At last! Disney embraces creators — now who else has the courage to follow?
“Offence is better than defence” is one of the laziest clichés in business.
If you’ve spent any time in media or advertising, you’ll know plenty of giants who’ve done just fine hiding behind defensive moats — platforms, agencies, FMCG behemoths.
Just look at last week’s playground scrap where Publicis Groupe’s Arthur Sadoun complained that Omnicom should report its revenue the way he does. Omnicom is days away from becoming the world’s biggest agency group after swallowing IPG, but Sadoun is upset about… accounting definitions. Aw, diddums.
Our industry spends so much energy fighting about the past that it routinely misses the future creeping up behind it with a baseball bat.
Because the uncomfortable truth behind “offence beats defence” is simple: by the time you notice the threat, it’s already slit your throat.
Publishers learned this the hard way. They thought partnering with Facebook and Google would protect them, right up until those businesses pivoted to crush their incentives and rewrite the rules of distribution.
TV is learning it now. YouTube has parked its tanks on the lawn and insists its vast, unregulated creator ecosystem should be treated as equivalent to regulated broadcasters… a neat sleight-of-hand that conveniently ignores the difference between a teenager with a ring light and a commissioning editor bound by law.
And if you think YouTube is “just another platform,” go and read about its ongoing carriage fight with Disney in the US. Google knows how to play offence. Incumbents, generally, don’t.
Which is why, last week, Disney CEO Bob Iger briefly made me believe in magic again.
