“In five years I want Romantical to be an emotion and an adjective. I want you walking down the street, looking at a couple sharing a martini in a window at a restaurant, and thinking to yourself—damn, that’s romantical. That’s all I care about.”

That’s Jonah Feingold describing the company he is building. Not a slate. Not a production shingle. A word he wants people to use when they see something that makes them believe in romance again.

It sounds soft until you look at the business underneath it. Romantical is designed to make films, short-form digital series, brand partnerships and live events, all built around one genre identity and one audience. The movies are an output. They’re not the whole business.

Nora Ephron created in two sandboxes—first books like Heartburn, then movies. When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail. Her characters were smart but accessible, funny but grounded, romantic without being overly sentimental. Her name guaranteed a feeling.

Today a writer or producer might pitch something as “Nora Ephron-esque.” That means the work has an essence, a recognizable emotional DNA. The Nora Ephron of right now wouldn’t stop making movies. She’d raise a round and build a company around that feeling so it could live in more places than a movie theater.

That’s what Jonah is attempting. The company is called Romantical.

Jonah the Founder

Jonah is a USC film school grad. He has directed five features already at 35—four of them rom-coms—plus a growing body of work on social. And he has stopped introducing himself as a director.

“Today as a professional, I’ve sort of started introducing myself as a founder. Five years ago I was a director, five years before that I was an aspiring director, and five years before that I was a video editor—which maybe speaks to where we are today.”

I’d been hearing about Jonah and Romantical for a while. As is often the case in the creator world, it took one introduction and a text to get us on Zoom. Jonah pointed out how different that is from Hollywood. Try getting to the head of Sony. First you have to find a path to the person. Then you get an opening in November. Then the meeting gets canceled three times. In this world you text, get on Zoom the next day and might be doing business together a week later.

We talked a few times. He sent me his fundraising deck. I watched his work. He has already raised a meaningful chunk of capital, mostly from friends and family with a few strategic people mixed in. The company is still early enough that some of what follows will change. That is part of what makes it worth looking at now.

Jonah loves the classic rom-coms. He talks about Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder as much as Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers. But he is just as fluent in creator culture, understands algorithms and knows how to wrangle brands into funding content. In other words, he is the Open Garden—the convergence on two feet.

In One Word: Enchantment

I’ve written before about how the biggest creator businesses can be boiled down to a single emotion. MrBeast is survival. Dude Perfect is wonder. The emotional idea travels across movies, television, social, live events and merchandise even when the formats have nothing else in common.

When I asked Jonah for his, he didn’t give me a mission statement. He gave me the couple sharing a martini.

My word for it is enchantment. That’s my word, not his. It’s a real belief in romance and a conspicuous lack of cynicism. It also comes from a genuine place in Jonah. The first movie that made him want to make movies was Hook. He was four, watched it a thousand times, dressed as Captain Hook—the whole thing. Then came L.A. Story, Albert Brooks, Big and You’ve Got Mail. He eventually worked his way backward to Billy Wilder, Lubitsch and Capra.

There is also his doctorate in the creator side. In 2015 he worked at BuzzFeed alongside the Try Guys and Quinta Brunson.

“Everyone gives MrBeast credit for titling and thumbnails. This is all shit that BuzzFeed was teaching us. BuzzFeed invented proprietary software that would put fake thumbnails onto our videos on the BuzzFeed site and rate which ones did better—and then we’d update the YouTube video after. This is before YouTube even allowed thumbnail testing.”

Classical Hollywood on one hand. Thumbnail A/B testing on the other.

The Machine

Romantical is built around Jonah’s simple conviction that it’s silly for a movie to live and die on an opening weekend. So true. I always compare movies to opening a restaurant. You design the menu and the room. You hire great people. You market it. The place starts filling up—and two months later you shut it down. Then you wait two years and hope those patrons find you when you open a completely different restaurant somewhere else.

That’s what a movie is like. So much work goes into building an audience that the business then treats as disposable. Romantical is an attempt to keep the restaurant open.

There’s a personal version too. Jonah was tired of moving from job to job without owning anything—the director-for-hire life, in and out of someone else’s production, no equity, little upside, on to the next one. Almost nobody working on a movie is truly invested in whether it succeeds long term. Backend points exist on paper. They rarely pay out.

Romantical is partly built to change that: give the people making the work real participation, not only a credit and a wrap gift. That is not a minor detail. It’s the commerce part of the system working backward into the community part. Jonah is trying to build ownership into the foundation instead of negotiating for it once everybody is successful.

The machine has three broad engines.

1. Filmettes

Filmettes are short cinematic rom-coms released natively on YouTube. He has already made pieces like Twixmas and I Dumped Four People in One Day. They sit somewhere between an Instagram Reel and a feature, and they function as creative laboratories with an audience attached. You find out whether a character or comic idea lands before anybody commits a feature budget. Each one can be cut into ten or more short-form assets and anchor a month of distribution.

They are also largely paid for upfront by brands. Twixmas was made with Tinder. Skylark funded a location shoot in London for Good to See You 2. The distinction Jonah is drawing is important: the brand isn’t placed into the plot after the fact. It helps create the reason for the plot. The IP gets built without Romantical carrying the entire cash burn.

“Half the time people just want to be cool. They want to send their boss the video on a Monday and say, hey, look what we made.”

He is equally blunt about why the money is hard to close.

“I’ll be talking to the product placement team, the digital brand marketing team, the commercial production team. They’re all different people, sometimes in different states, sometimes in different companies, but representing the same company.”

Every producer who has chased brand money recognizes this. The budgets exist. The people controlling them live in different buildings and operate on different clocks.

2. Features

The features will be financed outside the traditional system where possible: Romantical capital, outside investors, brand partners and economically priced production. Then theatrical distribution and the downstream windows.

One of the first is For the Boys, an R-rated rom-com Jonah describes as Some Like It Hot and Mrs. Doubtfire meets Wedding Crashers and The Hangover. Two women disguise themselves as men and infiltrate a bachelor party in Key West. The project came sideways out of Busboys, the R-rated ensemble comedy he made with David Spade and Theo Von.

The interesting part is what surrounds the movie. Jonah plans to shoot a digital series in the same production orbit—roughly forty episodes released weekly, all connected to the wedding at the center of the film.

“And of course, if for whatever reason people don’t make that connection, it’s at least in service to Romantical as a brand.”

I love this idea. It has been tried before, but the timing was wrong. Brands have trouble betting on features because the production and release cycles are too long for annual marketing budgets. They will bet on a series. If a brand funds the series leading into the movie, and the series works, Romantical can return as the release approaches and make a much stronger case for marketing dollars. That is a real bridge between the speed of brand media and the long clock of a feature.

3. Live and Physical

Quarterly events. Screenings. Panels. Eventually dating events, a run club, movie nights, a book club, merchandise. This is where the name starts doing work that no individual film can do.

A Romantical dating event should not feel like generic speed dating with a logo taped to the wall. It should draw people who want Jonah’s version of romance: optimistic, playful, maybe a little nostalgic. Even when nobody falls in love, the night should feel spontaneous enough that people want to come back.

Each piece of media and every event becomes a way to find those people and bring them into a community that lasts. The eventual dream is recurring revenue—a subscription business built around people who trust the taste and the emotional promise of Romantical.

McKinsey recently tried to put a dollar value on an hour of attention. Social video generates roughly twenty-five cents. Live experiences can generate somewhere between seventeen and thirty-three dollars. Read that lazily and you’d think Jonah should skip the cheap stuff and go directly to events. But the cheap stuff is where the audience gets built. The filmettes are not a compromise on the way to the real movie. They are R&D and audience development happening at the same time, at a price where Romantical can fail cheaply and learn quickly.

The Hard Question

The romance business has moved hard into creator media over the last five years: audio incubators like Meet Cute, bootstrapped studios like RomComPods, subscription audio at Quinn and Dipsea, social reading at Fable and Realm, and an enormous vertical micro-drama business that has turned romance into cliffhangers and coin-unlock paywalls.

Jonah is making a different bet. He wants to preserve the handmade, cinematically respectable version of the genre and give it an always-on business model.

Here is the skeptical version, because I don’t think the article is honest without it. Building a company around a genre is fundamentally different from building one around a person. Most creator success stories—MrBeast, Dude Perfect, the whole list—begin with a specific human being an audience has decided to trust. The brand and the person are the same thing, at least at the start.

Romantical is trying to build loyalty to an idea instead. A feeling. An adjective. Something you can point to through a restaurant window. That is harder. Genres don’t show up in your DMs. Genres don’t have a face people recognize at the airport.

Jonah knows this. It is the open question underneath the whole company: can Romantical become the draw, or will Jonah have to become the face that teaches the audience what Romantical means? Nobody knows yet. If the brand works, though, it can eventually survive him. A company built only around a person caps out at what that person can produce and how long they want to keep producing it. A company built around an emotion can outlast a career—if the emotion is real and the system holds.

If I Were Him

I’ll say the quiet part. If I were building Romantical, I would build it as a community company that happens to make movies, not a movie company that hopes a community eventually shows up. That is an ordering decision, not semantics. It changes what you build first, what you measure and who you hire.

I would start with the ideal member. Not the target audience—the ideal member, singular and specific. Gina Bianchini, who built Mighty Networks and has thought about this longer than almost anyone, has a useful way of defining that person: an actual human in a transition. Not “women 18–34 who like rom-coms.” Somebody at a specific moment of change, when they are motivated to find other people and willing to pay for help, access or belonging.

Who is that person for Romantical? Someone newly single and done with the apps? Someone who just moved to New York and wants a social life? Someone who still believes in love but has run out of places where that belief doesn’t feel embarrassing? I don’t know the answer. Jonah needs to pick one, build for that person and be equally clear about who the community is not for.

Then I would define enchantment on purpose. It is already in the filmettes, in the features Jonah chooses and in Jonah himself. But right now it mostly lives in his instincts. It needs to become a standard he can use to judge a script, a brand partner, an event, a hire and the easy cynical joke that might get a laugh but violates what the company is supposed to mean.

When we built a community strategy for Brass Knuckle Films—the action label Robert Rodriguez launched with Alexis Garcia—we ended up with three verbs: launch, grow, activate. The genres could not be more different, but the sequence applies almost perfectly here.

Launch means public-facing media made to stand on its own: the filmettes, the digital series around For the Boys, Jonah talking directly to the audience and events that give the audience something to do together. Not promotional scraps. Actual programming.

Grow means converting visibility into an owned relationship. Email addresses. Phone numbers where appropriate. Attendance history. Repeat viewing. Referrals. The information that tells Romantical who keeps showing up and why. Social platforms create discovery. They should not own the entire relationship.

Activate means giving the most committed people a reason to pay and participate: early screenings, intimate events, access to the filmmaking process, member-only rituals and eventually ways to help get projects made. But I would not start by throwing up a subscription page. First establish the habit. Give the community a name, a calendar and a reason to miss it when they are not there.

At my own company, we are restructuring around what I call a digital vertebra. The movies, television and other projects do not sit in separate boxes with social media bolted on at the end. The digital team runs through everything. It understands the DNA of the work and extends it before, during and after release.

Romantical needs the same thing. The early hire I would prioritize is not only a traditional development executive. Jonah needs a creator-editor-community operator who can sit inside the movies, the filmettes and the events and make them feed one another. The company should measure repeat viewers, email capture, event return, referrals and conversion into paid participation—not only views.

That is how Romantical starts learning whether the emotion is becoming a community or is still simply Jonah’s personal taste.

The Weird Bet

For all the talk about recurring revenue, brands and membership, the thing Jonah is most excited to spend money on has no obvious business model.

“I am most excited to make an 80-minute romantic comedy for YouTube on my FX3 with eight other crew members, over seven days of shooting, and put that on the internet and see what happens. That’s us spending money where there’s no immediately clear world in which there’s a return on that investment—which I know from a business standpoint sounds crazy. But I don’t think I can go to YouTube and type in nineties-style rom-com in New York and find something with compelling dialogue and characters falling in love that still feels handmade. And I think people do still value that.”

That’s the tell.

Legacy media is a closed circuit. You plug a production company into a known socket and a known business model comes out. Creator media is an open system. You can do almost anything, which also means nobody can give you a spreadsheet that proves it will work. You bet on yourself, hold onto the core idea and accept that the business may look completely different a year from now.

“In one year we might be talking and Romantical could be—we make martini glasses. We sell furniture.”

Honestly? If the brand is built right, both of those work.

The Nora Ephron of right now would raise a round. Not because movies matter less. Because she would want to own the feeling between them. The point of the company is to keep the restaurant open.

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TV is shrinking, and everyone in it is choosing one of three responses.

