, dal basso, che crea domanda — non spot che la interrompono.

• Usa l’AI come amplificatore cognitivo, non come esecutore seriale per sistemare le mail al capo.

La regola finale, rubata alla chiusura della puntata: non serve un nuovo master, non serve mollare tutto e coltivare un campo in Costa Rica. Serve solo non restare fermi.

Se questa ti è arrivata, inoltrala a un marketer che ha bisogno di sentirsela dire.

The product announcements were the wrapping: Ask Advisor, ad formats built for AI Mode, a Universal Cart, native checkout straight from the ad, Direct Offers fired at the high-intent moment. The subtext stayed constant — we’ll arrange the meeting between your product and the buyer who’s ready today, click by click. Need a video? Make it with AI. Need a creator? We have a library. Need a publisher? That’s an anachronism we’ll handle for you.

It’s an effective message, and it’s largely true. For the 5% of your potential buyers who are in-market right now and actively looking to purchase, Google and its peers are spectacular machines — granular, measurable down to the millimeter. The problem is the other 95%. And the way the system is trying to sell it.

The pattern no one is naming

Different players, same product: forced exposure plus a measurement layer. The 30-second spot didn’t die — it got refinanced.

Lift your eyes from the Google announcement to the wider landscape and a pattern emerges that’s worth naming explicitly, because I haven’t yet heard it framed the way it should be.

Every major player in video advertising — old and new — has converged on the same underlying model: forced exposure plus a proprietary measurement layer. The forcing is the heart of it. It’s interruption made mandatory by the mechanics of consumption: the pre-roll you can’t skip, the ad that fires when you hit pause, the video the feed slots between one piece of content and the next. The difference between players isn’t structural, it’s a matter of degree — targeting granularity, attribution precision, and how hard the forcing pushes: from the live ad you can’t skip, to the pause-screen ad, to the in-feed video you can scroll past in a second. The intensity varies; the nature doesn’t. Even the softest version is still an intrusion. And the product sold to the brand stays invariant: a message placed in front of a consumer who came for something else, made unavoidable enough — by the mechanics of the medium — to count as a view.

Google’s YouTube generated $40.4 billion in ad revenue in 2025, selling pre-roll and mid-roll. For scale: YouTube alone bills more than the entire global influencer marketing industry. Amazon’s Prime Video Ads bolts the 30-second spot onto its existing sponsored-search inventory, bridging exposure and shopper graph. Netflix, the last holdout, opened its ad-supported tier in 2022; it now reaches 250 million monthly active users, with ad revenue tracking toward $3 billion in 2026. Meta and TikTok sell in-feed video: forcing camouflaged inside the scroll. Linear TV, for its part, defends its territory with major live events — sports, award nights — where the forcing keeps a natural strength, because you can’t skip live.

What the system calls “advertising innovation” is really an upgrade to the measurement layer applied to a format that already existed. The 30-second spot isn’t dead; it’s been refinanced. Yet however much you optimize it, forced exposure remains a forcing — an intrusive model the mechanics of consumption make mandatory, and one the industry keeps refining instead of rethinking.

The creators got colonized too

Creators didn’t escape the system — they got absorbed by it. Two-thirds of the budget surge is performance money rebadged.

A CMO might object: but we invest in creators, and that isn’t forcing, it’s authenticity. You do invest. Let’s look at how.

The global influencer marketing industry was worth roughly $32.55 billion in 2025, up from about $24 billion in 2024. Fifty-four percent of multinational brands planned to raise creator spend (WFA). Numbers that prove the creator economy is a structured reality. But it’s inside these numbers that the subtlest confirmation of the diagnosis sits.

CreatorIQ’s State of Creator Marketing report shows creator-partnership investment grew 171% year over year — but roughly two-thirds of that increase came from reallocated paid media. It isn’t new money leaving the brand-building budget to build something different: it’s performance money, shifted onto creators because creator content has become a more efficient performance channel. CreatorIQ calls this phase the “Era of Efficacy,” describing the integration of creators with “the same performance-validation expectations as a media buy.”

Creators didn’t enter the budget as co-authors of brand meaning. They entered as more authentic performance units, measured on the conversion funnel. There’s a distinction the system is losing: one thing is paying a creator to talk about your product inside their content — camouflaged exposure, performance-driven; another thing is when the creator and the brand are one and the same, and the product is itself the content people choose to consume. That second case happens almost only when the brand is founded by the creator. The advertising market knows how to monetize the first, to the tune of $32 billion a year. The second, it still doesn’t know how to buy.

The signal the capital markets already wrote

Capital markets know how to value meaning once it becomes a company. The advertising market still can’t sell it as a line on the plan.

On May 28, 2025, e.l.f. Beauty — an NYSE-listed mass-market brand with $1.3 billion in revenue — agreed to acquire rhode, a three-year-old skincare brand with ten products total, founded by Hailey Bieber, in a deal worth up to $1 billion: $800 million at closing plus a $200 million earnout, against rhode’s $212 million in trailing revenue — close to 5x. The acquisition closed in August 2025, and on e.l.f.’s own guidance rhode is tracking toward roughly +70% net-sales growth in fiscal 2026.

The type of transaction is worth dwelling on. e.l.f. didn’t buy a product placement inside a piece of Hailey Bieber’s content; it bought the brand she is, in its entirety. A good share of that multiple is growth — rhode is expanding fast. But part of it pays for something a CFO still files under “intangible”: cultural authority built not through forced exposure or paid creator content, but through the narrative construction of a brand that is itself entertainment, part of the feed of the people who follow it. The paradox is the gap. Capital markets will pay close to 5x revenue to own a brand built on meaning, while the advertising market still can’t tell a CMO how to buy the same quality of meaning as a media placement.

The same signal is appearing beyond beauty, and beyond the US. In May 2026, Airbnb led a €49 million round in WeRoad, an Italian travel company built on community rather than on bought reach — capital backing a business whose growth comes from belonging, not from exposure.

There’s a structural disconnect between what the capital markets recognize as asset value and what the advertising market knows how to measure and buy as placement. Wall Street has understood what brand-as-meaning is worth as an acquirable asset. The advertising system hasn’t yet understood how to sell it as placement. And CMOs sit in the middle, with a single vocabulary to justify the spend: that of forced exposure, dressed up as a creator when needed.

The pattern isn’t just holding — it’s accelerating

Every streamer now sells AI agents that plan and buy. The product underneath hasn’t moved — forced exposure, just automated.

At the 2026 upfronts, which wrapped in mid-May, every major streaming player — Netflix, Disney, Amazon, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Fox — announced its own AI agents to help advertisers plan and buy campaigns. It’s the natural evolution of Google’s message: after “you don’t need a media company,” now you don’t need an agency. The tool that decides how much, where and how to buy inventory is being absorbed by the platform that sells that inventory. What stays invariant beneath the automated layer — beneath AI agents, authenticated audience graphs, clean rooms, shoppable carousels — is the product: forced exposure, measured well.

You can see it in the emerging formats too. Netflix launched a vertical feed inside its app in 2025, to compete with the scroll experience of TikTok and Reels. At the 2026 upfront it announced that ads are coming to it. The space that seemed like it might open a different grammar, inside the premium product par excellence, was immediately folded back into ad insertion. When a new format is born, the system applies the sales grammar it already knows — because it’s the only one its own AdOps and the advertiser’s procurement know how to handle at the moment of purchase.

And here is the part the streamers themselves should sit with. They hold the strongest cards in the system: powerful exposure, premium IP, low ad clutter, a direct and intimate relationship with the viewer on the couch. What they don’t yet hold is a different kind of attention. The big screen scores well on the existing attention vendors — Adelaide, TVision, Lumen — because the medium captures eyes; but what those scores measure is attention to an interruption, and the format innovations the streamers tout, from sponsored pause ads onward (Hulu got there first), are innovations of interruption, not new models of attention. The frontier isn’t a cleverer way to interrupt. It’s effective attention: exposure aligned with what the viewer actually cares about, measured on response rather than on delivery. The streamers have the assets to build it; for now the cash incentive keeps them optimizing the old model. But it’s there, in that unoccupied space, that the next cycle will be decided — and it deserves a piece of its own.

The question left on the table

CMOs have great tools for forced attention, none for the chosen kind. Whoever builds that grammar takes the next cycle.

