Jack Myers | The Media Revolution Has Arrived - Are You Prepared for the Next Wave?

0:00The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO Mike Linton. Welcome marketers, advertisers, and those who love them, the Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite.

0:54I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Jack Myers. Today's topic, The media revolution has arrived. Are you prepared for the next wave? Now, Jack has been involved in or reporting on media for most of his business career, including positions as the chairman and founder of the Myers Report and the founder of Media Village. He describes himself as a media ecologist and just published a book titled The Tao of Leadership. I'm going to try and get that in frame there. There it is. harmonizing technology, innovation, and human creativity, which we will talk about later in the show.

1:45Full disclosure, I've known Jack since our paths crossed as advisors to market share partners a few years ago. We've done well over 100 shows, and this is Jack's second time on the show. So welcome back. So honored to be back with you, Mike. Truly am. You do a Great job, and I love having the opportunity to talk to you and your audience. Thanks. We're having a blast doing the show. And I want to go back. I want to ground everybody. About 18 months ago, we discussed what you and I, what we titled the show, Chaos in the Media Marketplace and the generational shift in agencies. What has happened since then?

2:34Well, chaos is too soft a word.

2:41Marketers, every business today is being confronted by a wave of transformation, disruption, and of course, chaos. it's not just technological, it's environmental, it's regulatory, it's economic, it's generational, it's biological with this shift in health and wellness and longevity. So marketers today need to be, are confronted with so much going on, so much disruption across every part of their supply chain, their business, we've got tariffs to deal with now, that it's tough for them to really focus in on what their job title is, which is marketing. Marketing begins to shrink in terms of its relevance, in terms of their day-to-day realities that they're confronting and advertising, And then media being such a small part of the total marketing picture is really moving more and more into a commoditized programmatic marketplace focused on reach, frequency, and cost efficiency, which with all the dollars being put into data and ROI, it's kind of ironic that media is becoming as commoditized and efficiency focused as it has.

4:12But let's talk about that a minute. I want to go back to what I'm going to call tornadic chaos, because I can't just say chaos. Tsunamis. There's tsunamis. I like tornadic. I just think it's a great word. You know, you mentioned a bunch of a bunch of things affecting the marketplace. And, you know, we'll talk about technology and and health and people living longer. But you also mentioned regulatory, environmental and other things. Give us a take on a couple of those and how they are affecting marketing differently than they were like 10 years ago. Well, let's look at regulatory because it's the most obvious where it's the uncertainty across all of those categories that I mentioned.

4:55And it's the lack of being able to plan 24 months, no less 12 months, no less 12 days, knowing what the future is going to look like. And I think that's, you know, we used to have a North Star that we could point to and we could make decisions by keeping our focus on that North Star. but there's too many clouds in the sky you can't see the north star anymore so the sextant that we used to be able to have in every one of those categories just isn't working anymore and regulatory of course with the you know tariffs was a surprise what it wasn't a surprise that it happened it was surprised how much they were and are they going to stick are they going to stay we don't know environmental you don't know when the next storm is coming you don't know when the next massive disruption is coming or where it's going to be.

5:58You just know that it's going to happen. And certainly for anyone who sells through retail, that has an enormous effect. It has anyone who deals with construction or anything that's affected and impacted by weather. So climate's an issue. Economics. so we are marketing in a world of chaos where nothing is stable and every variable will move um and you in this environment in this where everything is a is a variable like i guess that's the way is that a fair way to put it there is no that is anything well everything that so where is the continuity where is the stability it's in your people it's in your workforce it's And now, of course, we see that part of what I've written about is the fact that corporate infrastructure, corporate architecture is incredibly outdated.

6:5590 plus percent of all public corporations are modeled on World War II General Motors production line architecture that Peter Drucker described in the concept of a corporation in 1952. And deconsolidation, decentralization, creating silos, profit centers, P &Ls. Today, as we see in the federal government, you need to consolidate. You need to contract. You need to see where the growth is, shed where the declines are. You've got to cut back your workforce. AI is forcing you to look at the workforce. but if we don't do it with humanity and that's where I focus that's why it's called the Tao or the path of leadership it's the Taoist principles that are 3 ,000 years old that are built on in times of chaos in times of disruption in times of uncertainty there are certain truths that are consistent in how you lead and manage people through that chaos and that's what the book is about.

