The Creator Era is Here: Feb. 11, 2024 - Present

Taylor Swift, The Super Bowl, and the New Centers of the Media Universe

If Marshall McLuhan’s famous axiom “the medium is the message” is true, then the message we glean from the Taylor Swift Super Bowl should be: The Creator Era is Here.

“While Swift isn't exactly a creator - she's a creative and a celebrity - she embodies the creator spirit,” wrote Jasmine Enberg, fellow analyst, thought partner, and the foremost expert on the creator economy. “Creators go over the top of established institutions to market and bring products directly to their communities.”

In this instance, Swift even transcended America’s pre-eminent cultural touchstone: The Super Bowl.

Creators—of which she is now the canonical example—are best thought of as the digitally-native creative class. They are unbound by the constraints of traditional gatekeepers, able to capture audience attention via a D2C model. They are independent media brands existing in a multimedia landscape, leveraging existing channels without being dependent on them. Creators can be social media influencers, video creators, podcasters, musicians, artists, comedians, independent journalists, TV writers, and athletes.

That Taylor Swift is so many of these things is why she was recently named TIME Magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year. She has become a central figure in our culture, the “social glue” capable of bringing a fragmented society together. “She’s the last monoculture left in our stratified world,” wrote Sam Lansky of TIME Magazine.

Even as once-ubiquitous cultural institutions like the Olympics and the Academy Awards lose relevance, the Super Bowl has not only survived but thrived. Only Taylor Swift could turn it into the Super Bowl of Super Bowls—posting its largest viewing audience in history.

Super Bowl LVIII—the culmination of a moment that’s been building as Swift achieved megastardom and became the center of American culture—is an inflection point in history. Along with the 2024 Olympics and US Presidential election, it sets the context for the future of media.

2024 is the year in which longstanding media institutions reach a breaking point, from linear TV’s last stand, to the death march of digital publishers, to the demise of third-party cookies. And it will also be a year in which new paradigms emerge, with TikTok taking center stage in social media and culture, the rise of ad-supported streaming TV, physical stores becoming media channels, and gen AI’s reordering of the media landscape.

Creativity, connection, and community will be the common throughlines for what comes next. Welcome to the Creator Era.

The Media Eras Tour: 1984-2024

Let’s travel back in time to 1984.

“Someday they won't let you, now you must agree
The times, they are a-telling, and the changing isn't free
You've read it in the tea leaves and the tracks are on TV
Beware the savage jaw of 1984” – David Bowie

Far from an Orwellian dystopia, it was the height of the go-go ‘80s and American exceptionalism. The 1984 Olympics were held in Los Angeles, Ronald Reagan was re-elected to a booming economy, Michael Jordan began his rookie season for the Chicago Bulls, and Michael Jackson and Madonna became global icons. This time was the peak of the mass media era, where Americans had the same cultural touchstones—everyone watched The Cosby Show and Family Ties, saw Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid in theaters, and listened to “Karma Chameleon” and “Time After Time” on the radio.

The monoculture reigned until the rise of the digital era—perhaps better described as “the fragmentation era”—circa 2004. That was the year of Google’s IPO and the birth of Facebook, the two companies primarily responsible for redefining the media landscape by atomizing, and ultimately commoditizing, media content. As the front doors to the internet, the new gatekeepers controlled the algorithms that dictated media companies’ visibility, and by extension their right to exist. In the late stages of this cycle, we are now discovering the fates of these legacy brands—and the outlook isn’t great.

“If you really want to blame anything, just blame the internet itself,” wrote Troy Young in his newsletter, People vs. Algorithms. “It turned media upside down, shifting control from media owners to consumers, evaporating the scarcity model and its stable economic equilibrium. Its virtues, of limitless access and distribution, of content everywhere and niches super-served, have become media’s poison. The new generation of tech-powered media disruptors, its fallen soldiers.”

We now face a future media landscape that most prognosticators insist will be determined by gen AI. But I believe it belongs to the creators.

The New—And Future—Media Value Chain

It’s been said that the only two ways to make money in business—and which ultimately define each era of media—are by bundling and unbundling. The mass media era was one of bundling led by the media owners. The fragmentation era was of course a great unbundling led by big tech platforms. This next era will be one of rebundling, only this time led by creators.

