Evan Shapīro’s Post

What’s NOT in Your Wallet? Like many, I used to be obsessed with having THE COOLEST business card at ANY party. When I ran IFC, I had a translucent card that looked like film. When I started ESHAP I made business cards that looked and felt just like Bicycle playing cards. I prided myself on the stir these cards made when I presented them - always a reliable ice breaker and brand builder. But times change. The smart change with them. Now I have a QR code on my iPhone Home Screen that links out to all my info. It’s free. It works. I can change the info at no cost anytime. And it creates even more chatter than the physical cards that cost money. A pro-tip for the portfolio lifestyle. #businesscards

SO MUCH chatter these days about “old declining men” needing to “step down and save face.” Yet THIS guy keeps getting paid? Is a puzzlement!

Maplication On the left: The latest Media Universe Map. $21 trillion in market value across 124 companies. On the right: The Map's cross section - 205 layers that must be altered, shifted, and updated, by hand, each time, all on one Powerpoint slide. Redrawing this Map every few weeks is like eating a handful of Sour Patch Kids: Sweet, Sour, Painful, and Wonderful - all at once. All the joys & pains of powerpoint mapmaking, are explained right here: https://lnkd.in/eprq7r2d

A Map of Memory Lane By Semi-popular demand: The Media Universe Map, animated through the years 👇 . 4 years, 124 companies, $21 trillion in market value, 205 objects - all on just one powerpoint slide. Find out how the Map gets made, here: https://lnkd.in/eprq7r2d Get ALL the Maps through the years, here: https://lnkd.in/eBSBxMhw #media #cartography

The Lock-In Monster or: How I Learned to F*ck-Up Lock-Ins & Love PowerPoint Jaron Lanier created the concept of virtual reality and the earliest avatars. Despite being one of the founding minds of the internet, he wrote one of the most important anti-big tech manifestos of all time: You Are Not a Gadget. It holds up and is worth a read. Lanier focuses on the “ambient manipulation in everything digital.” He shows how big tech uses convenient, elegant (and often free) services to slide us into automatic LOCK-INS and conform us - our digital selves - into their natural oligopoly. Nothing personifies this more than PowerPoint. I used PowerPoint for decades before I spoke to or read Lanier. I prided myself on being best in class at it. But after reading Gadget, I strove to do more than just USE the digital tools WELL. From then on, I set out to break those digital lock-ins wherever I found them and bend them to MY will. (Insert maniacal laugh here.) PowerPoint was invented to unlock creativity and inspire collaboration. Unfortunately, according to even its inventors, success has absolutely corrupted PowerPoint, engendering mindless misuse. No one’s taken the program more to task than Edward Tufte, Guru of Infographics who wrote an entire book, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within,” entirely dedicated to hating it. Yet, ironically, in Tufte 👇 we learn HOW to use PowerPoint WELL. I’ve personally decried PowerPoint and its design. It’s been bastardized too long by too many. Its Apple Mac version is a hot buggy mess. And yet, despite all its misuse, all the bad design, all the poor presentations… I can’t quit PowerPoint. I won’t! I still find it the most nimble and flexible communications tool in business. For a “non-designer,” I see it as the most accessible way to display data as narrative. Perhaps most importantly, in my obsessive opinion, learning how to use PowerPoint, WELL, teaches us HOW to enlist the natural power of digital lock-ins for GOOD instead of EVIL. At the link are more than 50 ways to leave your lock-ins; from me and others (i.e., Tufte on Chartjunk) that can turn Powerpoint from a torturous design quagmire into a powerful canvas of creativity and communication that’s the backbone and palate for my brand, my business, and my content. https://lnkd.in/eprq7r2d The secret to using PowerPoint, well, unlocks a key lesson for anyone trying to say something NEW: Don’t do it how everyone else does it. Do it how they’re NOT. #powerpoint #design #communication

Reboot. It’s a merger whose main thesis is “CUT COSTS” - as designed by very traditional Media minds, on an already heavily diced and sliced organization. Nowhere do the architects explain how the revenue of the “new whole” will be greater than the sum of all its parts. No one mentions a plan to invest for growth. Haven’t we seen this movie before? I don’t mean Mission Impossible. I mean Disco Bros. Since merger, THAT hole has consumed 75% of the value of its parts. This COULD all turn out well - if it actually closes. But this 👇 piece feels (to me) widely and incredibly familiar. Like history repeating itself in slow-fast motion. Could just be me tho. https://lnkd.in/eBVpw-rm Paramount Skydance Warner Bros. Discovery

