Media

1. RIP WBD
2. MSNBCCNNYAHOO
3. China’s soft power
4. The Great Rebundling

The advertising business has always been uniquely vulnerable to extortion. The large sums of money, the complex relationships between agencies and brands, the layer upon layer of people worried about embarrassing their bosses — all conspire to create a culture of relative silence that is, among other things, extremely frustrating for the journalists who cover the industry.

And so the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on the ad industry hasn’t drawn the public protests that have accompanied his lawsuits against media organizations or the gentler treatment he’s won from owners of The Washington Post, CBS News, and The Los Angeles Times.

But the pressure on marketers — who gather on the Riviera this week for the annual Cannes Lions festival — is another major front in Trump’s media war. The Wall Street Journal’s Suzanne Vranica opened a rare window into Trump’s efforts to muscle the media his way when she reported in February that the ad giant IPG signed a deal with Elon Musk’s X, believing it was the cost of avoiding regulatory scrutiny of its sale to Omnicom. She added the news last week that X is rebuilding its business with a campaign of legal threats against advertisers. The Federal Trade Commission is now focused on pressuring agencies and brands to drop “brand safety” guidelines that it interprets as political boycotts of right-wing views.

Marketers are right to be scared. Trump and his aides live on digital media and were infuriated by social media platforms, which penalized them for criticizing COVID-19 vaccines and policies and banned some of them after Jan. 6. They view restoring the absolute freedom of posting — and punishing anyone who sought to restrain it — as a true top priority, according to administration officials and allies I’ve spoken to.

Marketing executives I talked to are far too scared to talk about this pressure in public. But they do see paying X as a good way out: “Brands would rather spend on advertising at a low return rate on X, versus spending that money on lawyers,” one noted. “At least it’s not a total waste.” Now Musk is on the outs, the FTC is still on the march, and they may have to find a new avenue for tribute.

Also today: Anderson Cooper’s new agent, a guest column from Beijing, and Liz Hoffman, Rohan Goswami, and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson on big media’s future. (Scoop count: 3)

Max was off this week, training for a hard week of work in Cannes, where we’ll be putting out a daily newsletter and hosting a live event! Sign up for insights and event listings as the industry wrestles with Big Tech, AI, Trump, and the limits of its capacity for rosé, and drop us a line if you’re going to be there. And if you’d like to join our live Mixed Signals taping with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, please sign up here!

Why WBD was doomed to failure

You can see why the big Warner Bros. merger seemed to make sense in 2022, Liz Hoffman and Rohan Goswami wrote last week: “Glomming diverse operations together smooths out profits through business cycles. It mutualizes economic risk. But it also mutualizes scandal, tainting a corporate empire with the real or perceived sins of one subsidiary.”

“Breakups like those announced by Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast might be freeing for both sides. The next time Trump criticizes MSNBC, he can’t threaten Comcast with (hypothetically) OSHA agents descending on Universal Orlando. Mark Lazarus, who will run Comcast’s new cable spinoff, will be more exposed to political pressure without a corporate parent. But he can decide what to put on MSNBC without wondering what it will do to Harry Potter theme parks.”

MSNBCCNNYAHOO?

The cleaving of Warner Bros. Discovery offers another reminder of the sorry record of media deals, not least those involving the old Time Warner. (Jonathan Knee’s argument in his 2009 book, The Curse of the Mogul — that the sector’s dealmakers have destroyed more than their share of value — still holds up.) Old-timers at CNN, HBO and Warner Bros. have seen repeated changes of ownership since the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, none of which made the underlying businesses demonstrably stronger.

Yet David Zaslav’s dismantling of his creation was immediately greeted by speculation that an independent WBD cable networks business could make a tempting target for Versant, the TV business being spun off in turn by Comcast.

Versant’s in the market for assets to enhance its current networks in news, finance, sports and entertainment, Axios noted. If Versant widened its lens beyond declining TV properties, it might want to look at Yahoo, the Web 1.0 veteran currently finding new audiences under Apollo’s ownership. As CEO Jim Lanzone told Semafor recently, Yahoo owns America’s No. 1 finance site, No. 2 news site, and No. 3 sports site, and its properties attract some 3 billion visits a month. Just one detail may give a modern media mogul pause: Yahoo still owns AOL.

— Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

Cleo Abram left Vox and started her YouTube show, Huge If True, three years ago. Since then, the channel has grown to nearly 6 million subscribers and she’s become one of the most important tech journalists in the world. This week on Mixed Signals, Ben and Max talk to Cleo about why she started an optimistic show in an age of pessimism, the time she got space-sick in zero gravity, and how she navigates conversations with tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

China’s propaganda coup

American influencers are flooding China to show off its technology and culture, and a new Chinese initiative will pay for them to come and collaborate with local counterparts, Semafor’s J.D. Capelouto reported. State outlets praised recent visits from Westerners like IShowSpeed (whose six-hour YouTube video on his Shenzhen visit has nearly 9 million views). The US, meanwhile, pushed out the world’s most-followed TikToker, an Italian citizen, after a rival with ties to Barron Trump said he’d reported him to authorities.

We asked Zichen Wang, a rare mainland Chinese voice who crosses into Western media, to weigh in. In a column for Semafor, he argues that it’s “fundamentally defensive.” And he offers some advice to his country’s leaders: They should follow the American practice of (mostly) disclosing paid campaigns.

The Great Rebundling, and other reasons for optimism

In the run-up to the media-fest in Cannes, I joined two great media podcasters, The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey and Channels’ Peter Kafka, to talk about the future of our business. We all see, in different ways, what Morrissey described as “the current false divide between independent or alternative media and institutional media.” While independent media is leaner and more tightly connected with its audience, institutional media offers infrastructure and authority. His prediction: “Inevitably, these camps that are often set against each other will become entwined and mostly indistinguishable from each other.”

You should check out Channels and The Rebooting if you haven’t, and can listen to the Mixed Signals slice of this show here.

Andrew Essex is senior managing partner for TCS Interactive and a Cannes veteran.

Anderson Cooper has dropped UTA for CAA, two sources with knowledge of the move tell Max. It’s a notable loss as the number of true A-List TV news clients dwindles, but TV talent is still coming and going: Talk show host Sherri Shepherd is leaving CAA for UTA, Semafor has also learned … Substack, mostly ad-free to date, is quietly sending some of its executives to the French Riviera for private meetings at Cannes Lions this week … Jodi Kantor unlocks the final level of beat reporting, penetrating the Supreme Court … Carrie Budoff-Brown returns to defend Politico from former colleagues Matthew Karnitschnig at Euractiv and Suzanne Lynch at Bloomberg … A cool news/AI project: Vital City put the transcripts of interviews with the New York Editorial Board, on which Ben sits, into NotebookLM, which voters can query … A new role for humans in media: Live VJs at Hollywood films in Uganda …

Bluntness comes easily to Sebastian Siemiatkowski, particularly when he’s explaining how artificial intelligence threatens employment in his own business and beyond.

But even though the co-founder and CEO of Klarna had an AI-generated version of himself read his company’s financial update last month, he told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson that he doesn’t think AI will replace him any time soon — even if “it is definitely easier to replace the CEO than it is to replace a nurse.”