To understand how—and more importantly why—creators emerged, let’s first examine the evolution of the media value chain.

Here’s the full model, which we’ll break down into detail below.

The Old Media Value Chain—In the old model—the 1984 version—content supply was constrained. There were a finite number of TV networks and programs and limited space to fill in a newspaper or magazine. Media consumption was bundled in the form of cable or print publications, which ran the same ads that reached the same mass audiences. If those ads were effective, people would buy the advertised goods in physical retail stores. The major cable companies, TV networks, and physical retailers carried most of the power and mass consumer brands dominated the shelves.

The New Media Value Chain—By 2004, a new media value chain had evolved. As media went digital, the content itself became more dynamic and its supply was no longer constrained. The model shifted from scarcity to abundance, and value flowed to the aggregators of demand—per Ben Thompson’s “Aggregation Theory”. Google and Facebook emerged as the new gatekeepers to this infinite supply of content, surfacing the best content through algorithmic models. Content became atomized, and media companies’ roles as gateways to quality content diminished. Endless scrolls and YouTube holes dictated how most media consumers spent their time.

Content and commerce converged. The path to purchase collapsed. The demand creation and fulfillment that previously took days or weeks could now be realized within a matter of minutes or seconds. Content and ads targeted niche audiences who could purchase a brand instantly online if they were so inclined. Advertisers didn’t need six-figure budgets to compete for customers. Digital allowed thousands of niche media and D2C brands to bloom.

The creator—or social media influencer—arose out of this dynamic. Against a backdrop of infinite content supply, influencers possessed what had become scarce: the ability to cut through. By speaking directly and authentically to their audiences, they created, curated, and disseminated content that mattered and—most importantly—surfaced in the algorithm. These independent media brands had the power to influence what products consumers wanted. In so doing, they shifted the balance of power in the value chain.

The Future Media Value Chain—The future model begins in 2024. Dominant forms of media consumption like TikTok and Netflix are now determined algorithmically, not only in terms of what reaches audiences but increasingly the content itself. The media layer by which content travels is not merely fragmented but memetic, determined initially via engagement signals but ultimately dictated by virality and algorithmic amplification to reach audiences at scale. The most powerful mechanism by which content goes mainstream is—you guessed it—creators. They increasingly function as the marketing and advertising layer, drawing their power through the feedback loop of content and commerce—a direct parallel to retail media.

Creators exert a gravitational force on their communities, predicated on cultural affinities to which their audiences subscribe. In many cases, it takes the form of tribalism—an “us against them” mentality—that occurs in benign contexts like sports and entertainment or controversial contexts like social issues and political ideology. These cultural audiences are influenced to express their identity through the purchase of brands and products in physical stores, online, or through shoppable media.

The most influential creators can drive commerce through any and all channels. Taylor Swift has perfected this playbook.

Creators First Break the Mold, Then Break Through, and Finally Break the System

Breaking the Mold—Creators are the digitally native offspring of a democratized digital ecosystem with low barriers to entry. Anyone can create content across any variety of channels. The ones who get noticed break the mold.

They’re iconoclasts who see the world differently, surface novel ideas, and tell stories in interesting ways. They intuit value where others fail to look. Their unique POV is likely to be undervalued and misunderstood by existing institutions, but they persevere in bringing their message directly to their audience anyway.

Taylor Swift didn’t fit the mold when she descended on Nashville as a 14-year old songwriter with big aspirations, eventually getting signed by Big Machine records and recording her eponymous album in 2006. Feeling that her label was looking to replace her almost as soon as they’d signed her, she began to “shape-shift” to evolve her style and storytelling—discovering her voice and her audience along the way.

“[S]omething unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent,” wrote TIME Magazine’s Lansky. “She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique—a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.”

The mold-breakers include influencers like Charli D’Amelio whose competitive dancing skills channeled the early milieu on TikTok. They’re TV show creators like Larry David who proved there was an audience for “a show about nothing.” They’re filmmakers like Greta Gerwig who breathed new life into a decaying cultural institution like Barbie. They’re early D2C brands like Dollar Shave Club, Casper Mattress, and Away, which turned the model for consumer products on its head by meeting the unmet needs of modern consumers.