Some people are leaving outright — taking the marketing job, the vertical-video job, anything that isn’t scripted. Some are staying and squeezing what’s left out of a shrinking pie, chasing the same 22-episode dream that mostly doesn’t exist anymore. And a smaller group is doing something more interesting: taking the actual craft — not the credential, the craft — and finding out it’s worth something in a field that has never had it before.

Andrew Karlsruher is that third group. He spent fifteen years in network television — CSI: Cyber, five seasons on MacGyver, a season on Bull — before the development treadmill ran out from under him.

Somewhere in the last year, he noticed something: the humanoid and quadruped robots showing up in our homes, our sidewalks, our hospitals are, whether their makers admit it or not, characters. They have names, faces, voices, backstories, arcs. Somebody has to write them.

To sharpen his thinking around this he launched a substack called Story Layer where he could explore what it means to merge storytelling and robotics. That and some luck actually landed him a job.

Karlsruher is now Head of Character at Familiar Machines & Magic, the robotics company founded by Colin Angle — the guy who built iRobot and the Roomba — which came out of stealth earlier this year. He’s applying fifteen years of network TV instinct to a genuinely new kind of writers’ room: one where half the collaborators speak AI, half speak actuator torque, and none of them have ever had to think about story arcs before.

What follows is an edited conversation about how he got there, and what it actually means to write a character that has to be right — not just entertaining — because it’s going to live in someone’s house.

From Jurassic Park to CSI: Cyber

You wanted to work in Hollywood from early on. What was the entry point?

When did robots enter the picture?

What TV Knows That Robotics Doesn’t

Where’s the actual gap between the tech world and the creative world?

Give me an example.

One thing you mentioned researching for your Substack: Enchanted Tools, the French company doing hospital robots for kids in cancer treatment.

Guardrails and the Manipulation Problem

Let’s say a robot is in an abusive home. You don’t want it absorbing that and becoming an abuser itself. Is there something fundamentally wired in — that whatever personality it develops has to stay in service of the people it’s working for?

What about manipulation — even accidental manipulation? Say there’s an elderly woman who’s decided she can’t climb the stairs anymore, and the robot fakes being stuck partway up so she’ll climb up to help it, and in doing so proves to herself she still can.

The Character Bible

What are you actually building day to day?

Does the character actually change based on how a specific one lives in a specific home — the way a dog isn’t just “a dog,” it’s your dog?

Is This Making Him a Better Writer

Has doing this changed how you think about character — in a way a normal writers’ room never forced you to?

Where This Goes

Do you have a vision for where this leads?

The Sci-Fi Future that Is Today

And maybe, as the Great Convergence keeps converging, Andrew ends up doing both.

Somewhere down the line Andrew writes a show about a family and their robot — the robot you can actually buy, on Amazon, personality made to order, with one-click on Prime delivery.

You’ll join a community of equally deranged owners posting zany-adventure videos: robot folds the laundry while twerking to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body,” robot does the dishes while recapping the juiciest bits of Love Island gossip, robot absolutely destroys your kid at Uno and then, somehow, makes everyone feel better about it.

Weirder things are already happening. Andrew’s just the first person with a MacGyver credit trying to give it a character arc.

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Having just moved back to LA after a year and a half of working from the coffee region of Colombia, I’m taking this week and next week off from the usual Open Gardens deep dives to settle in and catch up on everything happening in the great convergence.

But I am publishing something anyway.

This is less an article than a set of notes and reflections from Kara Swisher’s interview with Peter Chernin on On with Kara Swisher a few weeks back. I finally had time to listen to it.

I’ve spent all of one hour in a room with Chernin, back when we were considering selling our company, but he was in kicking-the-tires mode, not sharing-wisdom mode.

When you can get him to go deep on where he thinks media is going, you take notes. He has kept his pulse on this business better than almost anyone. His company’s bet on Backrooms proves it yet again.

The whole interview is worth listening to. There are a lot of gems, including his caution against the current overcorrection that every creator is now going to launch a movie or series. But the most interesting through line, at least to me, was his thinking on creativity itself.

That is the hard part: not just finding talent, reading data, or spotting the next platform shift, but building companies where creativity can survive and thrive.

So as we head into a week of celebrating 250 years of American independence, however one might or might not feel about that, it feels like a useful moment to think about creativity and the freedom required for it to prosper. It remains one of the rare forces that can drive a career, a company, and an industry forward, but only if the conditions around it are protected.

1. Great work is fragile, and the systems around it matter.

As companies converge with the creator economy and build new models around talent, platforms, and audiences, it is worth remembering that creativity does not automatically survive inside new systems. It has to be protected.

Chernin makes the point through a story from his first job in Hollywood, working for a talented but micro-managing producer who was both brilliant and destructive. In his telling, 85% of what that producer did was great. The other 15% could ruin the whole thing.

That was the lesson. Great work is fragile. A piece of entertainment is not one decision. It is thousands of them. A good script can die with the wrong director. The right director can fail with the wrong cast. A scene that is only okay can become unforgettable because of a piece of music.

That is the danger in this moment. As legacy companies absorb creator logic, and creators move into more formal entertainment structures, the goal cannot just be efficiency, ownership, scale, or data. The question is whether all this new machinery leaves room for the fragile, inefficient, argumentative human process by which great work gets made.

Because the default outcome is not greatness. The default outcome is that it does not come together.

2. Managing creativity is managing innovation, and data can only see the present.

Chernin refuses to separate entertainment from innovation. Managing content, he says, is managing a form of innovation. Creativity and innovation are largely the same thing.

The creator economy has trained every company to pay closer attention to audience behavior. Good. Data tells you what people are watching, sharing, skipping, replaying, and talking about. It shows where attention is gathering. It helps you understand what is working now.

But that is also the limit. Data tells you what the garden looks like today. It does not tell you what wants to grow tomorrow.

The mistake is treating the current audience map as permanent. That is how companies optimize yesterday’s behavior while someone else builds the next thing from the side. The dashboard can show you demand that already exists. It is much worse at showing you the strange creative instinct that has not yet become demand.

So creativity has to be managed like innovation, not inventory. Read the signals, but do not become trapped by them. Understand the data without surrendering judgment to it.

3. Creativity requires fear, but it also requires safety.

Chernin’s leadership frame is simple: find talented young people, then support them through failure. That sounds generous (and scary if you’re holding on to your job for dear life), but it is also practical. If creativity and innovation are the same thing, failure is part of the process.

Creativity is not comfortable. A filmmaker can put years of instinct and identity into something that may be ignored or misunderstood. Chernin calls that “the scariest thing on earth,” and he is right.

Fear does not go away. Good leadership keeps it from killing the work.

That means people can take creative risk without being humiliated, abandoned after one miss, or forced to sand off everything strange before the work has a chance to become itself. Creator-led companies can leave people overexposed. Legacy companies can smother them. The better version protects creative risk without removing risk itself.

Comfort is not the point. The point is enough safety to try something that might fail.

4. Stakes are not the enemy of safety.

This is the harder half of Chernin’s argument.

Creative people need to feel safe enough to try. But fear also has a productive role. Not the fear of humiliation or being discarded after one miss. The useful fear is the one that comes from knowing the work matters, that success has consequences, and that failure does too.

Creators feel it every time they post. Every video, podcast, sketch, essay, or new format enters the feed exposed. The audience can ignore it. The algorithm can bury it. The thing can simply not travel.

But legacy failure is not less real. A writer can spend years on a script that never gets made. A showrunner can carry a series through development only to watch it disappear after one season.

Chernin’s argument about vertical integration is about incentives. In the consolidated model, the same company produces the work, owns it, and distributes it. Talent is paid the same whether something becomes a cultural event or vanishes in a weekend. There may be no meaningful upside if it works, no direct economic downside if it fails, and often only one blunt consequence: unemployment.

That is how you get “good enough,” which is the enemy of invention.

5. Creativity thrives in mess, and dies in a single hierarchy.

Chernin’s argument about consolidation is not only about economics. It is also about creative oxygen.

When every decision runs through one chain of command, one person’s no can become the final word. One executive does not get it. One algorithm does not surface it. One committee decides it is not worth the risk. One platform cannot imagine the audience. And the idea dies.

Creativity works best in mess. It thrives when people argue, when taste collides with taste, when one buyer passes and another sees it, when one executive thinks something is too strange and another thinks that is exactly why it matters.

That is one of the quiet dangers of consolidation. It does not just reduce the number of companies. It reduces the number of chances an idea has to be misunderstood before it is finally understood.

An Open Gardens model should protect those second and third chances. Some ideas need a studio. Some need a streamer. Some need YouTube. Some need a live audience first. Some need a creator community to prove them out before legacy understands what it is seeing.

6. Risk is the lifeblood, but risk is not recklessness.

Kara asks Chernin how Hollywood can take more risk in a system shaped by debt, consolidation, and fear. For Chernin, the answer is to stop confusing risk with recklessness.

Risk is not throwing money at uncertainty. It is not making a $200 million bet on weak conviction because familiar IP looks safer in a spreadsheet. He makes the point through recent big-budget blunders: rebooting 50-year-old IP does not do much to hook young audiences who did not grow up on it.

Chernin thinks about risk as a portfolio. Some bets should be big. Some should live in the middle. Some should be genuinely experimental. A healthy creative company knows where risk belongs, how much it should cost, and what kind of failure the company can survive.

That is why he ties risk to budget. The smaller the budget, the more creative risk you can afford. A $500,000 film can be strange, specific, and imperfect in ways a $150 million movie usually cannot. It can discover a filmmaker. It can test a voice. It can find an audience no committee would have modeled in advance.

Legacy should take that lesson seriously. Creators take risk constantly, but usually at a scale where failure teaches before it destroys. A video misses. A format dies. A series stalls. The creator reads the room, adjusts, and tries again.

Legacy companies need more of that logic underneath premium storytelling. Smaller budgets. Faster cycles. Clearer audience contact. More ownership. More chances to fail without disappearing.

This is not an argument for making everything cheap. Some stories need scale. Some talent deserves major investment. But a system that only knows how to make large bets will eventually become terrified of originality, because originality in that system is too expensive.

Chernin’s leadership point hits the nail on the proverbial head: find talented young people, figure out who is good, and support them through failure. That is not charity. That is how creative companies renew themselves.

Happy 4th of July. May you find the creative freedom to prosper.

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I can’t tell you how many agents, managers, execs, and producers have called me in the last few months asking some version of the same question:

Who should I sign?

Who wants to make a movie?

Who has a real audience?

Not surprising.

The horror-youtube triumvirate (you know who) all landed in roughly the same six-month window, and suddenly the whole industry had a collective epiphany about creators, community, and the power of launching content when people already care.

On one hand, that epiphany was overdue. The signals have been there for years. Creators have been building real communities, moving audiences, selling products, filling venues, launching formats, and proving over and over again that follower count is not the same thing as fandom.

The industry just wasn’t paying attention.

On the other hand, the six-month cluster was a fluke. Three creator-led breakouts arriving that close together makes it feel like there are hundreds more sitting out there, fully formed, waiting to be unleashed.

Not so fast… Worth chasing? Absolutely.

But finding the next one is still a needle-in-a-haystack business. It’s not that different from trying to pluck the next great filmmaker out of Sundance, SXSW, or Cannes. Different playing field. Same odds. There is still only a Ronaldo or Messi every once in a very long while.

I’ve spent the last few years as a producer working with creators to develop shows, movies, and other media properties. And yes, part of the equation is spotting whether a creator can actually step into a bigger arena.

Watch any interview with Kane Parsons and you see it immediately. He’s so smart, clear, and articulate that he reminds you of the precociousness of Orson Welles or Steven Soderbergh making their first films in their mid-20s.

The best producers and execs already know how to spot that.

That’s a skill.

But there’s another question that gets less attention and may matter just as much:

How do you actually value their community?

How do you know if it’s portable?

How do you know if the followers will show up for something new, or if they’re just along for the algorithmic ride?

That’s what I wanted to explore.

Through this Substack, I’ve built a network of people in the creator economy who are way smarter than me. So I asked a few of them directly. Here’s the team of Avengers I assembled to explore this topic:

Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios.

Alice Ma, co-founder of Mad Realities.

Bia Granja, the godmother of the Brazilian creator economy.

RJ Larese, President of talent management company Sixteenth USA.

Jim Louderback, OG of the creator economy.

Zack Honarvar, manager of some of the biggest creators, including Yes Theory and Airrack, and a serial entrepreneur.

Tim Shey, chair of creator-backed media company Electrify.

Didrik Svendsen, co-founder of Trudy. He’s perhaps the least known of the bunch, but no less interesting. Trudy is a platform built on data from more than 230,000 brand-creator campaigns, probably the most rigorous analytical approach to creator evaluation I’ve come across.

And this is what they said.

