Why marketers are wasting their media budgets - Evan Shapiro

Evan Shapiro (0:00)

Hey, everyone.

Jon Evans (0:00)

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Evan Shapiro (0:40)

The number one device for video consumption is the phone.

By a lot, trillions of hours of content are being watched on vertical. Most of it sucks. Netflix has been telling writers to continually repeat things in a script so that when people are looking at their phone, they hear the plot points over and over again, and explain and explain and over explain. The other thing would be to just make better shows. Fifty percent of advertising is presented to non-humans. The three biggest tech platforms in the world have no incentive to do anything about it. Don't believe all the hype and don't replace all your people with AI because it will not work out well for you.

Jon Evans (1:23)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now, we're going to be talking all about media with one who really knows all about media himself, Evan Shapiro. Welcome to Uncensored CMO.

Evan Shapiro (1:32)

Thanks for having me. It's an honor.

Jon Evans (1:34)

Thank you, mate. It's good to have you here. And I've been looking forward to this because if I put my old CMO hat on, once upon a time, I used to do the job. Now, I talk about doing the job, but I once did the job.

Same, by the way.

Evan Shapiro (1:45)

I used to work in media. Now, I talk about media.

Jon Evans (1:48)

We're kind of similar in that respect, aren't we?

Evan Shapiro (1:50)

It's just like football players to a certain extent.

Jon Evans (1:52)

Yeah, with the pundits now, right? And what used to make me laugh is I would spend so much time on the creative.

And the biggest spend by far was media, and it would be signed off on an Excel spreadsheet. I just thought it's insane that this much investment gets signed off by a CMO, just on the bottom of an Excel spreadsheet. And we don't talk enough about what's actually going on in media, whether we're getting good return on investment and what's changing and that kind of thing. So you're the man to talk to about it.

Evan Shapiro (2:22)

I guess so.

Jon Evans (2:24)

So first of all, for anyone who doesn't know you, how did you get into what you're doing now?

Evan Shapiro (2:28)

Well, I had a decent career in TV, and then I got fired from my last real job on my 50th birthday. And I decided actually to go back to where I began my career, which was creating stuff.

And when you get to a certain level inside the media ecosystem, you talk about making stuff way more than you actually make anything. And so I decided to dedicate every day the rest of my life about into making something. And it's then I started writing daily, first on LinkedIn, and then eventually on Substack. And now that's what I do for a living. I talk about media, and I think a lot of people think of me as an analyst, but really I'm kind of like you, a creator. And it was hard at first.

Jon Evans (3:15)

It was a slog.

Evan Shapiro (3:16)

Publishing every day, getting up trying to think of something to write about, and trying to make a living doing that. And I had a bit of a garden leave to give me some runway, but ultimately, a couple of years into it, dropped this map of the media universe, which I make by hand in PowerPoint every month, and Deadline published it. And it was the first time anybody had really taken a holistic look at the media universe side by side, Apple versus Netflix versus Disney all on one map. And it kind of blew up.

And since then, someone at that time coined the phrase Media Cartographer, and it kind of stuck. I've morphed it a little bit into Chaos Cartographer since then, but that's really how it picked up. And then I started publishing on Substack and that became a thing, and then consulting and speaking. And so now I write about the media, I talk about the media, I get to perform live all around the world.