CMOs live a dilemma the system doesn’t help them solve. They have to balance performance and brand. They have exquisite tools to measure and optimize performance — the entire forced-exposure market, from YouTube’s $40 billion to creator marketing’s $32 billion, now with AI agents that plan and buy on their behalf, is at their service. What they lack is a way to assess the investments that build brand through chosen attention rather than imposed attention. So they move brand budget around like a short blanket — pulling it from one medium to the next to sell a little more this quarter — and pour their ingenuity into optimizing interruptive attention, instead of a model that exists but doesn’t yet scale.

And this isn’t the same as the attention vendors the trade already knows. Lumen, Adelaide, TVision and the rest are real, but they sit as paid add-ons bolted onto the same interruptive buy, gauging how much of a forced impression actually landed. The shift I mean is upstream of that, and cultural: treating attention as alignment with what an audience genuinely cares about. Nor is it a luxury for beauty and travel brands. Nothing stops an insurer, or any “unglamorous” category, from building a real cultural connection — the constraint was never the category, it’s that no one yet knows how to buy or measure the connection once it’s built.

Wall Street has already shown what a brand built on meaning is worth to own: close to five times revenue. The advertising system still doesn’t know how to sell the same thing as placement.

The diagnostic question I’ll close on — and the one that opens the next chapter — isn’t which platform will win. It’s another: who will build the measurement-and-buying grammar that lets value built on chosen attention be treated as an asset, rather than sponsored as one more optimized forcing? Because until that grammar exists, the system will keep selling the old thing with better metrics — calling it, each time, innovation.

___________________

Vendiamo esposizione, la chiamiamo attenzione

A Google Marketing Live 2026, il pitch ai brand si è indurito di un grado: con Ask Advisor — un unico agente Gemini che fonde Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center e Marketing Platform — non ti serve una media company per vendere un tostapane. E non ti serve nemmeno un’agenzia. Google passa dritto dall’attenzione all’intenzione, con AI Mode che ha appena superato il miliardo di utenti mensili. Ma quello è ancora una fetta del mercato. Per tutto il resto, il settore continua a vendere esposizione e a chiamarla attenzione. Persino la creator economy, ora a 32 miliardi di dollari globali, è stata risucchiata dentro la stessa logica — mentre Wall Street ha appena pagato quasi cinque volte i ricavi per possedere un brand costruito sul significato, esattamente ciò che il sistema pubblicitario ancora non sa vendere.

Gli annunci di prodotto erano la confezione: Ask Advisor, formati pubblicitari costruiti per AI Mode, un Universal Cart, native checkout direttamente dall’annuncio, Direct Offers sparate nel momento di alta intenzione. Il sottotesto è rimasto identico — l’incontro tra il tuo prodotto e il consumatore pronto a comprare oggi lo organizziamo noi, click dopo click. Ti serve un video? Lo fai con l’AI. Ti serve un creator? Abbiamo una libreria. Ti serve un publisher? È un anacronismo, ce ne occupiamo noi.

È un messaggio efficace, e in larga parte vero. Per quel 5% di potenziali acquirenti già in mercato, attivamente alla ricerca dell’acquisto, Google e i suoi pari sono macchine spettacolari — granulari, misurabili al millimetro. Il problema è l’altro 95%. E il modo in cui il sistema sta provando a venderlo.

Il pattern che nessuno sta nominando

Giocatori diversi, stesso prodotto: esposizione forzata più uno strato di misurazione. Lo spot da 30 secondi non è morto — è stato rifinanziato.

Alza lo sguardo dall’annuncio di Google al panorama più ampio e uno schema emerge che vale la pena nominare esplicitamente, perché non l’ho ancora sentito incorniciato nel modo in cui dovrebbe esserlo.

Ogni grande player della pubblicità video — vecchio o nuovo — è convergito sullo stesso modello di fondo: esposizione forzata più uno strato di misurazione proprietario. La forzatura è il cuore della cosa. È interruzione resa obbligatoria dalla meccanica del consumo: il pre-roll che non puoi saltare, l’annuncio che parte quando metti in pausa, il video che il feed infila tra un contenuto e l’altro. La differenza tra i player non è strutturale, è una questione di grado — granularità del targeting, precisione dell’attribuzione, e quanto duramente la forzatura spinge: dall’annuncio live che non puoi saltare, al pause-screen, al video in-feed che puoi scrollare via in un secondo. L’intensità varia; la natura no. Anche la versione più morbida resta un’intrusione. E il prodotto venduto al brand resta invariante: un messaggio piazzato davanti a un consumatore arrivato per altro, reso abbastanza inevitabile — dalla meccanica del mezzo — da contare come una view.

YouTube di Google ha generato 40,4 miliardi di dollari di ad revenue nel 2025, vendendo pre-roll e mid-roll. Per dare la scala: YouTube da solo fattura più dell’intera industria globale dell’influencer marketing. Amazon Prime Video Ads incolla lo spot da 30 secondi al suo inventario sponsored-search già esistente, fondendo esposizione e shopper graph. Netflix, l’ultimo holdout, ha aperto il tier ad-supported nel 2022; oggi raggiunge 250 milioni di utenti mensili attivi, con ad revenue che traguarda i 3 miliardi di dollari nel 2026. Meta e TikTok vendono video in-feed: forzatura mimetizzata dentro lo scroll. La TV lineare, dal canto suo, difende il proprio territorio con i grandi eventi live — sport, premiazioni — dove la forzatura conserva una forza naturale, perché il live non lo puoi saltare.

Quella che il sistema chiama “innovazione pubblicitaria” è in realtà un upgrade dello strato di misurazione applicato a un formato che esisteva già. Lo spot da 30 secondi non è morto; è stato rifinanziato. Eppure, per quanto tu lo ottimizzi, l’esposizione forzata resta una forzatura — un modello intrusivo che la meccanica del consumo rende obbligatorio, e che il settore continua a raffinare invece che ripensare.

Anche i creator sono stati colonizzati

I creator non sono sfuggiti al sistema — sono stati assorbiti. Due terzi della crescita di budget è denaro performance riallocato.

Un CMO potrebbe obiettare: ma noi investiamo nei creator, e quella non è forzatura, è autenticità. Sì, investite. Vediamo come.

L’industria globale dell’influencer marketing valeva all’incirca 32,55 miliardi di dollari nel 2025, dai circa 24 miliardi del 2024. Il 54% dei brand multinazionali pianificava di aumentare la spesa sui creator (WFA). Numeri che dimostrano come la creator economy sia ormai una realtà strutturata. Ma è dentro questi numeri che siede la conferma più sottile della diagnosi.

Il report State of Creator Marketing di CreatorIQ mostra che l’investimento in partnership con creator è cresciuto del 171% anno su anno — ma circa due terzi di quell’incremento sono arrivati da paid media riallocato. Non è denaro nuovo che lascia il budget brand-building per costruire qualcosa di diverso: è denaro performance, spostato sui creator perché il contenuto creator è diventato un canale performance più efficiente. CreatorIQ chiama questa fase “Era of Efficacy”, descrivendo l’integrazione dei creator con “le stesse aspettative di validazione performance di un media buy”.

I creator non sono entrati nel budget come co-autori di significato di marca. Sono entrati come unità di performance più autentiche, misurate sul funnel di conversione. C’è una distinzione che il sistema sta perdendo: una cosa è pagare un creator perché parli del tuo prodotto dentro il suo contenuto — esposizione mimetizzata, performance-driven; un’altra cosa è quando il creator e il brand sono la stessa cosa, e il prodotto è il contenuto stesso che le persone scelgono di consumare. Quel secondo caso accade quasi solo quando il brand è fondato dal creator. Il mercato pubblicitario sa come monetizzare il primo, fino a 32 miliardi l’anno. Il secondo, non sa ancora come comprarlo.

Il segnale che il mercato dei capitali ha già scritto

Il mercato dei capitali sa valutare il significato quando diventa un’azienda. Il mercato pubblicitario ancora non sa venderlo come riga di piano.

Il 28 maggio 2025, e.l.f. Beauty — brand mass-market quotato al NYSE con 1,3 miliardi di dollari di ricavi — ha accettato di acquisire rhode, un brand skincare di tre anni con dieci prodotti in tutto, fondato da Hailey Bieber, in un’operazione del valore fino a 1 miliardo di dollari: 800 milioni alla chiusura più un earnout da 200 milioni, contro i 212 milioni di dollari di trailing revenue di rhode — vicino a 5x. L’acquisizione si è chiusa ad agosto 2025, e sulla guidance di e.l.f. stessa rhode è in traiettoria per una crescita di circa +70% delle net sales nell’anno fiscale 2026.