8:05And you say, though, you have stated that you think a lot or many of today's agency executives are really unprepared for this marketplace and the AI transformation. I think the words you used were woefully unprepared. Tell us what you mean by that, woefully unprepared for type tornadic change or tornadic yeah let me say two things to your audience who are not currently comfortable using ai and and comfortably accepting the use of generative ai and machine learning machine intelligence in their business number one if you don't start using it or start adapting it or accept it into your business you're going to be out of work in the next two years period If you're concerned about that and you'd like to know what to do about it, then ask AI, ask ChatGPT or ask Claude, what does it think you should do?

9:11Just put your bio in there, put your resume in there and say, where do you think the opportunities are? It'll tell you because it knows where the opportunities are for you and it'll personalize it and customize it to you. So that's a good way to get started with ChatGPT or Claude. And if you don't, you're just not going to have a job, period. So tell me how else people are willfully unprepared. Because the AI thing, and I agree with you on AI, because AI is the first technology that is unconstrained by adoption. It is evolving at speed. And it doesn't matter whether you use it or not, it's still evolving.

9:48So unlike, you know, mobile phones or digital stuff where you actually had to have machines, this technology is going all by itself. But what else? I'm sure you and I at some point in our career, maybe multiple points in our career, when we went into our bosses, our bosses, bosses and said, hey, I got this idea. Or, hey, you know, this new technology is coming along. I'd like to I'd like to check it out. And what you heard back was, you know, that's going to be my, who's ever in my position in five years is going to have to deal with that. I don't need to deal with that now. I got to deal with this quarter or this year's numbers.

10:26Doesn't work anymore. I was at a couple of weeks ago, I was at the Association National Advertisers, had a great AI tech conference led by Mike Donnelly. and uh there was shelly palmer who i think is is the best in the business keeping track of what's going on rashad tabaka wallace shiv singh uh pete black blackshaw and i were all talking among others there were two takeaways one shelly came in and he said you know a week ago i had to completely update my presentation because of everything that happened and then two days ago So something happened that I had to update it. And then yesterday, and this is at the conference, he said yesterday, OpenAI agreed to a standard called Modern Context Protocol, MCP, which was developed by Anthropic, was accepted and adopted by OpenAI as a standard.

11:30That was a big deal. It was a game changing reality. No one in the audience who were all involved and engaged in tech really understood. He had to tell them what that was, but it was a game changer. So we've got game changers every day. But why we're on it? Why don't you tell our audience what it was? Oh, my God. Please don't ask me. All right. I won't ask you, but you can look it up. Ask AI about it. It's context. It's context. It's integrating context along with, you know, data. Oh, so it is actually making choices about where the decision is being or where the data is being gathered from. And, oh, that's interesting.

12:11So I want to go back to the woefully unprepared thing in particular. Some of the other skills you think leaders need now that they don't have in the World War II General Motors model. You know, we have been trained over the last 70 years to be leaders of technological advance. As you point out, it's typically, if you go back to the printing press, it took 300 years before it really evolved. And then, you know, and then the telegraph came along and television came along and you always had time. Time has shrunk. Even the internet, it took three years that you had a chance to adopt and you had things like MySpace.

12:56You had the time to go through the process of innovation. You could build bridges from the past to the future by assessing risk, analyzing, testing, experimenting. Today, there's no time for that. As I just pointed out, things are happening so quickly that the time for innovation has shrunk to zero. So machine is leading machine. Machines are guiding the technological updates and transformation and are leading. So what do leaders need to do? They need to become really focus in on what they've assigned others to do, which is be people leaders, be human leaders. Sadly, we've had such a pushback.

13:43We now refer to DEI as professional development, the D. E is education and I is intelligence. So DEI has leaders, those human resource leaders who used to manage making sure regulatory, you know, they weren't managing the human aspects. So I focus in on the five core principles of Taoism, which are harmony. And we can talk about each of those if you want. Oh, give us all five and then we'll talk about harmony, flexibility, balance, stability and integrity. And those are the five core principles that are 3000 years old and they can be adjusted and adapted and applied to whatever human aspects of your are happening in your business.

14:34and in our business those are so all soft skills right they're not like yes analytics you know they're not like you're not running a manufacturing plant you're not you're not doing analytics these are all soft skills that you may recognize when you see it but you also may not even know how to manage it or build it in yourself. How do people even think about these skills in an era where a lot of companies would just evaluate you on leadership or people skills or comms? These are deeper than that. How do you even evaluate and think of them? Well, number one, I'd suggest people read my book because that's the how-to.

