Unsentimality

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This week’s piece for TRB Pro members focuses on how we are going through an unsentimental period across society and in the media business in particular, as unsentimental operators take control of distressed assets. Upgrade to TRB Pro for $200 a year or $20 a month.

First, veteran content marketer Lucas Quagliata on why the vibes are powerful yet rarely enough in a world of spreadsheets. (If you want to contribute to The Rebooting, send me a note at [email protected]. I'm interested in including the views of practitioners.)

Fake it til you make it. An old adage but honestly not bad advice. When you’re building a media business you need hype. 

To survive, though, you also need a strong business. You can launch without one and you have some runway before you need to be profitable, but you need to bring in revenue to justify your existence. This is true even when you have hype. Remember Quibi? CNN+? Venu? One could listen to the litany of excuses that Jeffery Katzenberg, David Zaslav or uh, (checks notes) David Zaslav could make about each of those endeavors, but the bottom line is they were not bringing in money. 

But vibes and numbers – hype and financial success – are far from mutually exclusive. In fact they can feed into each other quite well. Vibes often translate into numbers, and at the beginning stages of any new business, financial projections are rarely more concrete than the vibes behind them. It works the opposite way too, a project with no hype is much less likely to garner the support it needs to get off the ground, sound business plan or not. 

The publication of Graydon Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good, arrives at an auspicious time. It evokes the sentimentality of the golden age of media business. There were town cars and bar carts and big expense accounts. Writers were paid very well. Craft mattered. Annie Leibovitz was deployed. And, as Troy noted in our last episode of PvA, these were still good businesses.

Sometimes, it’s good to be sentimental, only we live in unsentimental times.

Not only has the market decimated legacy media businesses but the overall vibe has shifted to deprioritize the emotions evoked by sentimentality that served as a binder for a sprawling, chaotic and diverse nation. Trumpism is unsentimental about alliances, norms, institutions and what used to be agreed American ideals. The American experience has always been hard-headed practicality wrapped in a sentimental cocoon. Reagan might have railed against the government as the problem, not the solution, but he still evoked Winthrop’s religious imagery of America as a “shining city on a hill.”

This shift to the unsentimental is marketed as common sense and realism. The details aren’t always consistent on that score. It’s hard to see how trashing allies is common sense or a realistic view of the nature of the interconnected world – and limits of American power when things get real, rather than monkeying around bullying Greenland or Panama. 

The tech world was already in the midst of an unsentimental turn before the return of Trump, which has only accelerated the shift of tech leaders to assert themselves against the HR policies they adopted (supposedly under pressure), mouthy and coddled employees and, of course, ungrateful media companies. Their widespread capitulation to Trump can be seen as a betrayal or an unsentimental necessity of the realities of power. 

It’s no surprise that tech companies have taken an unsentimental view of the news industry. We are well past the times when Silicon Valley executives would genuflect to the importance of the news business. I was always skeptical of the motivations of the welfare programs Google and Facebook set up to benefit news companies. They struck me as a fairly transparent attempt to throw some chump change at a problem to make it go away. And still they got raked over the goals and dragged in front of Congress. Better to get jacked, go on Joe Rogan and give the mainstream media the finger. After all, they have built the platforms that have replaced the central role in shaping culture that many at Carter’s book party once held. 

Google recently came out with the results of an “an experiment to understand the value of European news content.” The conclusion: “European news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.” Translation: Don’t push it, EU regulators, we can easily walk away and eliminate news content from search results. This is giving no quarter to the notion that news is a societal good beyond its ability to drive ad clicks. 

Putting aside sentimentality, which was a better investment: Elon Musk buying Twitter for $44 billion or Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post for $200 million? You could argue, in math that old works if you’re a centi-billionaire, that Musk’s move was better. The unsentimental playbook Musk ran by dismantling Twitter could not be executed at the Post. (The counter is that Twitter took over his brain and will ultimately lead to his downfall due to being trapped in a bizarre echo chamber where Catturd is a public intellectual.)

Nick Denton has emerged from self-imposed exile from the media scene following the dismantling of Gawker. He suddenly started posting on X again, mostly about geopolitics and the need for Europe to take the message and move on from the sentimental view America as a loyal friend. He’s got an apartment to sell, so he gave an interview to Carter’s diminished Vanity Fair in which he credited Peter Thiel with actually benefiting him by forcing the sale of Gawker. His unsentimental reasoning: He’s better off with that messy outcome than Jonah Peretti is by continuing to run BuzzFeed. Unsentimental.

The legacy media business Carter’s memoir celebrates has moved onto a different phase of life. Many of these assets, and other digital media assets, have moved onto a phase where the IP value is harvested by unsentimental  operators. The next wave clean-up M&A will be led by those unencumbered by the yoke of sentimentality. The businesses will be rationalized and optimized, whittled down to their bare essentials as their remaining brand value is harvested via SEO, aggro programmatic and affiliate links galore. The return of Vice as a magazine is a figleaf for running an arb playbook. 

The triumph of performance marketing is the vanquishment of sentimentality. Emotion is the bedrock of sentimentality, and performance is the antithesis of that. AI will accelerate the shift to outcomes-based ad systems that are wholly unsentimental about the nostrums of storytelling and emotions that used to be the heart of the advertising industry.

The pendulum always swings too far. AI’s continued advancement will inevitably bring a shift to prioritize more human media. And sentimentality, for all its flaws and risks of the nostalgia trap, is an inextricable part of the human experience. 

Thanks for reading and being a TRB Pro member. Send me feedback by hitting reply. I’m also interested in hearing from potential contributors to The Rebooting.