Il tipo di transazione merita di essere soppesato. e.l.f. non ha comprato un product placement dentro un pezzo di contenuto di Hailey Bieber; ha comprato il brand che lei è, nella sua interezza. Una buona parte di quel multiplo è crescita — rhode si sta espandendo veloce. Ma una parte paga per qualcosa che un CFO ancora archivia sotto “intangibile”: l’autorità culturale costruita non attraverso esposizione forzata né contenuto creator a pagamento, ma attraverso la costruzione narrativa di un brand che è esso stesso intrattenimento, parte del feed delle persone che lo seguono. Il paradosso è il vuoto. Il mercato dei capitali pagherà quasi 5x i ricavi per possedere un brand costruito sul significato, mentre il mercato pubblicitario ancora non sa dire a un CMO come comprare la stessa qualità di significato come placement.

Lo stesso segnale sta apparendo oltre il beauty, e oltre gli USA. Nel maggio 2026, Airbnb ha guidato un round da 49 milioni di euro in WeRoad, una compagnia di viaggi italiana costruita sulla comunità più che sul reach comprato — capitale che scommette su un business la cui crescita arriva dall’appartenenza, non dall’esposizione.

C’è una disconnessione strutturale tra quello che il mercato dei capitali riconosce come valore asset e quello che il mercato pubblicitario sa misurare e comprare come placement. Wall Street ha capito quanto vale brand-as-meaning come asset acquisibile. Il sistema pubblicitario non ha ancora capito come venderlo come placement. E i CMO siedono nel mezzo, con un solo vocabolario per giustificare la spesa: quello dell’esposizione forzata, vestita da creator quando serve.

Il pattern non sta solo tenendo — sta accelerando

Ogni streamer ora vende agenti AI che pianificano e comprano. Il prodotto sotto non si è mosso — esposizione forzata, solo automatizzata.

Agli upfront 2026, conclusi a metà maggio, ogni grande player streaming — Netflix, Disney, Amazon, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Fox — ha annunciato i propri agenti AI per aiutare gli inserzionisti a pianificare e comprare campagne. È la naturale evoluzione del messaggio di Google: dopo “non ti serve una media company”, adesso non ti serve nemmeno un’agenzia. Lo strumento che decide quanto, dove e come comprare inventory viene assorbito dalla piattaforma che vende quell’inventory. Quello che resta invariante sotto lo strato automatizzato — sotto agenti AI, grafi di audience autenticate, clean room, caroselli shoppable — è il prodotto: esposizione forzata, ben misurata.

Lo vedi anche nei formati emergenti. Netflix ha lanciato nel 2025 un feed verticale dentro la sua app, per competere con l’esperienza scroll di TikTok e Reels. All’upfront 2026 ha annunciato che gli ad stanno arrivando anche lì. Lo spazio che sembrava potesse aprire una grammatica diversa, dentro il prodotto premium per eccellenza, è stato immediatamente ripiegato dentro l’ad insertion. Quando nasce un nuovo formato, il sistema gli applica la grammatica di vendita che conosce già — perché è l’unica che il suo AdOps e il procurement dell’advertiser sanno gestire nel momento dell’acquisto.

E qui c’è la parte con cui gli streamer stessi dovrebbero fare i conti. Hanno in mano le carte più forti del sistema: esposizione potente, IP premium, basso clutter pubblicitario, una relazione diretta e intima con lo spettatore sul divano. Quello che ancora non hanno è un tipo diverso di attenzione. Il grande schermo punteggia bene sui vendor di attenzione esistenti — Adelaide, TVision, Lumen — perché il mezzo cattura gli occhi; ma quello che quei punteggi misurano è attenzione a un’interruzione, e le innovazioni di formato che gli streamer sbandierano, dalle sponsored pause ads in poi (Hulu è arrivato per primo), sono innovazioni dell’interruzione, non nuovi modelli di attenzione. La frontiera non è un modo più intelligente di interrompere. È attenzione efficace: esposizione allineata con ciò a cui lo spettatore tiene davvero, misurata sulla risposta più che sulla delivery. Gli streamer hanno gli asset per costruirla; per ora l’incentivo cash li tiene a ottimizzare il modello vecchio. Ma è lì, in quello spazio non occupato, che si deciderà il prossimo ciclo — e merita un pezzo a sé.

La domanda lasciata sul tavolo

I CMO hanno ottimi strumenti per l’attenzione forzata, nessuno per quella scelta. Chi costruirà quella grammatica si prende il prossimo ciclo.

I CMO vivono un dilemma che il sistema non li aiuta a risolvere. Devono bilanciare performance e brand. Hanno strumenti raffinati per misurare e ottimizzare la performance — l’intero mercato dell’esposizione forzata, dai 40 miliardi di YouTube ai 32 della creator economy, ora con agenti AI che pianificano e comprano per conto loro, è a loro disposizione. Quello che manca è un modo per valutare gli investimenti che costruiscono brand attraverso attenzione scelta invece che attenzione imposta. Quindi spostano il budget di brand come una coperta corta — tirandolo da un mezzo all’altro per vendere un po’ di più questo trimestre — e versano la loro ingegnosità nell’ottimizzare l’attenzione interruttiva, invece che su un modello che esiste ma non ha ancora scala.

E questo non è la stessa cosa dei vendor di attenzione che il mercato conosce già. Lumen, Adelaide, TVision e gli altri sono reali, ma siedono come add-on a pagamento bullonati sopra lo stesso acquisto interruttivo, misurando quanto di un’impression forzata è effettivamente atterrato. Lo shift di cui parlo io è a monte, ed è culturale: trattare l’attenzione come allineamento con quello a cui un’audience tiene davvero. E non è un lusso per brand di beauty e travel. Niente impedisce a un’assicurazione, o a qualsiasi categoria “poco glamorous”, di costruire una connessione culturale vera — il vincolo non è mai stato la categoria, è che nessuno ancora sa come comprare o misurare quella connessione una volta che è stata costruita.

Wall Street ha già mostrato quanto vale possedere un brand costruito sul significato: quasi cinque volte i ricavi. Il sistema pubblicitario ancora non sa come vendere la stessa cosa come placement.

La domanda diagnostica con cui chiudo — e quella che apre il prossimo capitolo — non è quale piattaforma vincerà. È un’altra: chi costruirà la grammatica di misurazione e di acquisto che permetterà al valore costruito sull’attenzione scelta di essere trattato come un asset, invece di essere sponsorizzato come l’ennesima forzatura ottimizzata? Perché finché quella grammatica non esiste, il sistema continuerà a vendere la stessa vecchia cosa con metriche migliori — chiamandola, ogni volta, innovazione.

Hi there, the gold rush to sports right distribution is mad. Is really sport the new black in platforms era? Eng-Ita version and a useful TLDR down here. Let’s begin and thanks for following

I was there, inside Fox-Sky Italy. ‘Football like you’ve never seen it before’ wasn’t a tagline — it was a daily editorial promise. Cinematic direction. Commentators who’d turned play-by-play into performance art. Brands were guests, not interruptions. Cost per GRP: €11,000–13,000. Nobody complained. Nobody needed to.

Today, that world is gone. And here’s the punchline: on paper, the new world looks better for brands. More platforms. More inventory. Lower CPMs. Better metrics. More targeting. More data. More everything.

The metrics are excellent. But I argue that nobody is actually paying attention. That’s the paradox this article is about.

The race to the bottom dressed as progress

Over five years, every major platform decided live sport was the one thing worth overpaying for. Amazon: 1B/year for NFL Thursday Night Football. Google: 2B/year for NFL Sunday Ticket. Netflix: 5B over 10 years for WWE Raw, plus boxing, plus Christmas NFL. Apple TV+: exclusive global MLS. DAZN: 6.7 billion in equity burned by its founder, 9.8 billion in future rights commitments, and a 2024 revenue of 3.2B against rights costs of 3.1B+.

The rights arms race has a perverse outcome: the more platforms chase sport, the more ad inventory floods the market, and the lower CPMs fall. When Amazon launched its ad tier in early 2024 at ․24-25 CPM, it triggered a cascade. Netflix dropped from ․55 to ․37. Streaming CPMs fell 20–32% in twelve months.