The Instrument That Doesn’t Exist

How do you tell which creator communities travel? The industry has the rhetoric down.

“Depth beats width.”

“Real fandom, not vanity metrics.”

“Community over audience.”

All true. Also mostly useless when wielded like blunt instruments.

Because when the deal memo gets written, the number everyone still reaches for is followers.

This isn’t a new problem. People have been trying to reduce influence to a score forever. One of the early attempts was Klout, which tried to assign people a single influence score from 0 to 100 across hundreds of millions of social profiles. Brands handed out perks to high scorers. Employers even asked for Klout scores in job interviews.

Then the social landscape fragmented. Klout shut down. And the fantasy of one clean number went with it.

The problem wasn’t that scoring influence was a stupid idea. It was that the dimensions that matter most don’t compress that neatly.

Sean Atkins put it bluntly: “I’ve been playing this game for a long time and have not yet seen a tool or analytic model that can get this right.”

No one I talked to disagreed.

After all the conversations, the answer didn’t boil down to a score.

It boiled down to six dimensions.

None of them are definitive on their own. None of them require a dashboard. And three strong dimensions plus three weak ones does not equal 50%.

It means you’re looking at a specific kind of community with a specific commercial profile.

The point isn’t to grade the community.

The point is to understand what kind of animal you’re dealing with.

Welcome to the The Six Dimensions Test

1. Identity — Does membership say something about who you are?

I keep coming back to something Atkins said, because it’s so simple it almost sounds too obvious.

“At its peak CSI was on every TV in every country on every day. It was the most popular TV franchise in the world. See anyone with a CSI hat? For most of its life, The Simpsons has been below the top 50 TV shows. But you see that merch everywhere.”

CSI had more viewers. The Simpsons has identity. That distinction — between a show people watched and a show people belong to — is the whole thing.

The fans who have named themselves — Swifties, ARMY, Beliebers, Deadheads — have already answered this dimension. The fans of a show whose name you forget by Tuesday haven’t.

Alice Ma has the structural explanation: “The most successful communities cater to an opinionated subculture first, then spin out from that core fandom into greater scale.” Identity forms before scale. You can’t retrofit it onto something that’s already gone wide.

The tell: do they have a name for themselves?

2. Lateral Connection — Do members know each other exists?

An audience connects in one direction — toward the creator. A community connects in every direction. That horizontal layer is what separates the two.

Alice Ma goes right to the language: “The internet is so federated, each subculture is like its own little language. Encoded in that language are things about worldview, emotion, what are the top items most stressful and most joyful.”

The language develops before anyone formally builds a community around it — and it keeps going after the creator goes quiet.

Bia Granja calls it “inner culture”: “Recurring memes, slang, rituals, references, slogans, or ‘I know the name of your dog’ behavior. This usually points to fandom infrastructure.”

RJ Larese goes straight to the comments: “Are people defending the Creator in the comments like it’s their full-time job? Are they quoting them, talking to each other, showing up over and over again?”

Didrik Svendsen has found the simplest proxy I’ve come across: “The greatest creators use a lot more ‘we’ than they use ‘I.’ Count the we’s versus the I’s, do the percentage. If that percentage is high or low, that tells you more about that creator’s ability to move their audience than any other metric or bullshit thing people will throw your way.”

The tell: is there activity that doesn’t require the creator to start it?

3. Creation — Do they make things?

The highest form of engagement isn’t watching. It’s making.

Fanfic. Edits. Fan cams. A visual vocabulary that didn’t exist before the community invented it. When fans start producing artifacts — things that weren’t there before the community made them — the property has crossed from being consumed to being inhabited.

Bia Granja putting it simply: “Communities that remix are usually much deeper than communities that only consume.”

Alice Ma’s team at Mad Realities built their own internal system, Mad Metrics, specifically because no commercial tool was catching this signal. A homemade analytics stack is itself a data point about where the industry gaps are.

Fun fact I just learned researching this article -- Fifty Shades started as Twilight fanfiction. The Love Hypothesis started as Star Wars fanfiction and hit the New York Times bestseller list.

The tell: is there a visual language or vocabulary fans built that the creator didn’t give them?

4. Portability — Does the audience travel?

I think this is the easiest signal to measure and the most obvious. But how much portability does it take to make a community valuable? I keep thinking about this with a community we’ve been building around a digital show.

Alice Ma’s honest base rate: “Most creator communities won’t travel. I want to say 99%.”

The 1% that do have something in common. Atkins, on how he finds them before making the big bet: “You don’t ‘know’ until you do some testing like do a merch drop or have a small meetup. Other indicators are newsletters, uptake of your business in new areas as you expand.” Small bets before big bets.

RJ Larese uses a proxy no platform has automated: “I’ll even ask creators how often they get approached in public and where people know them from. That’s valuable signal because it helps you understand how invested the audience actually is.”

Zack Honarvar: “Markiplier’s $50M box office performance with basically no traditional marketing showcases that his channel isn’t just empty numbers but real community and following.”

And the mechanic underneath that, from Didrik Svendsen, who calls it the IKEA effect: “If you feel like you’ve part built it and co-built it, you end up loving the table more because you’ve put blood and sweat into it.” Markiplier didn’t release a movie to his community. He built one with them. They didn’t show up to watch it. They showed up to see it finished.

(Author’s digression – in my 20s when I lived on Ikea furniture I actually detested their stuff after I wrangled it into a wobbly mess. But the analogy works…)

The tell: when they last moved formats, who came with them?

5. Conversion — What’s the gap between free attention and paid behavior?

Two creators with identical follower counts can have wildly different commercial profiles. Size is the wrong variable. The question is how much economic activity the community will actually take on.

Jim Louderback trusts one signal more than most dashboards: “If someone says ‘Sign up for Squarespace, use my code for 25% off for the first year, my code is MRKitten’ — then you get a sense of how many sales were driven by the cool katt.”

Code-based affiliate signups trace actual behavior. They’re one of the few public signals that close the gap between attention and purchase.

Zack Honarvar, from the brand side: “When we’re pitching one of our creators to a brand, we’re selling the power of endorsement and the emotional connection that comes with it. It’s about recognition and trust, the same thing that used to justify paying an NBA player or artist millions to be in a commercial. The CPM doesn’t capture that depth of relationship or the quality of attention our creators command.”

Bia Granja on why some communities convert and others don’t: “Creators whose audiences travel well are providing some kind of service to the community.”

Disposable entertainment needs massive scale to convert. An identity-based community converts at smaller numbers because the relationship is functional, not passive.

The tell: revenue per active follower, not follower count.

6. Persistence — What survives creator silence?

The last one, and probably the most predictive of everything else. If the creator goes dark for six months — by choice, by burnout, by injury, by whatever — what does the community do?

Jim Louderback on how he actually checks: “Go to a creator appearing at an event. Do they drive meet-and-greets. Watch when the fan and the creator meet. Is it just a perfunctory thing or is there a real connection with each and every fan. There’s a difference.”

RJ Larese on what it looks like from the outside: “Are fans excited, emotional, waiting around just to say hi? Or are people casually walking by because they vaguely recognize them? There’s a huge difference.”

Sports communities are the benchmark. Browns fans don’t leave when the team is bad. Liverpool supporters don’t disappear between seasons. The relationship isn’t to the content — it’s to each other and to the thing the content represents. Most creator-driven communities aren’t there yet. The ones that are have a completely different financial profile.

The tell: six months dark — what’s left?

How to Actually Use This

Three contexts where this matters.

Before signing. Run the test on any creator you’re considering before the deal is done. Three strong dimensions might be enough — depending on which three.

Identity and lateral connection together are more predictive than identity and conversion.

The combinations matter.

And take Atkins’ advice: before the big bet, run a small test. A merch drop. A meetup. Something that generates real signal before you commit.

On what you already own. Before you spend a dollar trying to build community around a new property, run the test on your existing slate.

A senior digital exec at a legacy TV and Film studio told me recently that when he started his job he was told to build community around their flagship action franchise — a series of movies with spinoffs and a TV streaming extension. Huge IP. But you could see in the behavior – people didn’t show up for the spin offs or the TV show. There were no Halloween costumes. People just wanted to see the main franchise movie with its iconic star.

Meanwhile, on the same lot, there was another property where the fans had given themselves a name, written (and still write ten years later) tons of fan ficiton, built their own conventions, and were waiting for any reason to come back. And its essence had mutated into microdramas where it had launched a kind of subgenre inspired by those movies because no one was attending to them.

The property had laid dormant for 10 years. And the studio had no clue.

They ran the wrong test. They were measuring recent box office success on a franchise not looking at the behavior of its consumers outside of its principle revenue stream.

The dimensions come online in a rough order:

--identity first

--lateral connection second

--creation third

--portability and conversion as you scale

--persistence last and only with patience.

Most teams skip to conversion and wonder why nothing sticks.

Reach or Residence

Zack Honarvar thinks the market is already dividing: “The premium creator market will end up bifurcating from the programmatic one. They’re fundamentally different businesses serving different buyers.”

The Six Dimensions Test is for the premium side — where the asset isn’t reach but relationship, and the question isn’t impressions but whether the audience actually believes in what the creator is doing.

Tim Shey adds something I loved: “I would think less about evaluating each creator’s community as an isolated thing, and more about the wider community that each of them comes from, and appeals to.”

Michelle Phan’s fans didn’t just show up for her — they recruited. They spread the word to beauty communities that this was someone worth paying attention to. A community that recruits is worth more than a community that gathers.

When I push everyone I talked to on whether any tool can actually capture all of this, I get the same answer.

Atkins has been making these calls for decades and hasn’t found the algorithm.

Alice Ma built her own system and still says she leads with creativity, not data.

Jim Louderback’s most reliable signal is still showing up in person and watching what happens when a fan meets their creator face to face.

Bia Granja feels a lot of this still comes down to pattern recognition from the gut.

The dimensions that matter most — the ones that predict whether a community will show up when it counts — don’t live on any dashboard. They live in the room, in the comment sections, in whether a creator says “we” or “I.”

The Six Dimensions Test isn’t a score. It’s what the people who’ve been doing this longest reach for when the dashboards don’t tell them what they need to know.

Try it out. I just applied it to a digital property we have. The results were telling. More on this soon…

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Everyone is talking about a recent run of creator-made horror movies that just crushed at the box office. Naturally, every person with a Substack or Beehiiv is now beating the subject to death with such abandon that we might call it, rather than blogging, a flogging.

But there’s one angle worth exploring still — these three creators were not trained through the legacy system. None of them went to film school. And that tells you a lot about what’s happening now. Because film schools and their relevance are a perfect metaphor for the larger conversation: legacy and creator systems colliding, converging, changing each other, becoming inseparable. It’s what makes it interesting to anyone paying attention — whether you’re rooted in the old system or building the new one.

Last August as I was looking at the implications of all this and couldn’t ignore the questions about the relevance of film school. I teach a class at Columbia University and also studied there and love and cherish it. And I’ve taught and guest lectured at a handful of other institutions over the years.

So I wrote a substack about it.

The gist was this: Film schools are built on a broken model. They trained talent for a system that no longer exists, and now they’re watching the creator economy build its own training grounds without ever needing them. The feeder pathways they once staffed have disappeared. But I wasn’t arguing they should close — I was arguing they still matter. But they need treat the creator economy (and AI) as foundational curriculum, not electives. They must start building real partnerships with the world that’s actually operating instead of mourning the one that’s gone. And I even suggested that every student should build a youtube channel. Duck and cover!!!

The substack generated a lot of controversy. I got emails from old professors, I heard about others ranting and railing against it despite the fact that I also espoused the virtues of learning the fundamentals.

Watching three self-taught filmmakers crush at the box office and my desire to write about it brought back memories of all the backlash. But there was one reaction in particular that I felt compelled to re-read in the wake of these recent events.

It came from Rebecca Green a well-respected producer and now Director of Producing at the AFI Conservatory. She writes a blog called Dear Producer and in it, she took a very strong position against my article.

Her thesis was essentially this: She agrees schools need to innovate, but she pushes back on the core premise. Film schools don’t need to chase the creator economy. The real mistake is reducing art education to job training and monetization metrics. What I was missing in my article is that students come to film school to master self-expression and learn to create — not to launch YouTube channels. The purpose of art education is developing complete human beings with critical thinking and empathy, and if schools optimize for resume virtues instead of eulogy virtues, they’ve already lost what makes them matter.

I didn’t push back too hard at the time but only invited her to a deeper discussion to which she never replied.

But as I spoke to more and more professors and deans about these issues, the more that I felt that a lot of people in these institutions were thinking what Rebecca was saying out loud. And furthermore, it’s what a lot of legacy execs and producers feel as well about the industry writ large. And now at this pivotal moment, where an awakening has happened about the relationship between these two forces and their convergence, I’m providing my rebuttal to Rebecca.