WHAT'S THE POWER, POINT? The latest version of my Media Universe Map is below. Did you know it's just a powerpoint slide? I spent hours updating the Map this weekend - in Powerpoint. I do this twice each month. And that is just a fraction of the time, frustration, and love (yes, love) I put into PowerPoint. The slide has 205 layers and objects. There are twelve font sizes and four typefaces. There are 124 circles representing 124 companies. The objects are sized, to scale, by their market valuation based on publicly available information. Every month, I enter the values of the companies into an excel spreadsheet, which uses a formula I had to ask a mathematician for, to generate new sizes for each planet based on their valuations, which I then adjust (values and sizes) by hand, in PowerPoint, along with numerous other datapoints such as subscribers, households, market shares, etc. I’ve been reflecting this summer. And it turns out that I spend more time with PowerPoint than I do with any human other than my spouse. There are months that PowerPoint gets even more attention (sorry Jill). I devote more time to making PowerPoint than I do eating, talking on the phone, or managing people on my team. (Sorry, ESHAP). The Map below is the foundation of my brand. It’s the first slide in every presentation I give, and I give a lot of presentations. It’s been adopted by many in our community as a semi-unofficial dashboard for the industry. And it’s LITERALLY just a PowerPoint slide. I realized recently, that in addition to being a bit of a Media nerd touchstone, the Map offers larger lessons I’ve learned from conquering PowerPoint - which are not about the Media, but rather about life. The effort to conceive an idea, the rigor to do all the homework, the patience to stay within the lines in order to break the rules, the willingness to fail loudly, are ALL crucial if you want to say SOMETHING, rather than just say SOME THING. I did learn a lot of this by using PowerPoint - to communicate ideas, to share data, to tell stories. Despite this PowerPoint obsession, I’ve never written about it before. Until now. You can get all my dirty little PowerPoint design secrets, learn how to break out of life's "digital lock-ins," and see why "all human knowledge is now stored in PowerPoint..." at this convenient little link: https://lnkd.in/eprq7r2d Read on. Find out why I believe that PowerPoint is not just a software. It’s a lifestyle. #powerpoint #design #communications

Eye Spot On this episode of my LinkedIn series BIG DATA BRAINS, iSpot.tv founder Sean Muller explains why multi-currency CTV has urgency and how Universal ID will change advertising. TVREV The Measure ESHAP

Ol’ Grandpa Joe’s Economy has created more American jobs than ALL those younger Presidents. #justsayin #jobsreport

Community > Audience The dirty little secret of the Creator Economy: Creator-led enterprises do NOT need to be massive enterprises, with tens of millions of followers to make money. The #CreatorEconomy is NOT driven by clicks alone. Talented creators from an array of disciplines are able to build their own small businesses, based NOT on impressions, but cemented by their ability to monetize the love of their work from their small, passionate COMMUNITIES. Turns out, cults are good businesses! The obvious gold-medal case study is Taylor Swift, who took on the Music Industrial Complex and won. But there are countless, smaller, successful, non-billionaire examples. In fact, MY current career is a much smaller case study. I have tens of thousands (NOT millions) of readers. My platform of choice is LinkedIn, of all things. Every single penny I earn right now comes from my Creator efforts and the Community they attract. The list below includes one of the most popular Patreon publishers, The Yard, as well as numerous other Patreon creators with far fewer subs. The Last Podcast On The Left is the 98th most popular podcast. They have fewer than 14,000 Patreon members. Their Patreon will generate more than a $1 million this year. That’s on top of whatever revenue they generate from podcast ads, merch sales (which they do a lot of), and touring revenue. Snake Discovery is a YouTube series about reptiles from a pet shop in Minnesota. They have 3 million subs on YouTube. They have 3,500 Patreon members. This year, they will generate more than a quarter of a million dollars from Patreon, on top of their merch (which they sell a lot of) and various other sources of income. A huge part of the reshaping of the Media Universe in the decade ahead will be the shift in economic power from the Gatekeeper ecosystem to Creator-led Community Economy. If you read me regularly, and trust my insights, please take this seriously: Over the next quarter century, there will be far more Media opportunity in The Creator Economy than there will be in the traditional Media gatekeeper ecosystem. Why? How? Read more my on creator economy newsletter: https://lnkd.in/eGx8-NSh