Until TikTok came along and ate one of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s three lunches, Quibi was the undisputed embodiment of a media, marketing and consumer culture that went off the rails in the 2010s: a product so cynically engineered around our least-flattering impulses and reckless obsession with the so-called “attention economy” that it borders on parody.

Which is to stress that ByteDance merely perfected what we, in the US, unleashed on the planet with our national tech champions. It’s why the EU is light years ahead of us on privacy regulation, why foreign lawmakers continue to look warily on American firms, and why local jurisdictions stateside, from Seattle schools to the state of Utah, are trying aggressively to curb the corrosive effects of social media on their young people.

And if you think TikTok is the only multinational gone rogue with user data and unfriendly state actors, keep smiling for the camera.

Hence framing TikTok chiefly as a security concern not only exposes a glaring double-standard, it distracts from the bigger picture: it’s an economic issue, first and foremost. Social media, for its bright spots, is a failed experiment. Millions of screen-addled, hyper-materialistic depressives scarcely seems the recipe for a resilient, much less vibrant, economy. Echoing The Atlantic’s March cover piece: a society that, to these extremes, would rather be entertained than informed is deeply unprepared for the extraordinary obstacles, and opportunities, of the 21st century.

Even Xi is more progressive on this point than we.

We’ve long argued that media is an ESG concern, our information ecosystem critical infrastructure, its integrity and stewardship the shared responsibility of its stakeholders: marketers, publishers, regulators and indeed the public. 

Increasingly, media is also a risk front.

Marketers, fundamentally misguided in their thinking and approach, are enablers full stop. Publishers have shown little conviction on the matter, striking collaborations with the platforms time and again because that’s where the audience is. The markets are, well, the markets, and consumers simply don’t care. Absent accountability from these other quarters, it’s up to the government to intervene.

We created this mess. Our manufactured dependence on social media no matter the cost speaks to a people and marketplace that take their liberty and prosperity for granted. For its part, the TikTok high drama—the inevitable culmination of a decade of chronic, willful ignorance—was entirely foreseeable. So while pointing the finger at Beijing, we must also ask ourselves: How, and why, did we ever get let it get to this place?

Economic security is national security. So, yeah, put the screws to TikTok. Then, show diplomatic good faith—and a modicum of self-awareness—by training the lens on our homegrown menaces and the underlying pathologies. Because at the end of the day, regulating TikTok is less about protecting Americans from China than it is from themselves.

Lest China take all the credit, the distinctly American project of mass infantilization known as social media was in high gear stateside well before ByteDance tweaked the formula to exploit some of our most plentiful natural resources—vanity, ignorance, malaise—in the thin guise of celebrating creative self-expression.

Then again, at least Xi (who otherwise is all about freedom of self-expression) sees social, gaming, and other addictive time-sucks as potentially destabilizing agents in the long run. In his view, sharply contrasting America’s, influencer culture, the attention economy, and a screen-addled populace aren’t exactly the building blocks of a viable national blueprint.

The Daily Show‘s Trevor Noah, last year: “When the US government said you can’t trust TikTok because it’s a Chinese plot, I won’t lie — I didn’t believe it … But now I’m starting to see it. Because China’s figured it out: You don’t need to fight this country, you just need to convince Americans to go viral and they’ll just destroy themselves.”

Bear in mind that none of this even cuts to recent allegations by US lawmakers against TikTok, regarding state-sponsored surveillance, that echo regulator concerns in other countries and undermine years of parent-company denials.

Will national security and public health risks prompt reappraisal of partnership criteria among the sports marketers who embraced TikTok and its sales pitch, no questions asked, since it danced onto the scene several years ago? Will corporate enlightenment instead take the hand of government, as we see in the case of betting platforms and the English Premiership? Will Ryan Reynolds’s Welsh soccer club remain a billboard for Chinese spyware?

Odds on state intervention. We first argued this in Kit in 2018, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, while Facebook’s stock price and user numbers surged to all-time highs. The prospect of industry self-governance, given history, is not promising.

Whoever the instigator, the media ecosystem and economy are overdue a hard reset. As for social media, it’s time the adults take away the toys with the sharp edges.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2018 print edition.

I’m gazing at faces staring blankly at me / Oh, I suppose it’s just a sign of the times

Take the economics, if nothing else. Original content, regardless of quality and despite the revolutionary efficiencies of digital brought to bear on production and distribution, is by no means inexpensive to make, much less maintain, at volume. (Ask a digital-native publisher that’s come to prominence in the last decade.) Even if the endgame is nakedly a play for user data, or a loss-leader sop to sponsors, the ROI, over the long run, fizzles. Sponsors are fickle, consumers bore, metrics are easily (and readily) fudged. Plus, once the engine’s churning, there’s little choice but to keep it going, and even “A” material, turned out unrelentingly or shuffled in with reams of other programming, sooner or later becomes white noise. (None of this, of course, accounts for macro external risks—tech fatigue/antipathy, crackdowns on “myopia”, the whims of platform partners, major economic downturn—that can sour the proposition in short order.)

But then, yes, there are the matters of quality and, to Mr Mourinho’s concerns, brand prestige, considering that much of what passes for substance is emblematic of a race to the middle that’s commonplace industrywide. Football is especially culpable here, given its tendency to pander to a younger demographic. It’s not advanced marketing calculus to decipher that too much, let alone too much in one direction, risks watering down a legacy or tuning out a sizable, lucrative segment of one’s base.