15:22Or listen to CMO Confidential. Yes, exactly. Or listen here. I package all five of them under one word, which is creativity, because if you're focusing in on the broader construct of creativity, bringing what's uniquely human to the issues, to the problems, to the challenges you're confronting, each of those five can build under just being creative. But harmony isn't about avoiding conflict. It's about alignment. It's bringing AI and human creativity together to amplify. Think about companies that use AI to elevate design, storytelling, or accessibility. They're not replacing human ingenuity. They're expanding it.

16:11flexibility, survival. Rigid organizations crumble, but those that adapt survive. So being flexible and we can talk more about each of these balances. Yeah, just give me the nickel on it. And then I want to ask an overarching question. Balance is bringing speed and soul together. It's integrating efficiency and empathy. Stability, it's not resisting change. It's about grounding your organization and shared values and a clear vision. And integrity, integrity at a time when we're breaking down silos, when we're integrating across capabilities and reducing our workforce, integrity is doing it in a way where people, you have the human realities that you're integrating into your process and understanding the impact on humans, the empathy and building into your organization, a process for it.

17:09That's what we need in our government today that we don't have. So how do I, if I'm in a company and I wanna be more, let's just put it all under the banner of creativity. How do I know if I'm making progress here? Because a lot of these things are hard to measure and may not be defined the same by everybody, even if they do read your book. So how do I tell if I'm making progress as a company or if I'm a board, I want to evaluate my executives on their ability to deal with tornadic chaos? So that empathy is a soft skill or these five points are soft skills. They're not, they're critical leadership tools.

17:58They're essential for leadership going forward in the AI era. Most executives, most leaders have led by authority and not necessarily through the principles of Taoism. But you can learn empathy. There are ways to learn it. There are ways to learn social intelligence. There are ways to learn emotional intelligence. So first of all, the best way to answer your question, Mike, is to go into ChatGPT and ask it the questions of how you do something. Tell it, here's the challenge I'm confronting as an individual. Here's the difficulty I have. I don't understand how to lead with empathy or passion or nuance.

18:52So let me broaden it, though. I'm on a board though. And I'm, I'm judging my executive team and my company's ability to do, they have the right leadership skills to do this. And I I'm trying to, I'm trying to think, put, put yourself in a leadership position. You got all these people. How do you know you're making the progress you want or you don't? And then, you know, if, if, if I want to hire an outside firm that I think is, is going to adapt with me, How do I know they're going to adapt at speed? Give us some tips. Probably the only silver lining of the gift in attitudes toward DEI and the human aspects of the soft skills that you refer to is that look at your board, look at your company that you're on the board of.

19:50Look at what's happened in the last six months. What's happened to their HR and DEI leaders? Have they been let go? Have their budgets been cut? Have they taken every aspect that they put in post-George Floyd out of their management? If all of those measures have been taken and they've made no effort to build, reposition, repackage those tools and resources that were put into place, then they are not qualified to be leading the company. If they've found other ways to maintain and even advance their human resource development, professional development, internal education, are there continuing education programs?

20:42Are they building in tools to teach their teams generative AI? Are they bringing in speakers, whether it's Shelly or Rashad or me or you to come in and talk about here's where we're headed? Here's the realities and here's how to integrate them into your business model. Then I would say those leaders are not prepared or are prepared. So I think it's a simple way. Just say what's happened the last six months in terms of how you're leading the human realities within your organization. How do I put all these in the context of business results when you have, because the stock market's going wild up, wild down, you've got all these things.

21:29How do I look at the economics of all this and balance them all if I'm sitting there as a CEO or the board? You have such good questions. So, you know, as someone whose total career was originally built on revenue generation, meeting quarterly numbers, and then 12, 15 years ago, I transitioned most of the business over to, you know, to some of the softer skills and needs, recognizing the importance of education. uh the those realities we spoke about earlier those tsunamis or tornadic uh chaos that you i don't own it yeah so go ahead that that's that those those are a lot of uncertainty there where you can build the north star is how you lead your people and how you're navigating and managing your people.

