The Streaming Madman walks among you as a colleague and friend as your happy neighborhood heretic. After decades in the digital marketing business, he emerges today fully formed as an analogue and an amalgam, a stylized and synthesized voice expressing the hard bare truths of an industry gone mad.
Every week in this space, that voice will come to life with crackling electricity to incite, inform, and incense our dear readers.
So, to kick things off, here’s a starter pack of facts:
- The advertising business matters to its customers: brands need agencies and adtech to be healthy and to build new capabilities.
- The streaming business needs advertising to fund its current growth trajectory, or we’re looking at a dot-com-bubble level implosion.
- Content owners, distributors, and media agencies are rightly nervous about changes to their business models and are resistant to rapid changes that challenge their businesses’ underpinnings.
So herein lies the friction: How does a national advertising business, inured through decades of martini-field sales lunches, come to terms with the reality of “peak content,” where the long tail of content is every bit as potent as an advertising delivery mechanism as a three-letter network?
How can media planners and buyers know the difference now between something that is locally available (distribution) vs. something that is locally focused (content)? What are the new rules for the players at the table, CTV platforms commanding huge swaths of inventory and binding it with their own first-party data vs. the rights owners with dozens of platform partners, where the T&Cs of how advertising works between them is different in each case?
The Streaming Madman will interrogate these types of questions every week and smother the analysis with a healthy dose of opinion. It’s like adding sriracha to your news feed without the squeeze bottle top to regulate the flow.
And in the spirit of citing sources and giving credit where it’s due, I want to point out the experts in the space that TSM (™) believes are worth following:
- Evan Shapiro – Get his Substack. Today. Like Now. (Media War & Peace)
- Alan Wolk – The godfather of FAST. Go long, go deep. Spike the ball. (TVREV)
- Marion Ranchet – Making the world make sense. (Streaming Made Easy)
- Janko Roettgers – Streaming as part of a broader digital context. (Lowpass)
- Kirby Fucking Grines – Yeah, I said it. He’s the man. Full Stop. (The Streaming Wars)
So study up people. TSM will come at you with ideas and thoughts basically lifted from the brighter lights listed above.
And to close this inaugural issue of the madman, a quick rant:
Empires end, and this is often the more dramatic and exciting chapter than how they became empires.
Does anyone have the date for “The Ascent of Rome”?
No, of course not, because it took centuries. But we’re all taught that 476 AD is when the Western Roman Empire finally ended. I can’t help but think there is a date in the near future that will represent the general consensus of the fall of the first global digital empire: Google.
I’m not rooting for it, actually, because I’ve met the great detractors of Google (Alphabet, whatever), and they are certainly no more moral or upstanding than the pampered folks in Mountain View. In truth, they are every bit as venal, avaricious, and entitled than even the Googlers.
Does anyone really believe that these companies would not press their advantage in the exact same way that Google has, if they had it? Are practitioners and devotees of the “open web” really looking out for everyone’s best interests or is this just convenient cover to take when piling onto a neighborhood bully? And when it comes to streaming, advocating for an “open web” type approach just doesn’t work since the technical mechanics of getting AVOD and FAST to consumers fundamentally requires a series of cooperative intermediaries in a way that being a web publisher just doesn’t.
Anyway, back to empires: Google is getting its walls hammered with flaming poop bombs by the Visigoths at the DOJ. It’s a hell of a spectacle, but I would expect that the thing they hold on to most tightly will be YouTube and will start to offer up all of their aging adtech for divestiture as the price of shooing away these Barbarians from their gate.
Given that YouTube has become the moving image utility that used to be the stuff of science fiction dreams, with literally everything from shoddy DIY to network quality original programming, it’s the thing that will outlast the Google empire now that search is going to be disemboweled by AI.
So that’s it. First issue delivered.
Like it? Hate it? Let us know in the comments. We may cry in our Corn Flakes, but that’s just your average Thursday around here.
This Week’s Music: Sticks and Stones by Nils Loftgren
Rage on,
The Streaming Madman
The views and opinions expressed by The Streaming Madman are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Streaming Wars or its affiliates.