I agree with her that part of the obligation is to build the craft and provide the inspiration and guidance that allows for better self-expression. Many kids who go to film school want to make the kinds of films and TV shows that impacted them when they were young. Some want to be artists with a capital A. Learning the fundamentals and creating an environment where they can develop these skills is a fantastic service to provide.

But I don’t think we can ignore how the world is changing — and how that’s changing storytelling itself. Film schools need to provide craft AND the literacy to move through this new landscape. Because the best self-expression in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t reach the people who need to see it.

I think if you are gonna be 50k, 100k, 200k in debt, your film school should be educating you how to make a living when you graduate not just teaching you self-expression. There is nothing that says that all film schools need to play by the same rules. AFI is perhaps the best film school in the nation pound for pound and perhaps it can stay pure in its intention. But in my experience of teaching students, for the vast majority while one voice in their head wants only to be the artist, the other is asking sincerely how he or she can actually make a living. And so, I feel pretty certain, do a majority from the students graduating from one of the 500+ schools or programs across the nation.

So here’s where Rebecca and I most diverge—

The YouTube channel requirement:

She wrote in her piece: “While I said in my job interview that no student should graduate film school without understanding how to monetize YouTube, I don’t believe you need to launch your own channel to learn how the platform works or innovative ways to connect with audiences.”

My rebuttal:

She is perhaps unwittingly contradicting herself. If she truly believes that each student needs to learn how to monetize YouTube, then ask anyone who works in the creator economy how you do that — and they will tell you there is only one way: actually doing it. Like making a movie, you learn way more from doing than reading about it. The methods are constantly changing and it takes building muscles to understand it. You improve by iterating, by posting, by getting feedback, by adjusting. No one, not one creator I’ve ever spoken to (and over the last two years I’ve spoken to a lot), learned to monetize watching videos or sitting in a classroom. Not one.

Who Needs Another YouTube Channel?

She wrote: “And the last thing the world needs is more YouTube channels. [This] reminds me of when Facebook was the cool kid on the block and someone declared it necessary for every filmmaker to have at least 10,000 followers in order to be successful.”

My rebuttal:

How many more student short films do we need? I’ve watched hundreds, if not more. I’ve taught the making of short films, I’ve sat on juries, I’ve voted on shorts for the Academy. About one in a thousand actually moves or entertains me.

The point isn’t the finished product. It’s the exercise.

Most short films are forgettable for the same reason most Hollywood movies are forgettable. Once in a while something exquisite or hilarious or moving is made, gets noticed, and opens doors. Once in a long while.

And so it goes with YouTube. It is not some alien corruption of cinema. It is another training ground, only with a harsher teacher: an algorithm that measures, in public and in real time, whether anyone actually wants to keep watching. And like it or not, that teacher is no longer confined to YouTube. It is changing how audiences interact with all content: what they expect, how quickly they judge, when they lean in, and when they bail.

When The Daniels won the Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” one of them said something on the Academy stage that got lost amongst the pandemonium — “The world is changing so rapidly and I fear our stories are not keeping pace, and sometimes it’s a little scary knowing that movies move at the rate of years and the world on the internet moves at the rate of seconds.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but the relevant point here is this: you cannot make work for this moment without understanding where culture is actually being shaped. The internet doesn’t just distribute stories — it shapes how they’re told. How we think. What we find moving. You can’t separate those things. And the Daniels — they couldn’t get arrested in TV or film and ended up becoming creators (and making youtube videos!!!!) And by their own admission, EEAAO was inspired and shaped by internet culture and the things they learned making content online.

So why make a YouTube channel in film school? More like, why wouldn’t you? You can always ignore what you learn, but you can’t implement something you’ve ignored.

To Sell a Movie You Can’t Talk about the Movie

And it’s not just the YouTube channel as content that matters. No one is going to find your film and watch it if you don’t reach your audience on social media channels. That’s where people decide what to watch. It used to be young audiences. Now older ones too.

In a recent substack I wrote called “To Sell a Product You Can’t Mention the Product” I broke down the A24 marketing strategy behind Marty Supreme. The point was they weren’t so much marketing but extending the story of the movie across the different surfaces of the internet. So to get people to watch your movies, you’ll increasingly do better by learning how to reach audiences on the internet, just as Markiplier, Curry Barker, and Kane Parsons have all done in very different ways. Each used a combination of community relationships, cultural awareness, and audience understanding to build demand for their work. This was never a buden, it was just an extension of what they’ve been trained to do.

But is it so revolutionary?

When I first started making movies, one of the heads of theatrical distribution at a major studio told me: “While some movies fail despite a director’s involvement in marketing, I’ve never seen a movie work where the director wasn’t heavily involved.”

Even the most artistically ambitious films today rely on filmmakers helping shape how audiences discover and connect with their work. And by the above logic, if directors must be involved in their marketing campaigns for their films to succeed, then they better learn how to make content for social media.

Marketing has already made the shift. Stories live across screens and platforms now, not in 30-second spots. Film schools should teach that. Make it mandatory or make it an elective — but put it on the curriculum. Creators didn’t have the luxury of choice here. They learned to move stories across surfaces because they had to eat. When film students become filmmakers, they’ll face the same reality. The only question is whether schools prepare them for it or let them figure it out the hard way. (OK, lets be honest, filmmakers have always needed to know how to pull an audience, its just now the rules are different).

And I actually believe that there will be more and more filmmakers, artists, who call themselves creators and see the canvas of storytelling spread across screens and platforms as some kind of living, breathing organism.

Filmmakers as Creators?

Rebecca wrote: “I have yet to meet a film student who is attending school to become a ‘creator’.”

My rebuttal:

I have. Many. But first I’ll start with this story--

I guest lectured at a respected film school in Texas and asked 30 undergrads how many want to be creators. None raised their hands. Then I asked how many watched a movie or TV show in the previous week. I’m not making this up--not more than three of them raised their hand.

And finally I asked how many had watched content on social platforms that day.

Every. Hand. Went. Up.

My response to them — why would you not want to make the content you are actually consuming?

I have more direct stories as well. Students of mine who are very actively interested in becoming creators and filmmakers because they consume both equally. They see the connection. Not all, some. And then there are all the ones like those in the school in Texas who aren’t even paying attention to their own consumption.

Maybe there is a 1%, the purists, who can afford to focus only on their movie.

But let’s talk about the 99%, which I include myself in.

I’ve made probably produced a half dozen prestige films out of a couple of dozen movies. In order to afford to make those movies and still get my kids through decent schools and pay my mortgage, I’ve produced unscripted shows, scripted TV, animation, docu-series, and plenty of remakes and rom coms. Truthfully I’m proud of many of those as well. But I could never make those prestige movies if I didn’t do the others. I couldn’t afford it. And I’m not special. Most producers have a similar story. Directors and writers too.

Today’s filmmakers are going to pay the bills making YouTube videos like Ridley Scott made commercials or John Sayles wrote and re-wrote blockbusters for Hollywood. Some might like the freedom they have so much that they never actually make a traditional film. But some will see it as a means to an end. Many will just see different screens and formats as different forms of expression. The medium changes but the work doesn’t stop.

I spent my 20s as a screenwriter and while I loved it, it seemed too impractical a path for me. I saw the great ones and I was never going to be one of them. I went to film school to learn producing because I felt it would give me creative satisfaction while also providing me a solid way to make a living. And its mostly worked out. I even got to write a few things along the way.

I come from a place of pragmatism.

Build a career, don’t just make a movie. That’s part of my point about how film schools need to change. Even before the great convergence I saw so many talented filmmakers spend five years after film school getting one movie made and then realizing it would take just as long to make the next. So they went back to whatever job they had before they went to film school in the first place. And for the next 20 years, they’d be paying off their loans. And then there were the 60 / 70 / 80% of the class that couldn’t even get that first movie made…. Im sure AFI’s batting average is high but a bet a healthy number of graduates never build a sustainable career. And the traditional path will only get worse as the industry shrinks.

As I write the next chapter of my own business, 3Pas Studios, we have been leaning more heavily into the creator economy. One project has brought in more revenue in eight months than a feature film based on a script I fell in love with 11 years ago and only just got made.

So yes, if I have to build more creator businesses to afford the movies I love, I will. That is not selling out. That’s just being a producer.

And, clutch your pearls, I actually enjoyed making the creator content too.

Words and Ideas Can Change The World But Only if They Are… Movies?

I admire Rebecca’s resolve. I really do. There is something deeply moving about reminding artists that words and ideas still matter, especially at a moment when the industry feels like it is coming apart.

Where I differ is in the frame.

I don’t think the inflection point is the enemy of great art. I don’t think change is the thing we have to protect art from. More often, change is the thing that forces art to find new forms, new audiences, new languages, and new ways of mattering.

For a long time, I wanted to believe otherwise. It was convenient to believe that the kind of work I knew how to make, the kind of work that paid my bills and gave me my identity, carried some higher cultural value than the work being made on newer platforms. It was comforting to think a movie meant more than a YouTube video because it looked more like the thing I had spent my life learning how to make.

But that comfort was also a trap.

Accepting change meant accepting that I had to learn a new operating system. Not because the old one was worthless. It wasn’t. I still love it. But because audiences were already living somewhere else, speaking a slightly different language, building meaning in places many of us had trained ourselves not to take seriously.

My bubble was burst several years ago. While I was studying at Berkeley’s Haas school a professor told me that Hollywood was a walled garden and its walls had been breached and we were all “fucked.”

That’s when I started writing Open Gardens and forced myself to watch creators without judgment. And I have found some really interesting voices, some artists, some craftsman, some entertainers… and I’ve seen an awful lot of shit. Sounds like about the same experience of watching the thousands of movies made every year around the world.

That’s when I realized how easy it is to assume we knew better. That’s exactly what leads to blindness. To missing what’s actually happening in the culture.

The hope is in the convergence.

It is not legacy versus creators. It is the fundamentals of storytelling meeting the fluency of the creator economy. Craft meeting speed. Infrastructure meeting audience intimacy. Capital meeting community. Each side has something the other needs.

Look at the three movies everyone is talking about: Iron Lung, Obsessions, and Backrooms. None of them emerged from the creator economy in some pure, untouched form. Each relied on legacy in a different way, whether through infrastructure, craft, financing, distribution, production experience, or plain old Hollywood know-how.

The mix was different in each case. But the lesson was the same.

Creator instincts made them matter. Legacy muscle made them durable, financeable, producible, and real.

Technology has always disrupted and transformed storytelling. The printing press. Photography. Cinema. Radio. Television. Look how TV pushed cinema to create the widescreen and elaborate sound systems. Look how cinema changed the pacing of plays. Why is this any different? We are witnessing a transformation. We can be part of it. If we stay open. Its not the end of movies, it’s the beginning of something else…

Obviously Obvious

She called my piece “thoughtful but obvious.” Fair enough. It is obvious.

But obvious things still need to be said when entire institutions are behaving as if they are not true.

What interests me is the contradiction. She says film schools need to innovate, then resists teaching students the very skills that innovation now requires. That tension is worth examining, not because I want to win an argument, but because I’m watching students enter the industry with real talent and real fear, while being underprepared for a world that has already arrived.

I’ve never said film schools shouldn’t be a place to foster artists and self-expression. I’m saying they can’t pretend the world doesn’t exist outside the classroom door. Not when students are carrying six figures in debt. Self-expression is a luxury when you’re terrified about how you’ll survive. Effective art education has to account for that.

And just as vital, storytelling is changing. Like it always does. Art can exist anywhere, and the places we dismiss as commercial, unserious, or disposable are often where the next language of art is being born. Movies were once treated as a diversion too, until artists learned how to turn them into cinema.

And the convergence is real. It just happened three times in six months. Don’t focus on the movies focus on the patterns.

A 17-year-old kid today with a unique voice and point of view is probably not sitting in a dark room watching Kurosawa and Kubrick the way I did. Maybe some are, and God bless them. But many are living in a different media world, drawing inspiration from different places, different formats, different rhythms, and different communities.

That does not make their influences less serious. It just makes them different.

Art and genuine self-expression can come from anywhere. Ignoring that because it feels “obvious” is how institutions become beautifully preserved rooms: admirable, important, even noble, but increasingly disconnected from where the next generation is actually making meaning.

And noble rooms are hard places to make a living.

I wanted to talk to Rebecca, and I still do. Everyone is online, barking past each other, so I’m extending another invitation: let’s do a Substack Zoom and actually discuss this.

At the end of the day, we want the same thing: to see the next generation of storytellers prosper and inspire. We just disagree on how we get there.

That disagreement is worth having out loud.