Four things are happening simultaneously that nobody in the room wants to put on a slide.

First: price falls, impact falls with it — context quality and CPM track together.

Second: these platforms were born on the promise of no ads. Spotify still says it out loud: upgrade if you want a better experience. The brand isn’t a guest. It’s the downgrade notification.

Third: On Netflix the no-ads plan doesn't protect viewers during live sports — ads reach everyone, including those who paid specifically not to see them. On DAZN there is no ad-free tier: you pay up to €70/month and the spots are there regardless. The brand doesn't interrupt someone who “didn't want to be disturbed”. It interrupts someone who already paid not to be disturbed. That's not advertising in a tolerated context. That's advertising in a context of active resentment.

Fourth: fragmentation across six to eight platforms destroys the collective ritual. Without shared ritual, there is no cultural moment. Without a cultural moment, the brand is buying a slot during someone else’s private appointment.

Sources — DAZN: Companies House UK 2024, Sportico; 2025 target ⁄5B: Insider Sport Oct 2025. CPM data: Ad Age 2024, Digiday. Bango Subscription Wars 2024, n=5,000 US subscribers: 78% believe paid subscriptions should never show ads; 71% of sports streaming subscribers leave or upgrade when ads appear.

The P&L that nobody frames on the wall

Sources — DAZN: Companies House UK 2024, Sportico. ESPN: Disney 10-K FY2024; Q3 FY2025: StreamTV Insider Aug 2025. YouTube ST: Morgan Stanley Research 2024. Sky UK: Comcast 2024; PL rights: Premier League Oct 2023. DAZN PIF investment ⁄1B: Sportcal Oct 2025. Netflix/Apple: Sportico/Bloomberg.

After fifteen years of disruption and twenty-plus billion dollars in losses, the streaming industry has successfully rebuilt the thing it was trying to kill: a hybrid subscription-plus-advertising model. The difference is that Sky built advertising as a premium context from day one. OTT platforms retrofitted it as an economic fix onto a product that had promised the opposite. The legacy of ‘ads = you couldn’t afford Premium’ doesn’t disappear because the CFO needs another revenue stream.

The gap nobody talks about: neither Sky nor the click

Here’s the structural problem with CTV sports advertising that gets papered over in every upfront presentation. It borrowed the format from the wrong era and the measurement promise from the wrong channel.

From linear broadcast it took the passive lean-back model: the 30-second spot, the mass interruption, the ‘sit there and watch it’ assumption. That was fine when the broadcaster had premium editorial exclusivity. The interruption happened inside a context the brand actually wanted to inhabit.

From digital it borrowed the promise of performance metrics. But not the thing that makes digital performance real: the click. On desktop, the attribution chain is closed — impression, click, conversion, done. On the living-room TV, that chain breaks. The remote doesn’t browse. QR code scan rates during live sports broadcasts sit at 1-3%. Companion apps lose 70-80% of users within thirty days.

The industry knows this. TripleLift’s 2026 report found that 49% of CTV campaigns still use 15 and 30-second formats designed for linear television. ‘Agencies are built to produce 15s and 30s,’ one executive admitted. Interactive formats — pause ads, overlays, shoppable experiences — are growing (engagement per impression nearly doubled year-on-year to 1.94% in Q2 2025) but remain a marginal experiment. YouTube is introducing ‘Peak Points’: AI that places your ad at the highest-attention moment during a cultural event. It’s progress. It’s still an interruption.

The only genuinely closed-loop exception is Amazon — with a precise perimeter. TNF 2025 viewers were 52% more likely to search for advertiser brands than other NFL audiences (EDO, 2026): that’s search lift, not direct purchase. And the loop only closes for brands that sell on Amazon. Critically, TNF spots are not built ad-hoc for the event — Amazon’s Audience-Based Creative technology serves different existing creatives to different segments, but the format is still the standard 30-second spot, identical to the one running on NBC or CBS. For automotive, insurance, luxury, or any brand without an Amazon storefront, the attribution chain breaks. Long-term brand recall on Prime Video sports remains publicly unmeasured. Completion rate: high. Active mental processing: not guaranteed.

So what are brands actually paying for? A TVision study published in the Journal of Advertising Research (September 2025), tracking second-by-second attention across 1,000+ viewers, found that CTV viewers pay less attention to ads than linear TV audiences — and that attention decays more steeply with each repetition on CTV than on linear. Repeat an ad six times and recall goes up 92%, per Nexxen research. But purchase intent drops 16% from the first to the sixth exposure. In a sports streaming context where frequency is high and the viewer is mentally locked onto the game, not the ad break, that decay curve is brutal.

The sports audience doesn’t ignore ads the way they scroll past a banner. They experience the interruption as a direct violation of the emotional contract they paid to enter. They came for the match. The ad is the price of not being able to afford the tier without one. That’s not attention. That’s hostage-taking. And brands are paying premium rates to be the hostage-taker.

Sources — CTV attribution gap: StreamLayer CTV Live Sports Guide 2026. TripleLift ‘Architecture of Attention’ 2026. Interactive CTV engagement: EMARKETER/BrightLine Q2 2025. Amazon closed loop: INCRMNTAL study 2025. CTV attention decay: Bhan & Rallabandi, Journal of Advertising Research, Sep 2025 (TVision Insights dataset). Ad repetition vs purchase intent: Nexxen research 2024-25, cited MNTN Research Feb 2026.

Gen Z doesn’t watch sport. They watch people watch sport.

43% of Gen Z prefers YouTube and TikTok to any form of television, including paid streaming. Only 31% of sports fans aged 18-24 watch full live matches, against 75% of over-55s. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro has said the relationship with younger viewers is ‘the one thing that keeps me up at night.’ Not Amazon. Not Netflix. Creators.

This generation doesn’t want the institutional commentator reading from a press-box script. They want someone who reacts the way they react, who knows the same memes, who has a take before the referee has blown the whistle. The sports creator on YouTube with 300,000 subscribers who breaks down the formation with hand-drawn slides is not a lesser version of the Sky Studio. It’s a different product entirely — and for a specific audience, a better one.

The American lab: four case studies that aren’t theoretical

The US market has a five-year head start. These aren’t predictions — they’re current operating models with measurable results.

Pat McAfee built the most-watched sports show on YouTube — nearly 3 million subscribers, 3.4 billion X impressions in 2025. Aaron Rodgers announced career decisions live on McAfee’s show before talking to traditional media. ESPN then paid a multi-million dollar deal to license the show. Not hire McAfee. License him. He kept streaming on YouTube simultaneously. The power dynamic has permanently inverted: the broadcaster now pays the creator for access to his audience, not the other way around.

Amazon brought Dude Perfect — 60 million YouTube subscribers — as an alternative commentary stream for Thursday Night Football. Watch the game with traditional commentary or with creators. The result: TNF median viewer age dropped to 47, seven years below the NFL linear average. Same game, three simultaneous streams (classic commentary, creator layer, AI analytics). Three different audiences, three different brand integration opportunities, one event.

Bryson DeChambeau, two-time US Open champion, has 2.69 million YouTube subscribers. He invested over 1M building his own production company. His episode with Trump hit 13 million views. When his LIV Golf contract came up for renewal, he said going YouTube-only was ‘an incredibly viable option’. In April 2026 he co-founded Source Golf — a YouTube network aggregating creator content with centralised ad sales. The athlete is now a media company. The broadcaster needs him more than he needs the broadcaster.

The USGA invites YouTube golf creators to play its courses before the US Open. Lexus is the presenting sponsor: creators get a vehicle, caddies wear branded bibs, flags are co-branded. No spots. No interruptions. Lexus enters the narrative organically. Good Good Golf is valued at 45 million. Callaway treats them as creative co-directors, not sponsor recipients. This is the architecture for UEFA: federation provides access, creator brings audience, brand finances the ecosystem — near zero cost to the federation, global amplification as a by-product.

Sources — Pat McAfee: Stack Influence 2025; On3 2025; CAA Sports Media analysis. Dude Perfect/Amazon TNF: Barrett Media Oct 2023; SVG Oct 2022. DeChambeau: Golf.com Jan 2026; EssentiallySports May 2026; Awful Announcing Apr 2026. USGA/Good Good/Lexus: Digiday Sep 2025; PGA Tour Aug 2024.

