Stories That Matter: when formats stop explaining how media works
Plus social media bans, ads on ChatGPT, the 'advertising is a Bellwether' delusion, and Netflix.
Look away now media planners: advertising choices became even more challenging this week.
These inherited distinctions that we still live by — between “programmes” and “short-form content” — have become even less of a reliable guide to how media actually performs. As distribution, consumption, and measurement collapse into platform environments, decision-making logic built for channels and schedules is starting to strain.
What matters is becoming less about where something sits in a grid, and more about how it travels.
Media conceding what it no longer controls
Think about the olden days. Maybe, like me, you grew up in a house where the television was always on. With only four channels, it was normal to switch it on and drift in and out of the room, half-listening to whatever happened to be on. Television worked as ambient media: a shared backdrop that didn’t require a decision, only presence.
That dynamic faded once internet-connected TV introduced infinite choice. Watching became an active question — what do I actually want to watch? — one that carries cognitive cost. More choice brought more effort, less tolerance for mediocrity, and a shift away from shared viewing towards personalised consumption across devices.
That lived shift sits underneath this week’s headlines.
The BBC’s reported decision to start making programmes specifically for YouTube (The Guardian) is an institutional acknowledgement that audience aggregation can no longer be assumed to happen on owned platforms alone. Commissioning for scale inside a closed ecosystem is proving a less dependable route to reach and relevance; even public service broadcasters now find themselves rebuilding audiences piece by piece across global platforms they do not control.
At the same time, reporting around BARB data suggesting YouTube has “beaten” the BBC (Deadline) in viewing terms exposed the limits of existing measurement frameworks. The comparison itself is shaky — not because one is definitively winning, but because broadcast-era panels and sampling models struggle to account for content that circulates across formats, devices, and contexts.
What this reveals is less a shift in popularity than a widening gap between how media is consumed and how its performance is still being counted.
Why format is losing its grip on value
The weakening distinction between “programmes” and “short-form content” points to a broader change in how media value is beginning to be created.
In a world of abundance, general-interest output can no longer rely on habit or tolerance to secure attention; content increasingly has to earn engagement deliberately. That places pressure on commissioning models built around filling schedules, and on planning assumptions that still treat scale as a proxy for impact.
It also helps explain why legacy measurement is faltering, and the true scale of the challenge facing the likes of Origin. Even with “cross-media measurement”, systems designed to count audiences within bounded channels are ill-equipped to describe media that functions across multiple formats and contexts. Or media that generates value through reference, circulation, and secondary effects rather than through time spent alone.
We’re in a world where ideas matter more than the containers they first arrive in.
Media value, then, increasingly seems to be created by ideas that can move across formats and contexts, rather than by programmes designed to succeed within a single channel or schedule.
The same pressure, expressed elsewhere
This shift isn’t confined to institutions. Press Gazette reported that the BBC’s ubiquitous Amol Rajan is stepping away from Today (one of many licence fee-paid gigs) to start his own business, a move that makes more sense when influence and value are no longer anchored to a single programme slot. At the other end of the scale, Goalhanger’s growing subscriber base shows narrowcast media building durable economics outside broadcast schedules and legacy measurement altogether.
Different actors, different scales — but the same move away from programme-led logic towards ideas, identities, and relationships that travel.
Which is why, as I argued last week, video podcasting looks set to be big this year. Netflix’s deal with Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger was one signal, teaming up with Spotify was another, but the streaming OG is now launching its own originals featuring comedian Pete Davison and sports star Michael Irvin (TechCrunch).
Podcasts, as Lineker and co. have discovered, are an immensely profitable business if you can harness household names to produce good content consistently, given how cheap the format is to produce compared to TV.
Step forward Ant & Dec (below), who also announced they are clambering aboard the podcast gold rush (BBC).
If even the patron saints of linear primetime are now unbundling their value into a portable, low-cost, algorithm-compatible format, then the centre of gravity has moved.
What becomes harder to defend next
The question is: how much can audiences still be reliably aggregated, valued, and explained through stable formats and channels?
As ideas move more freely across platforms, familiar measurement frameworks risk offering comfort rather than clarity. The challenge now is less about finding a new metric than about recognising when the old ones are no longer telling the full story.
Now for some other stories that matter….
Social media and teens bans: understandable but unsatisfying
Calls are growing in the UK for a ban on social media for under-16s, a response that feels both understandable and incomplete.
On the one hand, we are normalising life inside algorithmically curated feeds, where ideas travel faster than institutions and taste is shaped by opaque systems rather than human editors. On the other, we are increasingly honest about how destabilising this environment can be for younger users, who are more vulnerable to manipulation, emotional extremes, and distorted norms.
Age-based thresholds offer a blunt form of protection, but they also expose a deeper discomfort: we have built a media system that demands discernment and self-regulation, while admitting we’re not confident everyone can develop those skills safely — and we don’t yet have a better answer.
Outdated ‘bellwether’ imagery?
Another IPA Bellwether report, another “flat” projection of whether marketing budgets grew last quarter.
If you read the latest WARC Media Global Adspend Report I authored (and of course you did!!) then you will know that the post-Covid advertising industry no longer goes up and down with the economy in the US and Europe and it used to.
Since 2021, global ad spend growth has consistently outpaced increases in GDP. Marketers are setting paid media budgets based on corporate profitability rather than consumer demand and broader macro conditions.
The TLDR is that so much of our industry’s behaviour (and hence its spend) is now dictated by the economics of digital platforms, not whether consumer confidence is high or low.
Ads on ChatGPT confirmed… what’s next?
“Advertising is coming” to ChatGPT, I wrote in The Media Leader last summer, after Open AI had just hired a head of marketing.
Last week this was finally announced (Adweek), within weeks of panicky CEO Sam Altman calling for a “code red” as the AI chatbot leader lost ground to rivals Google and Anthropic last year.
The why is obvious: Open AI’s valuation (estimates range between $500bn-$830bn) is completely out of kilter with how much money it makes (reportedly $13bn-$20bn). They need cash — yesterday — and creating ad formats seems like a predictable and manageable way to do it. After all, Google and Meta have competed by leveraging massive profits from their own huge ad businesses.
The ‘what next?’ is fraught with danger… all those personal insights that people have been handing over to ChatGPT (”what does this dream mean?” “help me decide if this is gout or a foot sprain”) are all, apparently monetisable now.
Netflix and overkill?
Matt Damon has claimed that Netflix increasingly pushes writers to restate plot points in dialogue because viewers are often on their phones while watching (Variety).
Taken on its own, this is anecdotal rather than evidential, but it resonates with a broader shift in how platforms appear to assume media is consumed: partially, distractedly, and alongside other screens. If that assumption is shaping creative notes — whether at Netflix or elsewhere — it would suggest storytelling is being optimised less for immersion and more for survivability in a fragmented attention environment. The open question isn’t whether audiences are distracted, but how far platforms are now designing narratives around that expectation, and what that does to the kind of stories that get made.
By the way: did Variety take the trouble to ask Netflix whether this was true? No mention of that in the story. But it did remember to link to the Joe Rogan Experience’s YouTube channel, where Damon said it!
You know, this Joe Rogan Experience.
Are you new? Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions
I’m Omar Oakes: someone who’s been lucky enough to have spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.
I bring together an increasingly rare mix of network, voice, and track record: building publications, growing audiences, and challenging the stories this industry tells itself. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign magazine before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.
I have no plans to put this newsletter behind a paywall; I just love writing and sharing ideas. This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.
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