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When the acceptance to Press Publish LA came through I booked my flights right away.

Ben raved about the NY version enough that I wasn’t about to skip LA. The conference was on the Fox Studios lot, same soundstage where The Public Enemy shot in 1937 and where It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia just wrapped its final season.

Nearly 700 creators, operators, and industry folks showed up, some flown in from Amsterdam, Switzerland, Hong Kong. Tim Katz from YouTube, Markiplier, Tom Segura, Billy Parks who runs Fox Creator Studios, Johnny Harris fresh off an Emmy win, Michelle Khare, and the operators behind MrBeast, Mark Rober’s Crunch Labs, and Smosh. The room represented $1.3 billion in combined subscribers across 17 countries.

You could feel it the moment you walked on the lot. This is where Hollywood had built its walled garden for ninety years. Now it’s where creators come to talk about owning their own work. As Ben likes to say: ‘the walls have been breached’.

Nobody on the panels was still arguing about whether the convergence is real.

They were past that. Deep into the actual mechanics: who owns the IP, how does craft scale from a video to a feature, what it takes to build a company around an audience. The real questions. Half the value was in the conversations that happened between sessions anyway.

Here are five things I took away.

1. “We’re not editing your videos, we’re not giving you notes. You own it, you do what you want. You don’t have those gatekeepers in the same way.”

— Tim Katz, VP Americas, YouTube | Session: The Future of YouTube + Surprise Guest

Katz opened the day and drew the line every other panel kept circling back to. The difference between YouTube and Hollywood isn’t the living room, the production values, or the brand dollars. It’s the IP. Creators keep it. YouTube takes a revshare and that’s the whole deal. It hasn’t changed even as the slate announced at Brandcast, Michelle Khare’s Challenge Accepted, Kareem Rahma’s Keep the Meter Running, starts to look like network programming.

Every creator in that room has heard the Hollywood pitch. We’ll fund it, we’ll make it, we’ll own it, you’ll get a fee and a back-end that never shows up. Katz was offering the opposite. The living room is now YouTube’s biggest surface in the U.S. and its fastest growing. The shows can cost as much as anything on broadcast. The IP still belongs to whoever made it.

He paired it with the advertiser side, which is what made the slate possible in the first place. “We just kept hearing from advertisers that we need to get closer to creators. We know this is the new Hollywood, this is where creativity is happening, this is where cultural relevancy is happening.” And the ask was specifically for the old structure. “We want to see this in the same way that TV historically has worked, where you’re buying a season of a show.” So you’ve got premium format and predictable buying, the things TV always sold, except now the person who made the show still owns it. I can’t think of another point where all three of those were true at the same time.

Own the IP and every distribution decision is a strategic one. Don’t, and you’re a vendor with a credit.

2. “I enter YouTube coming from a doubtful place and I’m addicted to overcoming that doubt.”

— Markiplier | Session: The Future of YouTube + Surprise Guest

Markiplier was the surprise guest, and he could have spent the whole time on the Iron Lung numbers. The single-location horror feature made over $50M in 4,200-plus theaters on a budget under $5M, and it dropped on YouTube as a transactional buy the day of the summit. Remarkable on its own. But he kept pulling the conversation back to craft, which is the part worth sitting with.

He doesn’t think a feature is far off from a YouTube video. “I don’t think that there’s all that much difference from a technical perspective of making a movie versus a YouTube video. It’s just the scale with which it is done, and the margin of error with which your skills have to be good enough to succeed at.” He wrote it, directed it, financed it, starred in it. Controlled the frame the same way he does on his channel. Webcam in a hotel room. Jump-cut self-critique. Audience trust standing in for production design. Colin called it self-reliance on stage and the word stuck.

Johnny Harris hit the same note in his own session, “Reimagining the Travel Show,” less than 24 hours after winning his Emmy in New York. “YouTube is a volume game.” He spent years getting reliable for his audience before pivoting to his new show The Human Element, which needed more planning and more development time. “I started to put more time in development. I think this show is a more intentional vision that underpins it.” The years of volume are what bought him the room to slow down and make something bigger, and the audience he’d built doing it didn’t go anywhere when he did.

The creators making this jump, to features or shows or franchises, aren’t switching careers. They’re scaling the one they already run. Same skills, same audience, just at a budget and a stakes level that punishes mistakes a lot harder.

3. “We’re literally in a golden age right now. If you have ambitions to be doing movies or television — it’s never been more accessible and possible than right now. This is the best time in history for somebody that doesn’t have a traditional entertainment path to end up with something like that.”

— Tom Segura | Session: What Hollywood Actually Wants From Creators, with Billy Parks, Head of Fox Creator Studios

That was Segura’s closing charge to the room. The infrastructure that used to gatekeep entertainment, the studios and agents and distribution and capital, isn’t the only path anymore. The alternatives are real enough now to build a career on, not just a viral moment.

Segura would know. He walked his own arc on stage. Stand-up in 2002. A podcast in 2010 because Joe Rogan kept pestering him. Live touring podcasts at $10 a ticket that sold 45,000 seats during the pandemic. A pay-per-view platform built out of necessity when touring shut down. Three short films shot in 11 days that became a 35-minute pilot. That pilot sold to Netflix and became Bad Thoughts, now in season two and currently #5 in the country. A vodka brand. A bakery. And now a multi-project deal with Fox Creator Studios. The day of the summit, FCS announced the partnership exclusively with The Publish Press: a stand-up showcase, a horror animated series, a live-action comedy, with FCS and Segura’s YMH Studios splitting ownership and the projects living on YMH’s platforms instead of Fox channels. The whole thing went from introductory dinners in March to a signed deal in six weeks.

Billy Parks, who runs Fox Creator Studios, described the posture in terms you almost never hear from a legacy studio. “We’re hyper-focused on working with IP, working with formats where we can say, here’s capital, make it on your channels, you drive the creative, you produce it. We’re not hiring producers and making it for you. You’re not shooting on our stages.” That’s a studio offering up its capital and its distribution and a hundred years of knowing how to monetize a thing, and then getting out of the way on the part it used to control most, the ownership and the production itself.

Segura talked about momentum like it was the whole ballgame. “Momentum is an undervalued piece of creativity. When I have an idea, it’s pretty fragile if I wait too long. There’s an energy to ideas, and when you find yourself in a group of people that all feel the momentum, it’s on you and the group to keep it going. If you let it fade, the idea fades as well.” That’s why the Fox deal matters. It moves at the speed the idea needs. Iron Lung doesn’t get made in 1995. Bad Thoughts doesn’t sell to Netflix without a pay-per-view platform that didn’t exist back then. A webcam and an audience can now make things the old timeline would have killed in development.

His closing advice tied it together. “Don’t shut down any avenue. Figure out your goals. Sometimes people listen to what someone else is doing and think that that’s the goal. That might not be what you want to do.” When you finally have options, the trap is chasing somebody else’s version of success because the path looks familiar.

4. “Formatting is world-building.”

— Michelle Khare, Host and Creator of Challenge Accepted | Session: Pushing YouTube’s Limits

This was the best craft conversation of the day, and it gets at the question the rest of the convergence talk keeps dodging. What actually separates a creator video from a creator show?

Khare walked through the format development on her seven marathons on seven continents series, which went through several cuts before she landed on three parts. The single 90-minute version lost the storylines about her fellow runners, which were the emotional core. A seven-part version ran too loose. Three parts held the tension. She wasn’t decorating the thing after the fact. The number of parts, where the breaks fell, what each episode had to carry, that was the storytelling, as much as anything that happened inside the runs.

None of this fits on a deck. Tim Katz can announce a slate. Billy Parks can write a check. YouTube can build a multi-season playlist tool. None of that tells you how long the show should be, how many episodes it needs, where the cliffhangers land, what the emotional architecture is. Those calls belong to the creator. And the ones figuring it out are doing it by trial, testing a 90-minute cut against three parts against seven, watching what the audience actually holds, rebuilding from there.

Markiplier made the same point from a different angle. “It’s harder to lose something that you care a lot about. And so we have to make people care about it.” He was talking about Unus Annus, the channel he and Ethan Nestor built for one year and deleted in front of 1.7 million people watching live. Same principle. Format is how an audience comes to care in the first place. Khare’s three-part cut works because the structure itself does the emotional work.

YouTube is offering season-level distribution. Brands are buying season-level commitments. Studios are putting up capital for season-level IP. The money and the reach are basically solved at this point. What isn’t solved is the thing Khare was describing, the actual decision of what the show is and how it’s built, and the creators who win the next chapter are going to be the ones who treat that the way a director treats a shot.

5. “I can’t teach someone to care about the work that they’re doing, but I can teach YouTube.”

— Kara McCloud, Director of Recruiting, MrBeast | Session: Meet the Operators Scaling the World’s Top Channels

McCloud was employee #12 at MrBeast. By the morning of Press Publish, Beast Industries had over 780 people. Her session, with Smosh CEO Alessandra Catanese and Crunch Labs Chief Content Officer Scott Lewers, moderated by Kim Larson, who heads YouTube’s Creator and Gaming team, was the most useful hour of the day. It was the only one that took the next question seriously. What happens after the creator becomes a company?

The answers were unglamorous and clarifying. McCloud A/B-tests hires the same way the team A/B-tests packaging. “There’s no other place you can go to that gets people ready for YouTube… I did whatever a good packaging person did. I A/B tested.” Her real point is that mindset is the constraint, not skill. “I can’t teach someone to care about the brand and about the work that they’re doing, but we can teach YouTube.” Beast has built what is basically the first talent incubator the creator economy has had, with alumni like Anthpo and Ernesto Perez. Crunch Labs runs most new hires through an hourly contractor period first. Smosh built a strict 9-to-6 with a 5:50 Slack message that tells people to go home. All three landed on the same diagnosis. Legacy media is departmentalized, camera here, post there, creative somewhere else, and that structure doesn’t survive creator-economy speed.

McCloud’s fix. “We need to get to the pyramids of Egypt. So everybody kind of needs to know what’s gonna go on. We put everybody in the same room.” Producers, camera, creators, post, all in the same room. Catanese hires for personality diversity at Smosh using a survey called Culture Index. Lewers’s team at Crunch Labs screens for pitching ability, because the delivery matters as much as the idea.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Most of the talk around creator-to-company assumes the hard part is the content. Make more of it. Make it bigger. Make movies. The operators in that room were saying the opposite. The content was never really the problem. The company is. You can’t scale the work until the org underneath it can actually carry the weight, and getting there means doing the unsexy stuff, figuring out what you’re hiring for, saying it out loud, and not just hiring your cousin because he’s around.

The Takeaways Behind The Takeaways

Call it leverage, not takeover: The cleanest story, the one I was tempted to write on the flight home, is that the whole thing has flipped. Hollywood comes to the creator now instead of the other way around. I don’t fully buy it. And I’d be suspicious of anyone who spent one day in a room full of creator-economy operators and walked out sure the old model was finished. Of course it looked flipped from inside that room. What I’ll actually stand behind is smaller and more durable. Creators have a real second path now, and a credible alternative changes the terms whether or not anyone takes it. The Fox deal with Segura isn’t Hollywood surrendering. It’s Hollywood competing for something it used to be able to assume. The studios still treating creators like supplicants are the ones who haven’t noticed the floor moved under the negotiation.

The audience is the asset, and everyone in that room knew it: Every operator kept landing on the same idea in different words. Markiplier: one person’s time is the most valuable thing we have. Segura: the audience is the boss, of all of us. Katz: they want relevancy and that connection. McCloud: I can teach YouTube but I can’t teach mindset. A studio deal can’t hand you that relationship, and no amount of capital builds it for you. It’s the one thing that doesn’t show up anywhere on a balance sheet. Every creator at Press Publish has built their whole business around protecting it. Every studio was trying to figure out how to get at it without breaking it.

For a long time the hard part of all this was the content itself, and somewhere along the way that stopped being true: The bottleneck moved to the company. That’s what surprised me most. I went out expecting a conversation about formats and platforms and budgets. I left with a notebook full of org-design lessons. The creators winning right now aren’t winning because they cracked YouTube. They cracked YouTube ten years ago. They’re winning because they figured out hiring, culture, work-life balance, partner selection, format, and pace. The next decade of this business won’t be decided on the platform. It’ll be decided in the back office, and on the cutting room floor, where Michelle Khare is deciding whether a story is three parts or seven.

What I took home is simple. The people winning didn’t wait for permission. They built something real and let the industry come to them. And the stuff that used to be the hard part, raising the money, getting distribution, finding an audience, is mostly handled now in a way it just wasn’t a few years ago. What’s left is the part that was always going to be hard, which is knowing what your story actually is and making it well enough that people show up and stay. That’s the whole game now, and I left more optimistic about it than I’ve been in a long time.

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The 30-second spot and the trailer are dying, and not just because attention spans got shorter. They feel corporate.

Even for a middle-aged dude like myself, I’ve developed a strange aversion to trailers. They talk at you, not with you. They often feel… slow. (Yikes!). That’s the gap between what corporate does and what a creator connection does — and the implications run deeper than marketing.

I’m a producer. I still love making movies. But every producer I know has another part of their brain that’s always running — the part that’s thinking about how to get someone to actually watch the thing. And that part of my brain is what I’ve been trying to update to the new operating system…

I used to think about it like this: you make the movie, you cut a trailer, the trailer pulls people to the movie. Linear. The movie is the destination. Everything points back at it.

Now I think about it the other way around. You find the core DNA of the thing you’re making, and that DNA travels out across different surfaces, creating connection in each one.

The movie is still the destination. That doesn’t have to change. What’s changed is that you can’t get there in a straight line anymore. You get there by building everything around it first — the ecosystem the DNA lives in.

The movie is one surface. Instagram is another. So is a live activation, a merch drop, a stunt. All of it connected by the same DNA. You’re not just making a movie anymore. You’re making the ecosystem the movie has to live inside.

WHERE THIS STARTED

A few weeks ago I was talking with Christoph Becker, Chief Creative Officer at Whalar Group, and he was talking about the challenges of creating symbioses between creators and brands.

“Im constantly telling brands that to sell a product, you can’t mention the product.”

We’ve all been hearing some version of this. But hearing it from Christoph — someone who’s spent decades in the ad world at the highest levels — especially in the context of the bigger conversation we were having about creativity, it resonated in a different way. And I had been thinking about this very issue in making movies and tv shows. They are a product. And you gotta sell it and the thirty second spot and trailer aren’t the answer…

Christoph wasn’t talking about clever copywriting, he was talking about how a brand needs a brief that can be interpreted across different surfaces, with different creators, organically.

The brief is what I was referring to above as DNA — in a perfect world the brand hands it to creators and lets them make it their own through their relationship with their community.

The brief was historically used to prescribe the message. It created strict, immutable guardrails.

Now, what it needs to do is prescribe the DNA — still guardrails of sorts — and then let go. The brand sets the DNA loose and lets creators decide which surfaces it lands on.

Because the surface belongs to the creator, and the creator belongs to their community. A brand that wants in has to be loose enough to be translated — into a TikTok, into an in-joke, into a piece of content that creates an emotional exchange the brand itself could never have authored.

But the dialogue isn’t one-way. The creator shapes the DNA for the community, and the community shapes it back. They remix it, they spread it, they build inside jokes around it, they turn it into something the brand never could’ve predicted.

The reach is the creator’s. The trust belongs to the community. The brand is just a guest.

Christoph added one more thing which might seem obvious to sophisticated marketers but gets lost on producers like me: somewhere in all of this, there should be a unifying visual element. A color. A shape. A motif. Something that lets the DNA stay recognizable across every surface it travels through, immediately connecting it to the whole ecosystem.

I’ve been turning this over for weeks now, and every time I try to articulate why it matters, I keep landing in the same place. I know — believe me, I know — that the entire internet has already written about A24’s Marty Supreme campaign. There is nothing left to say about the blimp. And yet… it just feels like the very best example to make the point…

…So bear with me.

THE DNA OF MARTY SUPREME

You probably know the broad strokes, but just a quick refresher…

The whole campaign was built around a single color — Hardcore Orange. It wasn’t invented for the campaign, it came from the movie. Marty Mauser tries to launch a business selling orange ping pong balls — his scheme for putting his stamp on the sport.

A24 took that exact orange out of the film and put it on everything else. An orange blimp drifted across the country from Nashville to LA. Streetwear brand Nahmias made a windbreaker in that same Hardcore Orange and seeded it to half of Instagram’s most-followed athletes (connecting ping pong to professional athletes does a whole bunch of work I’ll mention later). The character’s scheme to make orange the signature of his career became the studio’s scheme to make orange the signature of the movie.

The orange is the visual DNA. What it’s carrying — the emotional DNA underneath — is obsession. The way Chalamet describes the orange is obsessive. That’s the emotional DNA of the movie. And you start to see how Chalamet the actor is obsessed in the same way Marty the ping pong player is obsessed — and the two are melded together in the color orange.

Sounds like intellectual masturbation? Only when you say it out loud. The feeling watching Chalamet do this is the same feeling you get watching Marty: a man possessed.

META METHOD MARKETING: OBSESSED OBSESSION

Inside the film, Safdie doesn’t let you forget the obsession for a second. Marty is in perpetual motion — hustling, scheming, performing — all in an attempt to become the greatest ping pong player who ever lived in a sport almost nobody takes seriously. Orange and obsession are now one thing.

We’ve already seen how the actor and the character share the obsession. The interesting part is what Chalamet did with it once he brought it out into the real world.

He pitched the unhinged ideas in the leaked Zoom meeting — orange landmarks, orange blimps raining ping pong balls, four named shades of orange (hardcore, corroded, falling apart, rusted) that his “visual artist” supposedly spent six months developing. He dropped surprise coordinates on Instagram and made fans chase him across cities. He climbed to the top of the Las Vegas Sphere — the first person ever to do it — to declare Marty Supreme “an American film that comes out on Christmas day.”

The Zoom video isn’t a marketing stunt. It’s the same obsessive performance, just on a different surface. The film and the campaign aren’t separate things. They’re the same artifact, carrying the same DNA.

And here’s the point. The campaign isn’t promoting the movie. It’s its own content. People discovered it first because they live on Instagram — and what they found wasn’t an ad. It was a piece of content that made an emotional connection on its own terms, that pulls the viewer toward more of it. The movie is the ultimate expression of the DNA. The campaign is one path into it.

Now back to the parenthetical about jackets…

MERCH MADNESS

The Nahmias jacket got seeded to a long list of celebrities — but the names worth focusing on are the athletes. Tom Brady. Michael Phelps. Steph Curry. Three of the most obsessive competitors alive, in three sports that we all take very seriously.

When you put the Hardcore Orange jacket on Tom Brady, it’s not advertising, you’re staging the emotional thesis of the film in real life. I’m speculating here but I’d imagine Brady doesn’t have a lot of respect for ping pong. The orange jacket on his body says (ironically): even he takes this seriously now.

That’s what makes it funny, but it’s also what creates the feeling, the emotion… The delta between ping pong and Tom Brady is enormous — and that delta is exactly what makes Marty’s obsession funny and heartbreaking at the same time. He cares this much about a sport that the world treats as a basement game. When Brady wears the orange, the delta collapses for a moment. The character’s delusion becomes real. The world is taking ping pong seriously because Tom Brady is.

None of these guys mention the movie, and none of them have to. The casting itself is the message — the orange just carries it. The audience doesn’t think about any of this consciously, they just feel something. That something is goodwill, and goodwill gets cashed in at the box office.

And the jacket is just one surface.

MERCH EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Hardcore Orange ended up on Wheaties boxes, on the pyramids at Giza, on the top of the Las Vegas Sphere, on a blimp dropping ping pong balls over Camp Flog Gnaw, on a soundtrack release, on listening events in New York and Tokyo, on an actual underground ping pong tournament A24 hosted with Airbnb.

The DNA found surface after surface to live on. Some of them just generated feeling. All of them were the ecosystem.

But the jacket feels like the biggest tell — about how well this whole thing was working. The Nahmias windbreaker retailed at $250. It’s currently reselling on Grailed for $1,000, $2,000, $4,000. People are paying sixteen times retail for a piece of cloth — not because it’s a movie ticket but because it carries the DNA. The orange and the obsession, manifested in a jacket.

The emotion was the product. The value just showed up wherever it landed.

And this leads me back to how legacy executives, producers, even directors might need to rethink things…

THE AUTEUR IS NOT EXEMPT

Wasn’t this all orchestrated by a marketing department? 1000%. And one of the best marketing teams in the business. Josh Safdie just made the movie he wanted to make. He didn’t walk into A24 pitching orange-and-obsession as the campaign thesis. He didn’t pitch Chalamet going ape shit on a Zoom call with the stoically-faced A24 marketing team.

But we can’t keep talking about “meeting audiences where they are” without considering how storytelling itself is changing.

You could argue Alejandro Iñárritu doesn’t need to think this way. He’s an auteur. And I’ll be there opening weekend to watch Digger with Tom Cruise. But Iñárritu wants to win. The Digger rollout shows a filmmaker who’s thinking carefully — an unrecognizable-Cruise reveal, a teaser hidden inside a Cruise montage, a longer trailer. Smart, mysterious, old-school. It might even work. But if Iñárritu thought he needed to spread Digger across every surface — to tell the story in this new way — would he do it?

If I want to keep making movies and TV shows, I need audiences to show up. And if that means changing how I think about them, build for them, and market to them, I’m going to do that work now. Not when it’s too late.

A few months ago I was at StreamTV Europe in Portugal, speaking on a panel and sitting in on as many others as I could. One presenter shared a statistic we all intuit but rarely see written down so cleanly: 80% of people aged 18 to 24 discover new shows and movies on social media.

That number used to feel like a marketing problem. It isn’t. It’s a storytelling problem. If that’s where the next generation of audiences lives, that’s where the next generation of storytellers will tell their stories. Not deliver them. Tell them.

To sell a product, you can’t mention the product.

It’s not about 30-second spots. It’s about creating emotional connections that build goodwill — connections that eventually lead someone to want to watch the movie or the show.

Many in the next generation, and they may not even be so easily categorized as filmmakers, aren’t looking at the big screen as their canvas. They’re looking at the whole ecosystem of surfaces.

Their stories live in a Tom Brady photo wearing an orange jacket. In a blimp over the 405. In a Zoom video that wasn’t supposed to leak. In a windbreaker reselling for four grand. The screen is one place the story lives. It’s not the only one anymore.

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In 2022, John Hammond and Ari Cagan applied the legacy playbook to the creator economy.

They developed and produced a scripted vertical series called Cobell Energy — an office sitcom set inside a Texas oil company.

When it launched, Variety called it the first Hollywood-backed scripted vertical series ever made. They got Adam McKay to executive produce. They were funded by a sustainability nonprofit called Yellow Dot Judd Apatow reposted the first episode. It looked exactly like it was supposed to.

Didn’t move the needle.

The twist of setting an office sitcom inside a Texas oil company — cowboy boots, southern accents, the whole thing — created enough confusion in the first three seconds that audiences scrolled before they understood what they were watching.

“The second the audience starts to feel confused,” said Hammond, “they’re like, I don’t know what this is, next thing.” The concept registered. The spin was one beat too many.

The McKay attachment was supposed to do work it couldn’t do here.

“When you’re on your phone looking at content,” said Hammond, “you’re not thinking about who produced this or who’s behind it. You’re asking, is this entertaining to me? Do I understand this?” The people who read Variety are not the audience for Cobell Energy.

Hollywood has spent fifty years building an infrastructure of credibility around festivals, trades, EP attachments… all of it designed to communicate value to other people inside the industry.

None of that work translates at the point of contact with a phone screen, where the only question being asked is whether the next three seconds are worth giving up. The system was built for a different distribution model.

Hammond studied film and graphic design at the New School, ran an illegal comedy club out of his Brooklyn basement after graduating, and spent years developing a TV pilot nobody would buy.

Cagan taught himself production, built social-native series at Mad Realities, then started Gymnasium with a few others , in less than a year they sold a show to Amazon. John and Ari met through Kareem Rahma, recognized they read the landscape the same way, and APC came out of that.

After Cobell, the question changed. Not how to launch a show the right way, but what a format would look like if it was designed for zero context — where a stranger landing on it cold could understand what they were watching inside the first three seconds.

There’s an entire category of media companies now built around exactly that problem — studios without a face, formats that don’t depend on a single talent to carry them.

The Wrap recently profiled some that have reached scale: Dropout, Jubilee, NowThis. Mad Realities, which we’ve written about before, is another version of this.

What those companies share is that they’re past the hard part. The infrastructure is in place. The model holds. APC is earlier in that process, which is exactly why it’s worth paying attention to.

The Pivot

The first meeting John and Ari took after starting APC took was with Alex Berry. The show was called The Ick.

The premise lands immediately. Community-submitted dating horror stories, dramatized as scripted short films, each built around the precise moment attraction disappears.

A viewer landing on the content for first time immediately understands what they’re watching. No onboarding required, no prior episode to have seen. Without a known creator at the center, the format has to do the work of orientation on its own. This one does.

Seven months after launch: 500,000 followers, more than 15,000 story submissions, an average of 1.8 million viewers per episode, and breakout episodes reaching five to ten million. No advertising spend. No collab posts.