YouTube: the only player with the maths to change everything

YouTube generated 60B in revenue in 2025 — more than Netflix (⁄45.2B). Ad revenue alone: 40.4B. Alphabet posted ⁄102B in one quarter. The Sunday Ticket costs 2B/year and loses 1.2B annually. Google absorbs it without blinking.

Let’s imagine it for one moment: YouTube acquires the 2027-2033 Champions League global rights (5.9B/year target per the ongoing Relevent negotiation) plus an international Serie A package (1.8B), total annual cost is around 7.7B — 19% of YouTube’s ad revenue. A loss, yes. A manageable strategic loss for the entity that controls the world’s largest advertising infrastructure and suddenly becomes the global home of football. Different from any bet DAZN or Apple ever made, because Google’s business model doesn’t need the sports rights to generate a direct return. The sports rights generate an ecosystem return — search, discovery, YouTube TV subscriptions, advertising data enrichment, 2.5 billion monthly users who now associate YouTube with football.

Sources — YouTube 2025: Variety Feb 2026. UEFA CL target: Goal.com/The Independent Oct 2025. ESPN sublicensing model: The Wrap Sep 2025. Alphabet Q3 2025: Variety Oct 2025. Sunday Ticket loss: Morgan Stanley Research 2024.

YouTube wouldn’t become Sky. It would become something Sky never was: an open platform where the live event, the creator commentary layer, and the free market of independent voices coexist on the same infrastructure. The Official Creator Roster — journalists-turned-publishers with exclusive locker room access, funded by UEFA as a condition of the rights deal — would replace the studio. The sports journalist doesn’t disappear. They become their own media company, their own brand, their own revenue stream. The broadcaster becomes the pipe. The creator becomes the experience.

What brands actually gain from this — and what they’ve been losing

The creator model solves the three structural failures of CTV sports advertising in one move.

Context: the brand doesn’t interrupt. It participates. The creator’s audience chose to be there. The brand is part of why they stay, not the reason they briefly look at their phone.

Attribution: the creator uses a promo code, a link in description, a swipe. The conversion chain is traceable without needing the TV remote to become a mouse. YouTube’s dynamic brand sponsorships — swappable slots in long-form creator videos, sold to different brands in different markets, with performance dashboards — give advertisers the equivalent of click-level data in a video-native format.

Receptivity: Magnite data shows 67% of live sports streamers pay more attention to ads aligned with their lifestyle and interests. The specialised sports creator is, by definition, interest-aligned. The audience isn’t resisting. They’re leaning in.

A seasonal creator partnership for a sports-specialist channel typically costs $25-50 CPM per thousand video views — comparable on paper to a standard CTV spot. But that unit of comparison is misleading. The creator CPM covers the full editorial context: the trust the audience has built with that creator over years, the narrative integration of the brand, the non-skippable nature of the endorsement and a conversion chain that is traceable through promo codes and links. You are not buying an impression. You are buying participation in a conversation. The Google/Circana MMM data confirms what that difference produces in the long run: 86% higher incremental ROAS than paid social, specifically for creator partnerships.

The cultural barrier is real and worth naming. European media managers do use creators and the industry is growing but still have KPIs built for GRP and linear CPM. Presenting a plan that swaps a ․15 CPM for an €80,000 seasonal creator partnership requires a metrics shift that most planning structures haven’t incorporated. This is the slowest change — and the most expensive one to delay. Because the brands that figure it out first will compound their advantage. The ones that don’t will keep financing the platforms’ rights deals in exchange for the efficient delivery of inattention.

Sources — CTV attribution gap: StreamLayer 2026; TripleLift ‘Architecture of Attention’ 2026. Interactive CTV: EMARKETER/BrightLine Q2 2025. Attention decay: Bhan & Rallabandi, Journal of Advertising Research Sep 2025. Creator partnership CPM: SponsorRadar H1 2025, Viral Nation 2025. Magnite live sports viewer data 2024. ROAS creator +86% long-term vs paid social: Circana MMM meta-analysis commissioned by Google (2025) — 40 MMM models, 10 US CPG brands, creator partnerships specifically — YouTube Creator Marketing Playbook Mar 2026. Distinct from Nielsen MMM (53,153 campaigns, 2022-2024) measuring YouTube AI ads (Demand Gen): +17% ROAS vs digital; YouTube +109% vs linear TV for retail (Google/Nielsen Social Study, 20 studies, 2020-2024). Amazon TNF 52% search lift: EDO Analytics, Amazon Ads Feb 2026. Amazon Audience-Based Creative: Amazon Ads documentation 2025.

The thesis

The market has split into two incompatible worlds. The great mass events — Champions League finals, Olympics, Super Bowl — still work: collective ritual, premium context, brands as participants in a cultural moment. A handful per year, priced accordingly. The everyday match has become an ‘eventlet’: mediocre context, a viewer who paid to avoid exactly this, advertising as the tax on being unable to afford better.

YouTube is the only player with the financial scale, global reach, and advertising infrastructure to rebuild the architecture from scratch — not as a premium closed broadcaster, but as an open platform where live sport, creator commentary, and brand narrative coexist without the structural contradiction. The American examples — McAfee, Dude Perfect, DeChambeau, Good Good Golf — are not experiments. They are the operating model. They work. They scale. They generate measurable value for every party involved.

The brands that understand this first won’t just save money. They’ll own the conversation. Everyone else will keep paying to interrupt it.

TL;DR — IF YOU’RE IN A HURRY

→ Everyone is chasing sports rights. Costs go up. CPMs drop 20-32%. Looks like a win for brands. It isn’t.

→ Streaming platforms were born promising no ads. They added them when the economics broke. The viewer knows. The brand pays to be the symbol of the cheaper plan.

→ Netflix now shows ads during live sports even to no-ad subscribers. DAZN has no ad-free tier. This isn’t advertising in a tolerated context. It’s advertising in a context of active resentment.

→ CTV sports advertising borrowed the format from TV (passive 30-second spots) without the premium context, and the measurement promise from digital without the click. The worst of both worlds.

→ The only real exception is Amazon — but only for brands that sell on Amazon, and with standard spots not built for the event.

→ YouTube generates $60B in revenue annually — more than Netflix. It’s the only player that can buy Champions League rights without needing the sports economics to break even.

→ The model that changes everything: sports creators with exclusive event access, journalists becoming their own publishers, brands entering the narrative instead of interrupting it. Already operating in the US.

→Whoever figures this out first won’t just save on CPMs. They’ll own the conversation

_________________

Hai comprato un’audience.

Hai ottenuto uno schermo.

Il costo reale della pubblicità sportiva nell’era streaming — e il modello che nessuno ha ancora costruito in Europa.

di Emanuele Landi

L’ho vissuto dall’interno, in Fox-Sky Italia. ‘Il calcio come non lo hai mai visto’ non era uno slogan: era un impegno editoriale mantenuto ogni domenica. Regie d’eccezione. Commentatori che avevano trasformato la telecronaca in arte. I brand erano ospiti, non interruzioni. Costo per GRP: €11.000–13.000. Nessuno protestava. Nessuno ne aveva bisogno.

Oggi quel mondo è scomparso. E la cosa curiosa è che, sulla carta, il nuovo mondo sembra migliore per i brand: più piattaforme, più inventario, CPM più bassi, metriche più precise, targeting chirurgico. Sembra un vantaggio competitivo.

Le metriche sono eccellenti. Nessuno sta davvero guardando. Questo è il paradosso di cui parla questo articolo.

La corsa al ribasso travestita da progresso

Negli ultimi cinque anni ogni grande piattaforma ha deciso che lo sport live è l’unica cosa per cui vale la pena strapagare. Amazon: 1 miliardo l’anno per il Thursday Night Football NFL. Google: 2 miliardi per il Sunday Ticket NFL. Netflix: 5 miliardi in dieci anni per il WWE Raw, più la boxe, più le partite di Natale. Apple TV+: MLS in esclusiva globale. DAZN: 6,7 miliardi di equity bruciati dal fondatore, 9,8 miliardi di impegni futuri su diritti, ricavi 2024 pari a 3,2 miliardi contro costi diritti di 3,1 miliardi.

Il risultato paradossale di questa gara al rialzo sui diritti è una gara al ribasso sui CPM. Quando Amazon ha lanciato il suo tier pubblicitario nel 2024 a 24-25 dollari ogni mille impression, ha scatenato un effetto domino: Netflix è scesa da 55 a 37 dollari. I CPM streaming sono calati del 20-32% in dodici mesi.