22:30So I would say that is a hard core priority for every organization today, just to realize that the next 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, 48 months, 60 months, 72 months, they're going to be navigating these same realities with tremendous uncertainty. So make sure that you've got a team that's working with the common goals, common principles, common set of opportunities for growth, and clarity about what their role is, integrate your organization, eliminate as many silos as you can, scale back your costs where you can, your people costs, but make sure that the people you have are all capable and on board to be partners and collaborators, not just with you, but with generative AI as they're moving into the future.

23:33So that is a tall order. And if I had a magic wand, especially when employees can change out at will. I think, well, that's what we're seeing is a shift in that because of the disruption, because of the uncertainty. First of all, most young people, you and I both teach college, probably at least half our class want to be entrepreneurs or, you know, social media influencers. That's kind of working its way through this generation. There's not enough jobs. But there's going to be a lot of work. Not a lot of jobs. That's what Rashad talks about. Not a lot of work, but a lot of not a lot of jobs, but a lot of work to do and how you do it and where you do it, how you balance the in office, out of office.

24:22These are all the things that need to be resolved right now, making the decisions about. Are you an in office? Are you an out of office place? And it's a hybrid. When you bring a new employee and you probably need to give them, you know, nine months to 12 months in the office and then let them be virtual. You need to find that path toward the human issues. And the guidelines are all there. Guidelines are there. It's not hard, Mike. It's not hard. All right. Let's go. You always make predictions. And you have a number of predictions for the back half of 2025. Share your most provocative predictions.

25:07I don't think anyone questions that the next 18 months we're going to see enormous consolidation in the broadcast cable arena. We're going to see consolidation among the streamers. We're seeing Skydance, David Ellison and Larry Ellison taking over Paramount. We're seeing NBCU spinning off most of its cable networks. Warner Brothers Discovery probably doing the same the stage tv stations the business um so well this is i hear you say there that's a move to big big there's a bunch of people that are going to get big is that what you're saying kind of it's small they're going to get small you're going to get bigger small but uh as as we said in our show on uh the omnicom ipg merger the middle is no place to be um uh you know So medium-sized independent agencies that are integrating across promotion, public relations, influencer marketing, advertising, and creative.

26:20My biggest one is that there is an explosion coming of creativity. That's why I wrote two books now on creativity. With every technological disruption dating back to the printing press, you've had a commensurate and synchronous creative explosion. The Renaissance accompanied the printing press, the Protestant Reformation. With electricity, it brought television. With television, it brought a huge creative explosion. the internet, user-generated content. We are on the cusp of a massive explosion in creativity. And as I said before, under creativity, that's human. It's uniquely human. So you've got to be able to integrate into the creative process, into the acceptance and investment in creative, the harmony, flexibility, balance, stability, and integrity that I talked about.

27:25Let me put a couple of questions together because on the one hand, everyone should be embracing AI. But on the other hand, I should be very human and creative. Tie these together for the audience. What should they be doing right now? If I'm a CMO, if I'm an agency person right now, what should I be practicing with? you know what should i do first of all treating treating chat gpt or claude as if it's human okay talk to it engage with it as if it's human treat it how you treat it is how it treats you if you say thank you it says how much it appreciates you it's response now it's not sentient it's only reacting to the words that you've given it but the words you've given it lead how it's going to respond to you uh and and five years from now it'll probably be sentient too but so that's not if it's going to take into context into play as you said earlier the context of being polite and good and crisp it will over time learn you is that that's what you're saying and it'll also teach you there's chapters in my in in the Tao of Leadership about you know how do you learn empathy how do you learn social intelligence how do you learn emotional intelligence because most people actually don't have those skills but they can be learned so take those tools those courses I mentioned to you earlier I just put out a book called creativity unleashed how ai can supercharge your ideas overall you know the table of contents is six pages long you should be merchandising jack look at you it's like uh you know so learn how to use ai to be creative to break down the blocks that you have and the challenges that you have So aside from AI, what are the biggest risks to CMO, tenure and agency relationships with clients that you see coming down the road here?