In April 2026, The Ick won the Webby for Best Content Series in Social and Games at the 30th Annual Webby Awards, with additional nominations in Scripted Video and Comedy Video. Industry recognition for a show that has never been promoted by a single celebrity.

Underneath the visible part — the weekly episode — there’s an infrastructure most social content operations don’t have and would have a hard time replicating.

These guys made three moves that are worth noting…

The Operating System

Decision 1: Invent the Category

The default move in short-form is to find what’s working and make a version of it.

It’s rational, and it’s also a losing game over time. “If something is not cutting edge, there’s no point in us doing it,” said Cagan. “You can make good money very quickly from slop, maybe you’ve got a McMansion from your man-on-the-street shows. But what does it matter? All you did was man-on-the-street shows.”

The instinct at APC is to find the thing nobody has tried yet and figure out whether it can hold. The advantage of inventing a category is that there are no incumbents.

A format built around something people already feel doesn’t need to be explained. Anyone who has ever felt their attraction switch off in a single moment understood the premise the second a scene started.

This comes with a real cost. Studios can kill projects in script stage and never spend the production money.

APC kills them in market, after the production money has been spent. You learn things you can’t learn in development. Cobell Energy was part of that tuition.

Decision 2: Trust the Work

“It’s all about the writing,” said Hammond. “Not about who we can put in there to make the show good.” The Ick has no recurring host, no personality at the center, no collab posts. When an episode performs, they know exactly why.

Kareem Rahma — one of the most successful comedians — someone Hammond and Cagan genuinely respect — has appeared in The Ick. They don’t collab post with him.

“It all comes down to audience, the algorithms whole job is to keep you on the platform as long as possible, which means they have to serve things you will love. We have a lot of talent on our series, and that talent often doesn’t have the same audience as ours.” said Hammond.

With no face carrying the show, the production has to do the trust-building that celebrity usually handles. The framing, the sound, the writing, the edit — that’s what earns a stranger’s attention when there’s no recognizable face to do it. “You can copy someone’s format in an afternoon,” said Cagan. “You can’t copy their standard.”

Hammond’s read on the broader medium is that you can count on one hand those actually elevating the form. When he came up, the conventional wisdom was that rough content performed better — shoot on an iPhone, keep things raw.

“I remember hearing that and thinking, what the fuck am I doing in an industry where everyone is telling you makes things worse,” said Hammond. “surprise, surprise, that was wrong.”

Decision 3: Turn the Audience Into Infrastructure

This one started as an accident.

Hammond, Cagan, and Berry were in development on The Ick, writing their own ick stories, telling people about the concept. Every time they did, the conversation broke open.

Cagan was at a friends Easter dinner when it crystallized — the host mentioned what Ari was making, the cousin had a story, then the uncle, then everyone at the table. “At that point we realized, okay, wait, this would be a really cool way to add another element, another layer to this thing,” said Cagan.

Stories come in through Submityourick.com — hundreds per day. The team filters for a clean narrative turn, the precise moment the ick lands, because without that turn there isn’t a scene to build. By the time it hits production, what’s being shot is a script, not someone’s testimony.

They shoot four to five episodes in a single day, once a month. That batch cadence creates a backlog of around twenty episodes at any given moment. They can hold an episode, sequence releases strategically, absorb a busy month without breaking the feed.

The release rhythm is consistent: episode on Sunday, submission callouts on Monday, runner-ups on Thursday. That structure is what compounds when you’re trying to build a brand.

The submissions are also the data layer underneath everything else. APC keeps a searchable database of every story ever received.

When Reformation came in for a Valentine’s Day campaign with a dump-him angle, APC searched the database for matching stories and scripted around them. When Verizon wanted a Wi-Fi angle, same process.

The integration feels organic to the audience because it actually is, and APC holds a hard line on what brands can ask for in return.

“We’re telling true stories and we can’t just be like, oh, this story you submitted, you actually say you love Exxon now,” said Hammond. “That would just be, what the fuck. You never said that.”

Fifteen thousand submissions in, the show will only stop working if the community stops feeding it. The audience has skin in the game in a way the algorithm can’t replicate. When your story gets picked, you see it on screen and you share it.

Someone who submitted a story watches differently than someone who stumbled onto the feed. These people showed up with something. That’s a relationship that doesn’t get built by ad spend. The audience didn’t just give APC stories. They gave APC infrastructure.

The Lemonade Stand

Cagan describes the short form show landscape with precision rather than modesty. “I don’t think this is a real business yet,” he said. “It’s kind of like a lemonade stand. Its great for a single creator or a few kids, but our aspiration is something much larger.”

That candor is useful. What makes it interesting is what APC is choosing to build toward in the meantime.

Hammond reaches for the HBO comparison. “The Ick right now is basically that thing for us. We do this show, it is not a profitable show, but all the things that come along with it are.” Succession wasn’t profitable on its own — it existed to signal what HBO meant, while the economics of their library ran underneath on subscriptions.

90% of revenue in their first year came from client projects, white label shows, advertising and consulting.

Mid-conversation, Hammond raised TBPN — the podcast that recently sold to OpenAI for roughly $200 million. TBPN wasn’t the biggest podcast in tech. What it was was a vehicle for reaching a very high-value audience that brands were willing to pay a premium to access. The ceiling wasn’t total audience size but audience value.

The playbook could be find the high-value audience and own that space, a smaller audience in the right niche is worth more than a larger one somewhere else. Cagan put it simply “We are in the billboard business, a billboard in Beverly Hills is worth more than one in Glendale. The brilliant thing about the internet is that all land costs the same.”

What They Built and What It Means

Start with a format that doesn’t exist yet. Not a better version of what’s working — an entirely new category with no incumbent. Design it so a stranger understands what they’re watching inside three seconds.

Hold a high production standard.

Find the submission loop. Whatever turns passive viewers into active participants. Let the participation become the data layer. Let the data layer become the brand integration logic. The community doesn’t just produce raw material. It produces infrastructure.

Decide early which audience you’re building for, and make that decision based on value, not size.

Build the audience and the craft first. The money follows what you’ve built, not the other way around.

“I would love to be known as the company that makes the best stuff on the internet,” said Hammond. “And I would even go as far as to say the internet includes Netflix.”Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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A major studio just handed creative control of a tentpole project to a creator’s 31-million-person community. A production label is taking development capital from 2,000 fans instead of a studio. A showrunner just left a major streamer to own his own YouTube channel because ownership matters more than distribution size. Three different structures showing the same rupture: the trade that built Hollywood—capital in exchange for control—is collapsing. The question isn’t whether studios give up creative control. It’s when.

So here are three trends I’ve been noticing, emerging from our Garden Harvest posts and my general diet of media consumption about… well, media.

1. Hollywood Is Importing the Creator OS

Sony announced at CinemaCon in April that it’s developing a Bloodborne animated feature. The detail worth focusing on isn’t the IP. It’s who they brought in alongside it.

Jacksepticeye — the YouTube gaming creator with over 31 million subscribers — is joining the project as a producer. Not as an “executive producer” credit attached for marketing reach. As a creative stakeholder during development.

Producer credits get handed out generously, so the title alone doesn’t tell you much. What makes this one structurally different is who he is to the IP. Jacksepticeye has been a public Bloodborne advocate for years, and his community knows that. By bringing him into the creative process rather than into the marketing rollout, Sony is moving the audience’s representative into the room before the creative is locked. The 31 million people who follow him aren’t being courted at release. They’re effectively seated at the table during development.

That’s creator-economy logic — imported into a Hollywood structure. And it’s not isolated. A whole layer of plays across the industry is moving in the same direction.

In February, Utopia, the independent distributor, launched the Utopia Screening Room as a $5/month Patreon membership. Each screening is positioned as “a digital stop on each film’s release tour” — the city-by-city indie release model converted from a touring schedule into a recurring community ritual. The audience isn’t buying tickets. They’re funding the tour.

In mid-March, Linden Lane Films — founded by Hollywood actor Stephen Kunken with the Stokes Twins and Ben Azelart on the talent roster — launched around a two-arm model. The Films arm handles traditional theatrical and streaming distribution. The Labs arm is the creator incubator that responds to trends in real time on the creators’ existing platforms. The Labs work isn’t promotional. It’s where audience signal feeds creative decisions for the bigger projects.

At SXSW in March, Brass Knuckle Films — Robert Rodriguez and Alexis Garcia’s fan-investor action label — unveiled its first five-project slate. Two of the five came directly from investor-pitched ideas. The label has now raised $2M from over 2,000 individual investors, and announced a “Best Logline Wins” contest where the community competes to have its own idea developed. The audience isn’t a marketing target. It’s the cap table and the writers’ room.

Together they form a pattern: Hollywood used to define itself by what it kept out. The audience was outside the wall. They showed up at the box office or they didn’t. The capital, the creative, the decisions — all inside. The audience’s job was to consume the result.

The creator economy was built on the opposite assumption. The audience is in the room from day one. They vote with watch time, comments, and memes. The creator iterates against that signal. The audience is not the customer at the end of the funnel. They’re a co-creator of what gets made.

The smartest Hollywood operators are importing that posture. Sony brings the community’s representative in as a producer. Utopia brings the audience in as distribution. Linden Lane brings them in as ongoing creative input through the Labs structure. Brass Knuckle brings them in as capital and as development.

The audience used to be outside the wall. The smart Hollywood plays are now tearing down sections of the wall on purpose.

This rewrites a piece of what the producer job actually is. The old job was to gatekeep on behalf of capital — decide what gets made, who makes it, who sees it, when. As Hollywood imports the creator-economy posture, the gatekeeping function shrinks. You don’t need a $30M P&A budget if the audience funded the production and the distribution is the audience. You don’t need a development executive to validate a script if 2,000 fan investors greenlit it. You don’t need a marketing team to manufacture awareness if the creator-producer’s community is already inside the project.

The studio role doesn’t disappear. It gets smaller and more specialized. Less middleman, more partner. Less gatekeeper, more amplifier. The producer who figures out how to operate inside a creator-economy structure — bringing craft and capital without insisting on the gatekeeping — is the one who keeps working.

2. The Pilot Is Dead. The Pre-Production Is the Product.

YouTube published a Culture and Trends report on independent animation earlier this year, and yes, you have to discount any platform’s report on itself. But there’s one number worth taking seriously: more than half of Gen Z animation fans now watch animatics weekly.

An animatic was always an internal step. A storyboard timed to scratch dialogue, used to vet a pitch before anyone spent real money. It existed inside the studio’s vetting layer — the place where ideas got killed cheaply so the expensive ideas could be greenlit with confidence. The animatic was development infrastructure not a product.

Now it is— Glitch Productions ships them publicly. The Amazing Digital Circus released animatic scenes with green-screen backgrounds specifically so fans would meme them. Vivienne Medrano’s Hazbin Hotel pilot — released as a YouTube video — became the proof of demand that landed the Prime Video series.

What the animation pipeline did first, the rest of the industry is doing now.

Adam Neuhaus, the documentary producer, spent a few weeks getting yelled at on Twitter for telling filmmakers they should build sixty pieces of content around their movies before release. His clarification was sharper than the original take. He wasn’t talking about marketing. He was talking about the production process itself becoming the audience-development engine. Production diaries. Crew portraits. The work of making the work.

Jonah Feingold’s new company Romantical is raising $3M on a thesis that branded short-form content for Hinge, Tinder, and BetterHelp is the proof of concept, the audience build, and the creative R&D for his rom-com features happening simultaneously. The shorts and the films feed each other.

Brian Robbins — who just left the Paramount co-CEO job — raised $100M to develop IP first on YouTube and TikTok and let the data tell him which projects deserve theatrical money.

These look like different stories because they come from different corners of the industry. They’re the same story.

The development funnel has inverted. The old model was: pitch a script, greenlight a pilot, hope it works, scale into series. The cost of failure lived inside the studio — a failed pilot was a $5M loss, a failed greenlight was a bigger one. The infrastructure of development was built around ranking pitches before money got spent.

The new model is: build community in public, prove demand iteratively, scale into long-form once the audience exists. The cost of failure has moved earlier and lower — out of the studio’s balance sheet and into the creator’s daily content. By the time the long-form swing happens, the audience is already there.

Structurally, that means a layer of the studio’s value proposition is being unbundled. The development executive — the person whose job was to read pitches and bet on which ones deserved a pilot — is being replaced by a community whose collective viewing is the bet.

This is the production-side mirror of the rented-vs-owned shift. Studios used to rent out the development pipeline to writers and producers. Now creators are building owned development pipelines that sell long-form swings to studios on better terms. The studio’s role moves from validator to amplifier. From “do you have the script” to “do you have the community.”