Il contenuto più costoso della storia dei media sta producendo l’inventario pubblicitario più economico.

Quattro cose stanno accadendo contemporaneamente che nessuno in sala vuole mettere su una slide. Prima: il prezzo scende, l’impatto scende con esso — qualità del contesto e CPM si muovono insieme. Seconda: queste piattaforme sono nate sulla promessa dell’assenza di pubblicità. Spotify lo dice ancora ad alta voce: passa a Premium se vuoi un’esperienza migliore. Il brand non è un ospite dell’evento: è la notifica di downgrade. Terza: e la cosa peggiore non è nemmeno questa. Su Netflix il piano no-ads non protegge lo spettatore durante gli eventi sportivi live — la pubblicità arriva comunque a tutti, anche a chi ha pagato per non vederla. Su DAZN non esiste un piano senza spot: si paga fino a 70 euro al mese e gli spot ci sono lo stesso. Il brand non interrompe chi ’non voleva essere disturbato’. Interrompe chi ha già pagato per non essere disturbato. Non è advertising in un contesto tollerato: è advertising in un contesto di risentimento attivo. Quarta: la frammentazione su sei-otto piattaforme distrugge il rito collettivo. Senza rito condiviso non esiste momento culturale. Senza momento culturale, il brand sta comprando uno slot durante l’appuntamento privato di qualcun altro.

Fonti — DAZN: Companies House UK 2024, Sportico; target 2025 5B$: Insider Sport ott 2025. CPM: Ad Age 2024, Digiday. Bango Subscription Wars 2024, n=5.000 abbonati US: 78% ritiene che i servizi a pagamento non debbano mostrare ads; 71% degli abbonati sport streaming abbandona o fa upgrade quando compaiono gli spot.

I conti che nessuno appende in cornice

Fonti — DAZN: Companies House UK 2024, Sportico. ESPN: Disney 10-K FY2024; Q3 FY2025: StreamTV Insider ago 2025. YouTube ST: Morgan Stanley Research 2024. Sky UK: Comcast 2024; diritti PL: Premier League ott 2023. Investimento PIF/DAZN 1B$: Sportcal ott 2025. Netflix/Apple: Sportico/Bloomberg.

Dopo quindici anni di disruption e venti miliardi di dollari in perdite, il settore streaming ha ricostruito con successo esattamente ciò che stava cercando di distruggere: un modello ibrido abbonamento più pubblicità. La differenza è che Sky aveva costruito la pubblicità come contesto premium fin dall’inizio. Le piattaforme OTT l’hanno innestata come correzione economica su un prodotto che aveva promesso l’esatto contrario. L’eredità psicologica — ‘la pubblicità è la penalizzazione per non aver scelto il piano migliore’ — non scompare perché il CFO ha bisogno di un’altra linea di ricavo.

Il gap che nessuno nomina: né Sky né il click

Il problema strutturale della CTV sportiva non è solo il contesto. È che ha preso il formato sbagliato da due mondi diversi senza ereditare il vantaggio di nessuno dei due.

Dal broadcast lineare ha preso il modello lean-back: lo spot da trenta secondi, l’interruzione passiva, il grande schermo in salotto. Questo era giustificabile quando il broadcaster aveva l’esclusiva editoriale. L’interruzione avveniva in un contesto che il brand voleva abitare.

Dal digital ha preso la promessa delle performance metrics. Ma non il suo asset fondamentale: il click. Su desktop la catena è chiusa — impressione, click, conversione, fatto. Sul televisore quella catena si spezza. Il telecomando non naviga. I QR code durante i live sportivi registrano scan rate tra l’1% e il 3%. L’app companion perde il 70-80% degli utenti entro trenta giorni.

L’industria lo sa. Il report TripleLift 2026 ha rilevato che il 49% delle campagne CTV usa ancora i formati da 15 e 30 secondi progettati per la televisione lineare. Le agenzie sono costruite per produrre 15 e 30 secondi. I formati interattivi — pause ad, overlay, esperienze shoppable — stanno crescendo (il tasso di engagement per impression è quasi raddoppiato anno su anno al 1,94% nel Q2 2025) ma rimangono un esperimento marginale. YouTube sta introducendo i ‘Peak Points’: IA che posiziona lo spot nel momento di massima attenzione durante un evento. È progresso. È ancora un’interruzione.

L’unica vera eccezione è Amazon. I dati proprietari di prima parte permettono di collegare l’esposizione durante il Thursday Night Football a un acquisto successivo. Una ricerca INCRMNTAL su 2 miliardi di dollari di spesa ADV ha trovato che il CTV genera dieci volte più conversioni della TV lineare — dentro l’ecosistema chiuso di Amazon. Fuori da quell’ecosistema, sei di nuovo a reach, frequency e speranza. Si tratta di una sorta di supermercato retail dove il brand può vendere ma non costruire recall, bene per alcune categorie con sales veloce meno bene per altre.

Uno studio pubblicato sul Journal of Advertising Research nel settembre 2025 — basato sui dati secondo per secondo di TVision su oltre mille spettatori — ha dimostrato che su CTV l’attenzione decade più rapidamente di quanto non faccia sulla TV lineare a ogni ripetizione dell’ad. La ricerca Nexxen completa il quadro: la ripetizione aumenta il ricordo del 92% dopo sei esposizioni, ma l’intenzione d’acquisto scende del 16% dalla prima alla sesta. In un contesto sportivo streaming dove la frequenza è alta e lo spettatore è mentalmente altrove durante la pausa, quella curva di decadimento è brutale.

Il pubblico sportivo non ignora gli spot come scorre oltre un banner. Vive l’interruzione come una violazione diretta del contratto emotivo per cui ha pagato. È lì per la partita. Lo spot è il prezzo per non aver potuto permettersi il tier senza.

Fonti — Gap attributivo CTV: StreamLayer CTV Live Sports Guide 2026. TripleLift ‘Architecture of Attention’ 2026. Interactive CTV: EMARKETER/BrightLine Q2 2025. Amazon ecosistema chiuso: INCRMNTAL 2025. Decadimento attenzione CTV: Bhan & Rallabandi, Journal of Advertising Research, set 2025 (dataset TVision Insights). Ripetizione vs intenzione d’acquisto: Nexxen research 2024-25, citato MNTN Research feb 2026.

La Gen Z non guarda lo sport. Guarda persone che guardano lo sport.

Il 43% della Gen Z preferisce YouTube e TikTok a qualsiasi forma di televisione, incluso lo streaming a pagamento. Solo il 31% dei fan sportivi tra i 18 e i 24 anni guarda le partite integrali in diretta, contro il 75% degli over 55. Jimmy Pitaro, chairman di ESPN, ha detto che il rapporto con i consumatori più giovani è ‘l’unica cosa che mi tiene sveglio la notte’. Non Amazon. Non Netflix. I creator.

Questa generazione non vuole il telecronista istituzionale che legge dalla tribuna stampa. Vuole qualcuno che reagisce come reagirebbe lei, che conosce gli stessi meme, che ha un’opinione prima che l’arbitro abbia fischiato. Il creator sportivo su YouTube con 300.000 iscritti che smonta la formazione con slide disegnate a mano non è una versione inferiore dello Studio Sky. È un prodotto diverso — e per un’audience specifica, migliore.

Il laboratorio americano: quattro casi che non sono teoria

Il mercato americano ha cinque anni di vantaggio sull’Europa. Non sono previsioni: sono modelli già in funzione con risultati misurabili.

Pat McAfee ha costruito su YouTube il programma sportivo più visto della piattaforma — quasi 3 milioni di iscritti, 3,4 miliardi di impression su X nel 2025. Aaron Rodgers ha annunciato le sue decisioni di carriera in diretta sulla sua trasmissione prima di comunicarle ai media tradizionali. Nel 2023 ESPN ha pagato un accordo multimilionario per licenziare il suo show — non per assumerlo, per licenziarlo. McAfee continua a trasmettere in parallelo su YouTube. La direzione del potere si è invertita definitivamente: non è il broadcaster che sceglie il commentatore, è il creator che sceglie chi gli conviene distribuire.