29:44I think the biggest challenge that the large holding companies have is that they've built their business on silos. there it's an outdated business model that needs to uh you know they need to figure out and so i do think we are going to see um more integration across the not just with creative agencies coming together like they have you know with y and r vml bringing you you know uh but media and creative being integrated media you know media as i said earlier the devastating thing for the broadcasting cable and legacy media industry is that it became a commodity and it's transactional and it's programmatic um but let's say 20 percent of your media budget should be built on innovation and creativity um and 80 you know let let 80 percent of it go to wherever it needs to go with you know cheap eyeballs and impressions and you know influencer marketing is something that's growing but it's become commodities 80 but you know sports is the sports is the best example there are so many these cable networks that are being spun off and the fast channels that are very focused being very narrow take a little piece of your budget and say we want to own that you know horror is a is a great example of something where there's a dedicated passionate if your product lends itself to the horror environment why aren't you becoming a sponsor of that fast channel so we have cornered the horror market yeah look at the look at the deconstruction of the business and how as a marketer do we find those little pockets where we can put small pieces of our budget and really make a difference, really own that audience and dominate that audience, and then measure that and forget about all the money that's being put into currencies around media that really aren't delivering measurable ROI anymore.

31:52I'm sorry, but they're delivering eyeballs with no connection to ultimate results, sadly. I got it. Before I get to the last question, you know the traditional last question. You wrote about the ad apocalypse, I think. Tell us what the ad apocalypse is. And since we have tornadic chaos, I feel like we must close with the ad apocalypse. So let us in on that. We're experiencing it right now. The ad apocalypse. Mike, are you getting that noise in the background? I am not. Okay. We've got a gardener outside. I'm sorry. The ad apocalypse, Mike, is basically all the things we talked about earlier that you call tornadic, I call a tsunami.

32:40All of these massive things coming at an industry that frankly is not prepared for it. Marketers today are not prepared for what is coming with AI. The way I like to think about AI is when Edison invented the light bulb, it was able to light up a room and then it was able to light up the outdoors. But no one saw the microwave oven coming. No one saw the electric car coming. No one saw 50 years into the future. Today, that 50 years is being compacted into 50 weeks, 50 days. And we're at the light bulb stage of generative AI. machine intelligence. The ad apocalypse is understanding that we're going to be turning the world upside down in advertising and marketing in just the next, I say 36 months, I really think it's 12 months.

33:40But, you know, my whole career, I've said 36 months, it's been 10 years. So let me say, we don't have the five years that we talked about earlier. And by ad apocalypse, you mean ads are going to be obliterated or ads are just going to evolve? The creativity, I think the creativity in advertising today is an embarrassment to the advertising industry. I think 95 % of the ads we see in any medium are clients should be embarrassed to have them representing their products and their companies. They're not creative. They're following a tutorial guide, a set of models, computers, research that's incredibly outdated and is not in touch with how people are consuming content today and how they're being exposed to advertising.

34:38That's why all the research shows that no one is paying any attention to ads anymore. I agree with that also the borrowed interest is, in my mind, probably at an all-time high. uh yeah i don't know how many more things matthew mcconnelly can sell but you know i wish i was i wish i was his agent um hey so jack we're almost at the end of the show and you know our traditional last question it's a two-parter you take one or both but you have to take at least one practical advice and our funniest story so practical advice we haven't talked about yet and our funniest story you can share on the air over you you have to pick one i knew i knew this was coming and and i i didn't prepare i'd love to be able to give how far back can i go with the funny story well you went all the way back to crazy eddie the first time so that's my favorite story well you can't tell it again jack so to give us practical advice we haven't talked about yet?

35:44You know, the practical advice, Mike, I think is number one, watch your podcast, watch CMO Confidential. I think it's learn. Continuing education, never stop learning. If you can't go to sleep every night without saying, what did I learn new today? Then you're really not doing what you need to do to prepare and grow in the future. And I'd also say for all those who are young, who are earlier in their career, understand that you're not young enough to really understand what's about to happen in the market. The generation that's on its way up now that are being born into this generation, in 20 years, they're going to be leading you and they're going to be your bosses.

36:41So take a look at the way your kids are growing up. Take a look at the way they're using AI, whether it's Alexa or Siri, and understand these are technologies that are in their infancy today. So think about the next generation that's following you and the generation that's growing up right now. Gen Z is already an outdated generation. generation. All right. We can't wait to hear from the Gen Z people. Thank you, Jack. So I hope to come back in a year and I'm going to have a funnier story. I'm really disappointed that I didn't come up with my funny story. All right. Thank you, Jack. And thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential.

37:26Look for our other shows on the iHearEverything network, Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, which include the rise and fall of Peloton as seen through the lens of customer lifetime value? Is AI an extinction event for agencies? And the Omnicom interpublic merger, what's next and what does it mean? And finally, Jack's first show, chaos in the media marketplace. Hey, all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential.