Today’s conversations: Vox Media CRO Geoff Schiller discusses its talent-led franchise strategy, and FloSports CEO Mark Floreani on why niche sports like cheerleading, rugby and marching band are a growing media opportunity.
These discussions were part of TRB Conversations powered by EX.CO, which we held at CES two weeks ago. Thanks to EX.CO for its partnership.
First, why OpenAI ads capitulation was inevitable and poised to succeed.
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Ads always win
Miami has a fleet of delivery robots that mostly seem lost, often stranded along the beach walk, terrified by yappy little dogs barking at them, or, on at least one occasion, meeting the business end of the Brightline. Now, they are plastered with ads. The Seufert Rule in effect.
Silicon Valley has a strange relationship with ads. They want to remake society but keep stumbling into ad networks. Engineering Brain sees ads not so much as gauche but more as friction, the ultimate evil.
The tech titans each go through the same process: 1. Declare their hate of ads; 2. Vow to never run them; 3. Meet with their CFO and investors; 4. Roll out an ad product that is supposedly useful and not friction.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speedran the process, as is fitting in a time when we are all going through life on 2.5x speed. Two years ago, he called it the “last resort.” That changed, of course, as was inevitable. VC philosopher Marc Andreessen explained the simple logic: you can’t have a digital consumer service with billions of users and not have ads. People whine about ads but usually choose them over paying subscriptions. OpenAI hiring former Facebook exec and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo signaled ads were a when, not if.
ChatGPT’s ad platform for free and low-cost tiers will be the most anticipated since Facebook rolled out ads back in 2007. Zuckerberg heralded a new era of media with a slightly hippie idea that the ads would be completely native to the experience and “social.” He promptly ignited a privacy uproar by embedding tracking technology called Beacon that began a parade of, well, aggressive approaches to user data. In what would become a pattern, Zuckerberg dissembled, to put it mildly, over what Beacon did.
Zuckerberg debuted its ads program at a glitzy event for advertisers and ad industry types in NYC. This was a different time. Silicon Valley had made peace with ads once they saw Google’s IPO filing. What friction? Time to turn on the revenue spigot.
That spigot often came up. The simple logic was to accumulate a massive audience rather than focus on a business model. Being too commercially minded was for losers or fake tech people from NYC or LA. MySpace was crushed by Facebook in part because it was slow to adapt. It would delay new feature launches until the sales team could find a launch sponsor. NGMI when Facebook was f-ing it and shipping.
OpenAI didn’t choose CES to make its announcement. Or rush it for Advertising Week. And it couldn’t delay until Cannes, which would seem ideal. That’s because it is incinerating tons of money in compute and infrastructure. Google searches are fairly cheap to produce. ChatGPT spends “tens of millions” on people saying thank you to the bot.
The timeline for AGI and curing cancer was pushed out when its GPT-5 model disappointed in August. Google has gone from hapless back to presumed hegemon as Gemini keeps catching up as Google has reached parity with OpenAI and turns on its massive distribution spigot. Claude Code is threatening to break out of the nerdery, although I suspect 99% of the apps vibe coded are rarely if ever used.
That said, ChatGPT has the makings of a great advertising business. It has massive distribution with 200 million weekly users. It is an ideal ad environment for commercial conversations. The example OpenAI showed was a ChatGPT regurgitated recipe with grocery listings.
It is a robust ad presentation, taking up a third of the screen. That’s in contrast to the almost apologetic announcement, which was dropped on a Friday afternoon in mid-January. No buddy movie of Sam and Fidji like the one with Jonny Ive to announce whatever device they’re building.
OpenAI is clearly wary of losing trust from users by intruding into chats with commercials. Its announcement wasn’t geared toward advertisers – it assumes there will be robust demand – but more to explain why ads wouldn’t ruin the chatbot.
This is easy to hyperventilate over, but my brothers in tech, have you been on a website the last decade? You’re fine. The bar for obscene ad density is fairly high. No, ChatGPT won’t monetize therapy sessions. People forget that Google only makes money off only 10–15% of its searches. OpenAI will do fine if people are discussing mesothelioma with it.
OpenAI will focus on intent conversations, and it will also, based on the example shown, make its ads less “native.” The trend in ads dating from Google was to make them seamless. Search ads looked like any other result. That’s dangerous in a chat environment. It would be a SNL skit for ChatGPT to play an Avon seller in the middle of chats. Best to have a more standard ad unit.
The new ad platform will inevitably be complemented by a commerce offering. Silicon Valley learned long ago that the real money is in direct marketing. More scalable.
With Samo and many veterans of both Google and Facebook’s as teams, OpenAI has an established playbook to run. This isn’t an act of invention. They do not need to make crazy claims like Zuckerberg’s that Social Ads marked an epochal change. It can just tell Delta it will book more flights for it. Everyone knows the drill.
Vox Media’s bet on talent franchises
The shift in the market to reward individuals over institutions means publishers will need to develop their own talent strategies. Vox Media has been one of the most aggressive, using its podcasting operation to incubate talent-led franchises like Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway and A Touch More with Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, The Rebooting and EX.CO partnered for a series of live podcast recordings at EX.CO’s suite in The Cosmopolitan, Vox CRO Geoff Schiller joined me for a discussion of this strategy.
“Vox Media Podcast Network is like the HBO of podcasting where we're a home for talent to nurture them, to build trust, and it's not just like this massive scale play,” Geoff said in our conversation.
The niche sports opportunity
I also spoke with Mark Floreani, CEO of FloSports, a direct-to-consumer sports media platform, about why niche sports are having a moment. FloSports focuses on mid-and-long-tail sports like cheerleading, rugby and marching bands. These aren’t small. A cheerleading event can draw over 100,000 people over a weekend, Mark said.
"By owning the IP, we can then can own it from registration, ticketing, uh to broadcast times to make sure that we're really delivering a great customer experience uh for the sport and then we also own it so we don't have to rent the rights,” Mark said.
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