Amazon Prime Video ha portato Dude Perfect — 60 milioni di iscritti YouTube — come broadcaster alternativo per il Thursday Night Football. Il ‘TNF with Dude Perfect’ è uno stream parallelo alla partita: gli spettatori scelgono tra la telecronaca classica o quella dei creator. Risultato demografico: l’età mediana del TNF è scesa a 47 anni, sette anni sotto la media NFL lineare. Amazon offre simultaneamente tre stream diversi sullo stesso evento: telecronaca classica, creator commentary, analisi AI in tempo reale. Tre layer, tre audience, tre opportunità di brand su un unico match.

Bryson DeChambeau, due volte campione degli US Open, ha 2,69 milioni di iscritti YouTube. Ha investito oltre un milione di dollari costruendo la propria società di produzione. Il suo episodio con Trump ha raggiunto 13 milioni di views; quello con Steph Curry 16,5 milioni. Quando si è discusso del rinnovo con LIV Golf, ha detto che vivere di solo YouTube e giocare i major era ‘un’opzione incredibilmente percorribile’. Nell’aprile 2026 ha fondato Source Golf con altri creator — una rete YouTube con vendita pubblicitaria centralizzata. L’atleta non ha più bisogno del broadcaster per avere un’audience. Il broadcaster ha bisogno dell’atleta.

L’USGA invita i creator YouTube a giocare sui suoi percorsi nei giorni precedenti gli US Open. Lexus è il presenting sponsor: i creator ricevono un veicolo, i caddie indossano divise con logo US Open, i flag sono brandizzati. Nessuno spot. Nessuna interruzione. Il brand entra nella narrazione in modo organico. Good Good Golf vale 45 milioni di dollari. Callaway li tratta come co-direttori creativi, non come semplici sponsor. Questa è l’architettura per UEFA: federazione che fornisce accesso, creator che porta audience, brand che finanzia l’ecosistema — costo per la federazione quasi zero, amplificazione globale come effetto collaterale gratuito.

Fonti — Pat McAfee: Stack Influence 2025; On3 2025; analisi CAA Sports Media. Dude Perfect/Amazon TNF: Barrett Media ott 2023; SVG ott 2022. DeChambeau: Golf.com gen 2026; EssentiallySports mag 2026; Awful Announcing apr 2026. USGA/Good Good/Lexus: Digiday set 2025; PGA Tour ago 2024.

Lo scenario YouTube: l’unico player con i numeri per cambiare tutto

YouTube ha generato 60 miliardi di dollari di ricavi nel 2025 — più di Netflix (45,2 miliardi). Il solo ad revenue vale 40,4 miliardi l’anno. Alphabet ha registrato 102 miliardi di fatturato in un singolo trimestre del 2025. Il Sunday Ticket costa 2 miliardi l’anno e perde 1,2 miliardi: Google lo assorbe senza battere ciglio.

Se UEFA prezzasse il ciclo Champions League 2027-2033 a 5,9 miliardi l’anno — come emerge dalle trattative in corso con l’agenzia Relevent — e YouTube lo acquisisse insieme a un pacchetto di diritti internazionali Serie A da altri 1,8 miliardi, il costo totale sarebbe intorno a 7,7 miliardi annui. Pari al 19% del solo ad revenue YouTube. Una perdita enorme in valore assoluto. Gestibile come investimento strategico nell’ecosistema più grande della storia del broadcasting: Google Ads più YouTube più 2,5 miliardi di utenti mensili attivi che improvvisamente cercano e guardano calcio sulla stessa piattaforma dove guardano tutto il resto.

YouTube non diventerebbe Sky. Diventerebbe qualcosa che Sky non poteva essere: una piattaforma aperta dove il live, il layer creator e il libero mercato delle voci indipendenti coesistono sulla stessa infrastruttura. Il roster ufficiale di creator — giornalisti sportivi che diventano editori di se stessi, creator affermati con accrediti esclusivi UEFA — rimpiazzerebbe lo studio. Il giornalista sportivo non sparisce: diventa la propria società di media, il proprio brand, il proprio flusso di ricavo. Il broadcaster diventa il tubo. Il creator diventa l’esperienza.

Cosa guadagnano davvero i brand — e cosa hanno perso fin qui

Il modello creator economy sportiva risolve i tre fallimenti strutturali della CTV sportiva standard in un colpo solo.

Contesto: il brand non interrompe. Partecipa. L’audience del creator ha scelto di essere lì. Il brand è parte del motivo per cui restano, non la ragione per cui guardano il telefono.

Attribuzione: il creator usa un codice promozionale, un link in descrizione, uno swipe. La catena di conversione è tracciabile senza che il telecomando diventi un mouse. I dynamic brand sponsorship di YouTube — slot swappabili nei video long-form, vendibili a brand diversi per mercati diversi, con dashboard di performance — danno agli advertiser dati equivalenti al click, in formato video-native.

Ricettività: i dati Magnite mostrano che il 67% degli spettatori di sport in streaming presta più attenzione agli spot allineati ai propri interessi. Il creator sportivo specializzato è, per definizione, allineato agli interessi. L’audience non respinge: si sporge in avanti.

Una partnership stagionale con un creator sportivo specializzato costa tipicamente $25-50 CPM per mille view del video — comparabile sulla carta a uno spot CTV standard. Ma l’unità di misura è fuorviante. Il CPM del creator include il contesto editoriale completo: la fiducia che l’audience ha costruito con quel creator nel corso degli anni, l’integrazione narrativa del brand, la natura non-skippabile dell’endorsement e una catena di conversione tracciabile attraverso promo code e link. Non stai comprando un’impression. Stai comprando la partecipazione a una conversazione. I dati Google/Circana MMM confermano cosa produce quella differenza nel lungo periodo: un ROAS incrementale superiore dell’86% rispetto al paid social, specificatamente per le creator partnership.

La barriera culturale è reale e vale la pena nominarla. I responsabili media europei usano molto i creator e siamo di fronte ad una industria crescente, ma hanno ancora i KPI calibrati su GRP e CPM lineari. Presentare un piano che sostituisce un CPM da 15 dollari con una creator partnership da 80.000 euro per stagione richiede un cambio di metriche che le strutture decisionali non hanno ancora incorporato. Questo è il cambiamento più lento — e il più costoso da ritardare. Perché i brand che lo capiscono per primi non risparmieranno soltanto: possederanno la conversazione. Gli altri continueranno a finanziarla.

Fonti — Gap attributivo CTV: StreamLayer 2026; TripleLift 2026. CTV interattivo: EMARKETER/BrightLine Q2 2025. Decadimento intenzione d’acquisto: Nexxen/MNTN Research feb 2026. Intenzione d’acquisto creator +40%: Spiralytics Creator Economy Report 2025. ROAS creator +86% long-term vs paid social: Google/Circana MMM meta-analysis, 53.153 campagne, 104 settimane, 2022-2024 (YouTube Blog mar 2026; Nielsen MMM commissionato da Google, 2024). Magnite sport streaming viewer data 2024.

La tesi

Il mercato si è spaccato in due mondi incompatibili. I grandi eventi di massa — finali di Champions, Olimpiadi, Super Bowl — funzionano ancora: rito collettivo intatto, contesto premium, brand come partecipanti a un momento culturale. Pochi all’anno, prezzati di conseguenza. La partita quotidiana è diventata un ‘eventino’: contesto mediocre, uno spettatore che ha pagato per evitare esattamente questo, la pubblicità come tassa sull’incapacità di permettersi di meglio.

YouTube è l’unico player con la scala finanziaria, la distribuzione globale e l’infrastruttura ADV per ricostruire l’architettura da zero — non come broadcaster premium chiuso, ma come piattaforma aperta dove lo sport live, il creator commentary e la narrazione di brand coesistono senza la contraddizione strutturale. Gli esempi americani — McAfee, Dude Perfect, DeChambeau, Good Good Golf — non sono esperimenti. Sono il modello operativo. Funzionano. Scalano. Generano valore misurabile per tutte le parti.

I brand che lo capiscono per primi non risparmieranno soltanto sui CPM. Possederanno la conversazione. Tutti gli altri continueranno a pagare per interromperla.

Perché il cambiamento fallisce prima ancora di cominciare? Perché le aziende continuano a cercare il “Gandalf” esterno invece di decodificare l’assetto reale di chi decide, chi blocca e chi teme?

