Undivided: Winning the War for Attention

Every era of media has a small group of people who figure out the new tools before anyone else does. They reach enormous audiences with a fraction of the resources the incumbents spend. Then the incumbents catch up, professionalize it, and the cycle starts over.

I want to talk to the people in the early part of that cycle.

Big media companies don’t miss new platforms because they can’t see them. They see them clearly. They miss them because they are busy operationalizing the platform that already made them successful. Every quarter spent making the existing business run better is a quarter not spent on the thing that looks small and unserious today.

That’s not stupidity. It’s the rational behavior of an organization that has already won something and wants to keep it. But it creates an opening, and somebody always walks through it.

The tools available to an individual creator right now are extraordinary. One person can write, produce, distribute, and build an audience at a scale that required a studio ten years ago. Most of the people using those tools well are not working at the companies you’d expect.

The first conversation is with Bob Sabouni. Bob was at Marvel Comics before Marvel IP became the most reliable formula at the box office. I’m less interested in what happened after the formula worked than in what it looked like from the inside while it was still a comics business and nobody had decided those characters were worth billions. That’s the part that’s hard to see in hindsight and easy to get wrong.

From there, more creators and entrepreneurs who are building audiences outside the traditional system. People who made something work before the industry agreed it would work.

As humans in the 21st century, our most valuable and scarce commodity is time. Alongside work, sleep, family, fitness and spirituality, it’s amazing that we somehow manage to carve out time for media every day. And the stakes for winning those precious few moments couldn’t be higher — the global media and entertainment industry now exceeds $3.5 trillion.¹

Most conversations about attention get stuck on how to buy it. I’d rather understand how it gets earned.

Introducing Undivided.