Free Agency vol. 1 📈 - Rise of the Dangerous Reader

Media isn't dead. It's different. It will probably never be the same. That's uncomfortable, exciting, exhausting, and bewildering. Free Agency is my attempt to wrestle, explore, and explain much of what continues to happen around us, and the forces that are weaving that together.

Why: Well, media is a hard place to be in, and it is a glorious place, all at once. You are really beset by the winds of platform changes, advertisers whims, and the changing perspectives of consumers. But, we want and need entertainment, so it's not going anywhere soon.

However, it is much easier to speak of media in terms of what is happening, instead of what is being built. There are institutions among us, silent giants, but they slip through the radar because we call them everything but what they are.

Where have you been? What do you even do?

Free Agency is the result of almost a decade of being in, out, and around the creative industries. I say in and out, because I have never really felt like I had a foot firmly in one place, for that long. After building and leaving Blavity, I went to do a fellowship, where I looked at IP and creativity across the UK and the Caribbean.

At that point, what we had built was often perceived as just a website where Black people did stuff and looked happy. Ironically, there's lots of businesses to be built in the things people ignore and choose to misunderstand.

I went to work for the Smith Family (yes, that one), and people talked about it like it was just entertainment.

I worked at an international bank in 56 markets across Asia, and that was just communications.

Everything is just something, until it isn't.

I've spent my career working in, on, and around, managing attention. Selling it, attracting it, deploying it, and looking to capture it. I was neck deep in the game of attention management.

I was talking to someone I respect deeply a few months ago, and they mentioned, "Wow, you've done some things...make it make sense to me."

That's what Free Agency is about. Making it make sense. I don't connect dots because I am told too. I connect the ones I think can tell the stories I believe are worth learning and investigating. I'm interested in exploring things with range. Things like:

How Youtube is quietly and persistently punishing Netflix (and all the other streamers).

Why Paramount sold the largest video conference for GenZ so it can clean up its balance sheet (but still needs your subscription).

Satirical accounts are getting so good at parodying real things, it's hard to tell the difference.

'Advertising' is Richard Millie going to 🇯🇲 to see if Shelly-Ann's left wrist was available and if she felt like matching a bezel to her hair color.

And how Lego is not a toy company, but a dream merchant for adults (some who happen to have kids).

Here's my promise to you and myself:

Deep analysis on the creator economy and the adjacent worlds that are affected by it, what's changing and what continues to evolve.
Highlighting deals and transactions that are off the radar, but critically important to the major shifts and shakeups across industries that shape the new paradigms for how media institutions and universes get built.
Stories on modern media businesses and how they operate (a particular focus on creators, because that is and will become a deeper part of our economy).
A global focus; There are things that are borderless and should be examined as such. Plus, I don't want to get yelled at by my cousins.

A Deeper Motivation

I'm writing this, and more broadly the things we care about at Due Dilly, because of something much more personal to me.

I'm interested in seeing people become more dangerous and discerning readers.

There are institutions all around us; they shape how we view culture, how we engage with it, and what we see and decide is valuable. But we only talk about a fraction of them. That's why I call it Free Agency. You should be free to mix, match, and master what is happening, and make it work for you. To do that well, I've found that understanding the make up of how something functions, allows you to remix what you need, and leave anything else that does not work. If you can develop range, you get to be more proactive and adaptable.

A dangerous reader is someone who doesn't let the feed (or anyone else) play with their intelligence or time. They are in control of how they assess what is going on around them, and what those ideas mean and how they are executed. Media, advertising, marketing, and all the adjacencies that exist around it and each has an intention.

For my own ambitions to be realized, I need to be a consistently courageous writer. Time will tell if I execute on that. I have no doubt you will keep me honest.

See you next week.