In questa conversazione densa e diretta parliamo di:

→ La resistenza al cambiamento: è biologica, non personale

→ Il “Gandalf esterno”: l’errore più costoso dei leader → La doppia mappa del potere: organigramma ufficiale vs. potere reale → Come gestire gli stakeholder difficili (anche quelli che non sopporti)

→ Le aree grigie come strumento deliberato di potere

→ La “tregua operativa”: come preparare il team al cambiamento vero

→ Accountability: perché fare le domande scomode è l’unica strategia → L’elefante nella stanza — il coraggio di nominarlo

“Se cambi azienda, cambi badge, cambi capo, il problema te lo porti dietro. Ridisegno, non rassegno.”

Un episodio per founder, manager, executive e chiunque stia attraversando — o guidando — una fase di trasformazione.

Another week, another gig for my english - italian followers and subscribers here and on Peaklight. Here you have both language version of my take

Un’altra settimana, un’altro giro di giostra per i miei followers e abbonati qui e su Peaklight. Qui in entrambe le lingue la versione del mio pezzo.

Enjoy and thanks for following.

The year 2026 marks a tipping point for those who control advertising budgets. The strategic agreements between France Télévisions, BBC, and YouTube are not merely distribution headlines; they represent a genetic mutation of the value the medium offers to brands. If linear TV accepts being a mere content provider for the global “tube,” it is abdicating its primary function: acting as the guardian of brand equity.

Beyond the ocean, brilliant minds like claim that “YouTube is TV” due to interface superiority and the capacity to drive new audiences, while prophesies the victory of the Creator Economy. Fascinating theories, but in Europe, they risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy only if we succumb to structural inertia.

Building on my work with international industry hubs, it’s clear that the challenge isn’t technological—it’s about value. For a brand, lasting sales are the result of building three fundamental pillars: Credential Capital, Social Capital, and Cultural Capital.

1. Credential Capital: Beyond the Performance Trap

Credential capital is about function: what the product is for and why to buy it now. This is the realm of “performance,” where YouTube and Walled Gardens dominate with immense volumes at low costs. But sales that endure do not thrive on clicks alone. If a brand invests only here, it becomes a commodity. A TV industry that chases digital volumes on their own turf, selling off inventory, offers brands a tactical fix that fails to build strategic value.

2. Social Capital: TV as the Arena of Collective Trust

Social capital is collective legitimacy: the value derived from the fact that “everyone knows that brand is relevant.” Linear TV, with its moments of shared viewing—from national events to cult fiction—is the only medium capable of creating a common arena.

Europe already has fandoms; they are intergenerational and rooted. But if broadcasters abdicate distribution, they weaken the “social glue” that makes a brand a safe, shared choice rather than just an isolated algorithmic suggestion.

3. The Asset of Cultural Capital

Cultural capital is identity: it is when a brand becomes a symbol. This is built only in high-prestige, curated editorial environments. YouTube seeks out broadcasters precisely because it hungers for their cultural capital. If a brand settles for being distributed anywhere without caring about the environment, it erodes its own prestige.

The Thesis: Certifying Attention Equity

The challenge for the market is about measuring value. We must stop counting heads and start certifying Attention Equity. We don’t need to outrun the tech giants on interface; we need to outclass them on contact quality.

We must impose the Q-GRP (Quality GRP) as a native trading metric:

• Intrinsic Measurement: JICs must certify real contact quality (Completion rate, AVOC, immersiveness) as a native pricing variable.

• Non-negotiable Value: If a publisher guarantees a high-attention, low-dispersion environment, the brand is purchasing social capital, not just “noise.”

• European Federation: This is the only way to offer brands the necessary scale to compete with Walled Gardens while protecting the cultural identity of our markets.

This data art demonstrates to CMOs that while YouTube (even on CTV) offers fragmented attention, a Broadcaster provides a solid core of Attention Equity that directly fuels their three brand capitals.

Source: Market benchmarks derived from public studies by Lumen Research, TVision, and industry effectiveness reports (2025-2026).

In Conclusion

Brands should not seek the lowest price, but the most solid value. If linear TV limits itself to becoming a passive provider, brands lose their most important stage. The challenge for CMOs today is not just “being there,” but being present where attention is a guaranteed, certified asset.

______________________

Perché i Brand dovrebbero preoccuparsi se la TV abdica a YouTube?

di Emanuele Landi

Il 2026 segna un punto di rottura per chi sposta i budget pubblicitari. Gli accordi strategici tra France Télévisions, BBC e YouTube non sono semplici esperimenti di distribuzione: rappresentano una mutazione genetica del valore che il mezzo offre alle marche.

Se la TV lineare accetta di essere un semplice fornitore di contenuti per il “tubo” globale, sta abdicando alla sua funzione primaria: quella di garante dei capitali di marca.

Oltreoceano, menti brillanti come Alan Wolk sostengono che ‘YouTube sia ormai la TV’ grazie alla sua superiorità d’interfaccia, mentre Evan Shapiro profetizza la vittoria della Creator Economy. Tesi affascinanti, che però in Europa rischiano di trasformarsi in una profezia che si autoavvera solo se decidiamo di soccombere all’inerzia strutturale.

Per un brand, la vendita stabile e duratura non è un atto impulsivo, ma il risultato della costruzione di tre pilastri fondamentali che oggi rischiano di essere erosi da un’eccessiva frammentazione distributiva: il capitale credenziale, il capitale sociale e il capitale culturale.

1. Il Capitale Credenziale: Oltre la trappola della pura performance

Il capitale credenziale riguarda la funzione: a cosa serve il prodotto e perché comprarlo ora. È il terreno della “performance”, dove YouTube e i Walled Garden dominano con volumi immensi a basso costo. Ma la vendita che resiste nel tempo non si nutre di soli clic. Se un brand investe solo qui, diventa una commodity. La TV che rincorre i volumi digitali sul loro stesso campo, svendendo inventario, offre ai brand una soluzione tattica che non costruisce valore strategico.

2. Il Capitale Sociale: La TV come arena della fiducia collettiva

Il capitale sociale è la legittimazione collettiva: il valore che deriva dal fatto che “tutti sanno che quel brand è rilevante”. La TV lineare, con i suoi momenti di visione condivisa — dai grandi eventi nazionali alle fiction di culto — è l’unico mezzo capace di creare un’arena comune. Abdicare alla distribuzione significa indebolire quel “collante sociale” che rende un brand una scelta sicura e condivisa, trasformandolo in un’opzione algoritmica isolata in un feed personalizzato.

3. L’asset del Capitale Culturale

Il capitale culturale è l’identità: quando un brand diventa un simbolo. Questo si costruisce solo in ambienti ad alto prestigio e contesti editoriali curati. YouTube cerca i broadcaster proprio perché ha fame del loro capitale culturale. Se il brand si accontenta di essere distribuito ovunque senza curare l’ambiente, erode il proprio prestigio nel lungo periodo.

La tesi: Certificare l’Attention Equity

La sfida per il mercato non è tecnologica, ma di misurazione del valore. Come ho sostenuto nel mio recente contributo per egta nel report “ad pricing models and strategies for multiplatform tv companies”, dobbiamo smettere di contare le teste e iniziare a certificare l’Attention Equity.

Dobbiamo imporre il Q-GRP (Quality GRP) come metrica nativa di trading:

• Misurazione Intrinseca: I JIC devono certificare la qualità reale del contatto (Completion rate, AVOC, immersività) come variabile nativa del pricing.

• Valore non negoziabile: Se un editore garantisce un ambiente ad alta attenzione e bassa dispersione, il brand sta acquistando capitale sociale, non semplice “rumore”.

• Federazione Europea: È l’unico modo per offrire ai brand la massa critica necessaria per competere con i Walled Garden, proteggendo l’identità culturale dei nostri mercati.

Questa opera di data art dimostra ai CMO che, mentre YouTube (persino su CTV) offre un’attenzione frammentata, il Broadcaster garantisce un nucleo solido di Attention Equity in grado di alimentare direttamente i tre capitali di marca.

Fonte: Benchmark di mercato derivati da studi pubblici di Lumen Research, TVision e report sull’efficacia del settore (2025-2026).

In conclusione

I brand non devono cercare il prezzo più basso, ma il valore più solido. Se la TV lineare si limita a diventare un fornitore passivo di piattaforme terze, i brand perdono il loro palcoscenico più importante. La sfida per chi sposta i budget oggi non è “esserci”, ma essere presenti dove l’attenzione è un asset garantito e certificato.