For producers, this reorganizes the job. The next generation of showrunners isn’t pitching scripts. They’re shipping animatics and production diaries. Whoever brings craft to that pipeline wins. Whoever insists on the old greenlight model finds themselves rewriting decks for a buyer that no longer needs to read them.

3. Legacy Talent Is Adopting the Creator Job

Phil Rosenthal — the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, in his mid-sixties — just signed a Banijay Americas deal that moves new episodes of Somebody Feed Phil to a dedicated YouTube channel starting in 2027. The eight-season back catalog stays on Netflix. Going forward, YouTube is the primary home, alongside a slate of short-form material built around the show.

The reasons Rosenthal gave matter. He said he always loved that Everybody Loves Raymond was free to watch everywhere, and that the YouTube move is a return to that ethos. Reach, directness, ownership. Global audience without a gatekeeper. More direct engagement with the people who actually watch. Greater control over what gets made.

Sounds like a creator…

This is what’s quietly happening across the talent layer of Hollywood. The job description for “talent” is being rewritten to include the things creators have been doing for a decade.

Mark Wahlberg’s production company Unrealistic Ideas — behind HBO’s Wahl Street and McMillion$ — just launched 4AM Club Challenge, a ten-part YouTube series putting creators through his brutal early-morning workout. The first season includes Druski, Dhar Mann, the Stokes Twins, Airrack, and Ben Azelart. He’s using his own production infrastructure to build a YouTube presence with the audiences he doesn’t yet have.

And Jim Louderback wrote recently about athletes — Faatimah Amen-Ra, Hayden Tyler Ancheta, Diana Flores — building “portable communities” that follow them across teams, leagues, and sports. The career insurance for a modern athlete is owning an audience that travels.

If athletes can carry their audience from team to team, actors and showrunners can carry theirs from project to project. In a world where buyers obsess over built-in IP and de-risked bets, a portable audience is leverage at the table.

This is the talent-layer version of Trends 1 and 2. Studios are bringing the audience inside the production. Development is being rebuilt around audience signal. And now talent itself is treating audience-building as part of the job — a prerequisite for the better deals, not a side activity.

For producers, this changes who you cast, who you sign, who you go into business with. An actor who can deliver 5 million people on opening weekend through their own channels is structurally different from one who needs a $30M P&A campaign to do the same job. The economics flow toward the first one.

The harder version of this question is what happens to the talent that doesn’t make the transition. The actors, writers, and showrunners whose visibility was always mediated by the studio’s marketing apparatus, and who don’t have a public-facing presence beyond press junkets. Phil Rosenthal at 65 figured out the answer is to behave like a creator. Plenty of his peers won’t.

Where the three meet

Read the three together and one through-line shows up.

Hollywood is bringing the audience inside the production. The development pipeline is being rebuilt around community signal. Legacy talent is taking on the creator job to keep working.

Every one of these shifts costs Hollywood the same thing: creative control.

For a century, the studio system has run on a single trade — capital for control. We provide the money, we keep the notes, the greenlight, the final cut, the marketing approvals. That trade is what built the system. It’s also what every legacy operator has refused to let go of.

That model is crumbling fast…

Markiplier released Iron Lung in theaters with no studio and no distributor. Lighthouse Studios is putting real capital behind Cole Bennett’s Lyrical Lemonade with the kind of creative freedom Hollywood would have demanded oversight on. Whalar can finance projects against creator audiences. Brass Knuckle can raise $2M from fans.

That puts a real question in front of every studio executive: when does Hollywood have to give up creative control to survive?

The talent, the IP, and the audiences are migrating toward the people who’ll fund them without insisting on control. So what does Hollywood actually have to offer that creators can’t get elsewhere? Capital and institutional know how for sure but having the knowledge doesn’t mean you have to have the control.

But the producers and executives who thrive in this environment are going to be the ones who make peace with the trade earliest. Less control. More partnership. Fund the work, support it, get out of the way. The job becomes amplification, not validation. The notes become a conversation, not a command. The creative control that legacy Hollywood has guarded for a century gets handed to the filmmakers and storytellers who actually know what they’re making.

That’s a hard transition. It cuts against muscle memory built over generations. It’s also the only one that keeps a seat at the table.

Markiplier going directly to theaters with Iron Lung is a small move in the grand scheme of things. The leading indicator is how soon studios realize the trade has flipped — and that the creative control they’ve held for a century is now the price of staying in the room.

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Somewhere around 3.5 million years ago, a small but consequential mutation showed up in the human hand. The opposable thumb. Not dramatic. Not a new organ. Not a revolution in the biology of the species. Just a subtle shift in one digit that unlocked tool use, dexterity, and eventually, civilization.

Evolution’s best work rarely looks like a lightning bolt. It looks like a thumb.

I’ve been thinking about Lighthouse Studios the same way. When they announced the partnership between Lyrical Lemonade TV and Lighthouse Studios at SXSW in March, the coverage was dutiful. A new creator studio. A partnership with Cole Bennett. A programmed YouTube network. Filed, noted, moved on.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the structural implications of what they’re actually doing — because underneath the announcement is a model that reorganizes several key assumptions about how creator content gets built, owned, and monetized. It’s not a revolution.

But it might just be an opposable thumb.

So I went deepe…

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I was on the fence about speaking at StreamTV Europe. The Denver conference is well regarded, and the speakers and moderators are top notch. But Europe is a different animal. The creator economy doesn’t map cleanly onto a continent where a show that dominates in Spain means nothing in Germany, where public broadcasting still holds structural power that has no real American equivalent, and where regulatory frameworks treat content the way other governments treat roads and utilities — as infrastructure too important to leave entirely to the market. Was a thirty-minute panel worth a long transatlantic flight?

But something told me I needed to go.

Turns out the fragmentation and regulation I was worried about wasn’t the story. It was the backdrop. We say about country-specific content that breaks through globally that “the specific is universal.” That was true here too. The actual story was the same one playing out in every media market in the world, just more honestly discussed than I expe…

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When I started this newsletter 18 months ago, it felt like a white space. Very few people were writing seriously about the convergence of Hollywood and the creator economy — the deal structures, the leverage dynamics, the fundamental question of what each side actually has that the other needs. Now it seems like it’s all anyone talks about.

Which is how I ended up at The Lighthouse in Venice last week, watching The Wrap’s Creators x Hollywood panel on deal structure — a room full of industry people nodding along as a Lionsgate EVP, a partner at 3Arts Entertainment, and Tubi’s VP of Creator Partnerships explained, with apparent ease, why they’ve surrendered the one thing Hollywood never surrenders.

Creative control.

The panel was framed as a conversation about partnerships. But the more interesting conversation happening underneath it was about something harder to name: what Hollywood actually has that creators need, and whether the answer to that question is changing faster than either s…

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I first heard about Mad Realities a year or two ago. They called themselves the MTV of the internet generation, which sounds reductive until you actually look at what they’ve built — unscripted formats designed natively for social media platforms that generated over a billion views last year across just eight shows.

Eight shows. A billion views.

My first reaction to watching this kind of content was judgment. This isn’t storytelling. This has no substance. But I’ve learned to recognize that instinct for what it is — the defensiveness that kicks in after you’ve spent decades building a career and suddenly the skills and instincts you killed yourself to develop are being challenged and downgraded.

The work is pushing through that. Asking what I can learn from it instead of why it doesn’t meet my standards.

That’s why I launched this Substack. So that people like Alice Ma — who are building the systems that will define the next era of entertainment — can illuminate legacy storytellers like m…

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A Note From The Team: Team Open Gardens is on the road this week. We’ll be returning next week with a new Deep Dive! We’ve decided to repost one of our more widely read pieces that has remained relevant despite the countless shifts and changes throughout the industry at large. See you next week!

At 3Pas Studios, we’ve always made our living the old-fashioned way: pitching studios, selling shows, spending years getting something green lit.

That model still works — sometimes. But not enough. So we’re now financing our own shows directly for social platforms. Not an experiment. Not a hobby. This is the real plan: big talent with real online communities, clean digital formats, made cheap — but made. No waiting for permission. There’s a lot more to it. But that’s the headline.

We still love our legacy business. We’re still playing that game.

Open Gardens is my lab notebook for these new horizons.

Today’s entry is for every legacy producer, writer, or director who wants to make their first real …

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I occasionally write a deep dive called Nobody Asked Me, where I pitch big ideas to companies that did not invite me into the room, have no obligation to listen, and are more than successful enough to ignore me entirely. Still, the ground under all of us is moving.

Almost a year ago I published a thought exercise about Miami Vice, exploring what I might do with a legendary legacy brand in the open garden. At the time it was purely speculative because nobody was actually rebooting Miami Vice.

Lately, while working through marketing plans on some of our own shows, I’ve been thinking about that piece again. The more I do this, the more it feels like marketing isn’t separate from the show anymore. The DNA of the story starts showing up everywhere in different ways. It’s really just the same creative process expressed across different platforms, each one expanding the world of the story and growing a community at the center of it.

Now someone is rebooting Baywatch, and the choices they’re mak…

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You don’t have to be as interested in Brazil or Mexico as I am to find this story useful. What I’m really looking at here is structure, how creator economies get built and why some ecosystems mature faster than others. Brazil just happens to offer a case study with lessons that can be applied almost anywhere in the world.

One of my predictions for 2026 is that the creator economy is about to get a lot more international.

That observation is both analytical and a little self-serving. My company produces a lot of content for Spanish-speaking markets, particularly Mexico, and recently we’ve been spending more time thinking about how creators fit into that ecosystem. But it’s also a fairly predictable pattern. As the U.S. creator market matures, capital and opportunity will naturally start looking for less saturated markets.

As I started digging deeper into Latin America, one comparison kept bothering me.

Brazil and Mexico are often treated as economic twins, even though Brazil has nearly 80 …

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At the end of 2022, we decided to explore selling our company, 3Pas Studios.

At the time, the decision was not driven by panic or pessimism. We were still technically in Peak TV. There was still some optimism that mid and lower budget films could recover real theatrical value post-pandemic. And my partner, with close to 90 million followers, remained one of the most powerful names in U.S. Hispanic and Latin American entertainment. The traditional system was still working, and in many ways working very well.

The market reinforced that confidence. Celebrity-driven production companies were being rewarded with valuations that had little to do with near-term cash flow and everything to do with perceived leverage and future optionality.

Hello Sunshine. SpringHill. (Remember that media moment? Feels like a lifetime ago).

We brought in a bank and went to market. After more than a year of meetings, we had three bidders. We went exclusive with one of them, an international media company, and enter…

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As a legacy producer running a legacy-focused production company, I’m constantly asking a simple question:

Where do we actually have leverage in the creator economy?

In a recent conversation, RJ Larese, who runs one of the top creator management firms, Sixteenth, told me something both surprising and inevitable. Because studios and platforms are aggressively pursuing creator talent, he has opened a division dedicated solely to packaging and selling projects into the traditional system. They already have projects set up at streamers.

This will not be an isolated move.

The simple reaction from legacy producers is to chase one-off deals with individual creators. Attach one to a show. Adapt a channel. Test a collaboration.

But there may be a larger structural play.

The most future-proof production companies won’t behave like mini-studios.
They’ll behave like creator management agencies, run by producers who already possess the core skills required to build them: packaging talent, developing form…

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For those of us who grew up before the internet flattened everything into clips and feeds, NFL Films felt almost magical. It was hypnotic. Seductive. Myth-building in the purest sense. You didn’t have to love football to fall under its spell. You just had to watch.

An NFL Films documentary could make you care about teams you’d never seen play, players you’d never heard of, seasons that ended decades before you were born. It made football feel important in a way that went far beyond the game itself.

That feeling has been on my mind lately as the season ends.

I’ve been spending time with a friend who works as a content strategist, and our conversations keep circling the same reality: most brands know they need to behave like media companies, but very few actually do. Some dabble. Some commission a campaign here or there. Some think hiring a couple of creators is enough to check the box. But the brands that are winning aren’t treating content as decoration. They’re being aggressive. They’re…

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For nearly a century, advertising agencies occupied a privileged position in the cultural supply chain.

They sat between capital and culture. Between brands and audiences. Between money and meaning. Institutions like WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Publicis, and Dentsu built global empires by controlling access to scarce media inventory and arbitraging attention at scale. If you wanted to reach people, you went through them.

For filmmakers and creative talent, advertising became a parallel ecosystem. A place to experiment, pay overhead, and stay sharp between projects. At the highest level, it monetized reputation. Martin Scorsese and Alejandro Iñárritu used commercials to cash in on their names while keeping their tools sharp. For others, it was structural. Brady Corbet directed commercials to afford The Brutalist. Producers built commercial companies that later leveraged talent into film and television. Anonymous Content became the clearest expression of that model, a proving ground for directors …

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