There are plenty of wannabe creators and D2C brands that emulate the playbook of the best creators. But they ultimately lack the originality, style, and differentiated POV needed to break through.

Breaking Through—Next-level creators figure out how to break through and gain mainstream adoption through expanded distribution. This effect usually begins organically through favorable distribution conferred by content algorithms, as Charli D’Amelio was able to do. Niche popularity begets mainstream popularity, as social platforms prioritize and amplify the creators generating the most engagement. Content and creators that previously lived in the margins found bigger audiences when they figured out what those audiences wanted. D’Amelio parlayed her success into a hit reality TV show on Hulu.

Social media influencers are now extending their personal brands into consumer products. Mr. Beast’s Feastables brand has carved out meaningful market share in the multibillion dollar chocolate bar category led by Hershey’s. Logan Paul and KSI have done it on an even bigger scale with PRIME Hydration in the sports drink category, even giving Gatorade a run for its money, per data from Stackline Shopper Analytics.

Celebrity-led brands like Kim Kardashian and SKIMS, Rihanna and Savage x Fenty, Jessica Alba and The Honest Co., and Ryan Reynolds and Aviation Gin all achieved breakthrough to become several hundred million or billion-dollar brands carried on the shelves of major retailers.

Breaking the System—The best creators—the ones that rise above the rest to become enduring megabrands—do more than break the mold and break through. They break the system.

Taylor Swift is both a cultural and economic phenomenon capable of unleashing the “Taylor Swift Effect,” a mini-economic boom in every city in which she performs. Yet her influence on business is even further reaching. She traverses platforms and transcends culture by virtue of her deep connection with her audience—a two-way relationship that could only exist in the digital era.

“Swift has built one of the largest and most engaged fandoms, ‘Swifties,’ and she has broken established business norms and gone direct-to-consumer in several ways,” wrote Enberg. “She forwent traditional tour marketing by announcing her tour through Instagram, she is re-releasing all of her studio albums with additional songs, and she bypassed studios in bringing her concert to the silver screen.”

She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 in protest over artist royalties. Apple backed down to her over a similar issue. The ticket release for Swift’s Eras Tour—the first ever to gross over $1 billion globally—literally broke Ticketmaster.

Swift is both a disruptor and savior of traditional media, boosting NFL TV ratings, topping $100 million on opening weekend for her concert film, and then cutting a deal with Disney+ for its streaming rights.

Upon winning her 13^th Grammy this year, she used her airtime on stage to announce her upcoming album The Tortured Poets Department. She is the convergence of content and commerce, able to leverage any media channel to do her bidding precisely because she isn’t beholden to any of them.

Taylor Swift and other elite creators—which includes generational predecessors like David Bowie, Michael Jordan, and Barack Obama—do it on their own terms. They reframe the context, flip the script, and ultimately change the game.

The New Centers of the Media Universe

Media fragmentation and the demise of our monoculture has left us starving for connection. We want to coexist, once again, within a common cultural context. The Taylor Swift Super Bowl rekindled that feeling for many Americans.

In the creator era, cultural touchstones will re-emerge as slightly different incarnations of the past. These will be the new centers of the media universe.

Streaming TV will take the mantle from linear TV by re-embracing synchronous events and water cooler culture. The Netflix homescreen will prioritize flagship programming for the masses over personalized viewing recommendations. Prestige programming will continue to revert back to weekly release schedules over on-demand binge viewing.

Professional sports will win back loyal fandoms with more D2C access to hometown sports team programming and reassert the primacy of tentpole events like the Super Bowl. Appointment-viewing for sports leagues will be resurrected on specific nights of the week—only it’s more likely to be on YouTube, Prime Video, and Apple TV+ than NBC, TNT, and TBS. The rise of legal sports-betting will connect more fans to live events and to each other.

Physical stores will emerge as the next major media channel, providing digitized in-store experiences that reach tens of millions of eyeballs every week. They are the centers of their communities—particularly grocery stores—and the singular establishments that virtually everyone visits on a regular basis.

TikTok will dominate the cultural zeitgeist as the purveyor of memes and primary mechanism for reaching mass audiences on digital channels. It’s the modern-day firestarter for breakthrough brands and content.

And finally, the creators. They are both the medium and the message. More than anything else, they will define the future of media.

The creator era is officially here.