That said, football has in spades what premium publishers flog and non-publishing brands aspire to: reach, engagement, and loyalty. And football is, after all, entertainment. The urge among clubs to optimize value as slicker, more sophisticated media enterprises stands to reason, and the evolution of the business model is genuinely enthralling. But so-called content strategy calls for a light touch to be effective, let alone tasteful. A sport that touts its progressiveness can exercise some of it here by going against trend, playing the long game, and measuring creative ambition with a less-is-more sensibility.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2018 print edition.

It seemed barely a fortnight before Nike, walking tall after its Colin Kaepernick “Sacrifice Everything” gambit, had to downshift amid sexual assault allegations leveled against one of its mega assets, Cristiano Ronaldo. Perhaps all the more stinging, one surmises, given the backdrop of an historically acrimonious US Supreme Court nomination fight and year of #MeToo. One ought neither expect nor hope a company like Nike would ever shy away from taking risks, asserting values, and testing limits (part and parcel to this, it has shown exceptional willingness to stand by its talent during periods of uncertainty), yet the Ronaldo affair is a blunt reminder—no matter the due diligence, strategic calculus, or even good intentions—of the tightrope-walk of corporate reputation and glass-house fragility of the marketer-provocateur.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2018 print edition.

China and Saudi Arabia have been on a tear to diversify and, to some extent, liberalize their economies. A key vertical in both countries’ go-global plans has been the media, sports, and entertainment industries; fostering a domestic entertainment culture, and the international pursuit of soft power—the spread of a nation’s culture and norms to increase influence overseas—are explicit objectives for both President Xi Jinping and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Western companies have in turn been attracted by the promise of new funding and consumers, especially China’s 1.4 billion, with a middle class expected to hit 400 million by 2020. 

However, a string of curtailed imperatives and jarring incidents have served as costly reminders of the political risk companies face when embarking on deals in, or with, emerging markets, oftentimes those under authoritarian leadership. None brought home the message more starkly than the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul at the hands of Saudi Arabian authorities, which, in addition to an international outcry, prompted moguls from the media, entertainment, tech, and art worlds to reconsider their dealings with the young Crown Prince and his glossy promises of a new and, apparently, more liberal Saudi Arabia. 

Countries like China and Saudi play by different sets of rules than those to which companies hailing from beyond their borders are often accustomed, and the list is long of firms which in recent times have run afoul. Witness the backlash Google has weathered in its attempt to adhere to Chinese censorship rules, despite its mission to make the world’s information “universally accessible”; the dramatic scale-back of the much-touted dealmaking between China and Hollywood (to say nothing of the occasional disappearances of public figures), and scrutiny and sharp sell-off of Chinese football assets abroad, on account of Xi’s crackdown on corruption and conspicuous spending, concerns over currency fluctuations, and increasing US-China trade tensions; the continuing piracy of Qatari airwaves by allegedly state-directed broadcasters in Saudi Arabia, fuelled in part by the security impetus of sating a potentially restive segment of population of under-employed young men; or Sony Pictures’ brush with state-backed cyber-sabotage (a reminder that content itself can be subject to the vagaries of politics). Flashpoints like these will multiply as emerging markets continue to grow and companies seek to capture new financiers, consumers and audiences— ever more so if US foreign policy towards Iran, Cuba, and perhaps even North Korea one day reverts.

Sectors such as the extractives industry have long been cognizant of political risk as a cornerstone of market development strategy. As firms in media, entertainment, and sport—especially those espousing progressive values on the homefront—diversify abroad and turn to unfamiliar markets, they do well getting up to speed not just on local controls over culture, information, and creative expression but on domestic power-players and their priorities, government interference, and geopolitical complexities. As with legal and financial counsel, political risk diligence is essential for venturing in duly equipped and eyes wide open.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2018 print edition.

One almost—almost—feels sympathy for Facebook, piled on by the very enablers of an unwieldy ecosystem premised on collecting and peddling user information to the detriment of brand if not customer privacy. Forthcoming regulation—the grownups taking away the toys with the sharp edges—is a reckoning overdue. For much of the mainstream, the Cambridge Analytica breach is another awakening to the risks of a not-so-secret subeconomy of third parties that’s been industry norm for years. Facebook’s ambitions in live sport, football particularly, as a content play are manifest—a question not of If but When and How big—evinced by recent moves not only in the category but music, entertainment and news, and may be even more of a strategic priority given this latest. And rights will go to highest bidder, be it Facebook, Amazon, an incumbent broadcaster, or a dark-horse digital newcomer. In other words, brokers of rights aren’t apt to a take a position. Besides, to be fair, it would be interesting to see what a Facebook could do with Premier League—better yet, a league with less of a footprint—given its reach and engagement propositions. (After all, football is already the most watched sport on the platform.) The social aspect aside, streaming is an evolutionary leap; whether viewed on smartphone or beamed to a big screen, it’s all TV at the end of the day. Nor is Analyticagate itself apt to dent Facebook’s user base—hovering somewhere around 3 billion—or that of its platform peers. This is likely but a skipping of the record. The more compelling question—amidst a wave of heightened business activism, no less—is what role the content creators in bed with platforms can play in ensuring standards are met and upheld. Arm’s-length relationships are one thing, but full-blown partnerships are not altogether unlike the parties of a manufacturing supply chain. A similar degree of due diligence would seem warranted. However unpleasant Facebook and its ilk, the obligation to effect change is not solely theirs. Reform takes self-awareness, introspection and a hard look at house practices among industry players across the board.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2018 print edition.