IPs Create Relationships. Ads Don’t.
On October 8, in Amsterdam, I had the slot nobody wants: the last twenty minutes before lunch, in front of the broadcasters and sales houses of egta. So I made one argument instead of five.
Television is spending enormous energy trying to look like digital: easier to buy, easier to compare, easier to measure. Most of that is necessary. My worry is what happens if the industry mistakes the modernisation of the transaction for the definition of the product.
This is the short version. The full one is on Substack, with my conversation with Rick Howe on why scrolling wins over binge, and the tools to test your own brand: contentwithaview.com.
What I said in Amsterdam
I spent years inside this business, at Fox and Disney, and I know the pressure on television. This is what I told them.
Modernising is necessary. In the UK, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, with Thinkbox, are building Lantern to connect TV exposure to searches, website visits and purchases. In Germany, Seven.One’s MediaLytics linked a real FMCG campaign (€2.7 million, about 600 GRPs) to roughly 350,000 incremental visits and 120,000 orders: €9.2 million of short-term additional revenue, with probabilistic attribution. Television can finally prove what it drives.
But comparable is not equivalent. CPM is a good common language and a poor definition of the product. Across six major European broadcasters, content and programming costs equal about 60% of advertising revenue (FY2025, illustrative, not a per-euro allocation). The impression comes out of an industrial system whose main output is content, and that system makes more than impressions: attention, memory, fame, talent, fandom.
The IP travels, and the relationship changes with the place. Sanremo 2026: about 10 million people a night on television, 1.2 billion video views across platforms in five days (source: Rai). Born on TV, mostly lived in what Alan Wolk of TVREV calls the fiefdoms of feudal media. On TV it is the shared moment, on YouTube the replay, on TikTok the remix, with creators the conversation.
IPs earn a relationship. Ads do not inherit it automatically. Exposure is not attention, and attention is not relationship. The industry measures the first well, is starting to measure the second, and cannot yet measure the third. And once the IP lives on rented platforms, the platform sells the impressions while the creators monetise the fandom.
That is the broadcasters’ problem. The brand’s problem is its mirror image: if the relationship belongs to the content, what does an advertiser do standing inside it?
Why it matters
Two signals this week show the market trying to give the relationship a business model.
YouTube Shopping launched in France on October 13. It puts the platform inside the relationship between creators and brands, and it is a direct answer to TikTok Shop. Will it work? I am not sure that asking the audience for that many actions will work, especially on CTV. But it gives ideas a shelf.
Fox comes at it from the other side: through Fox Creator Studios it is trying to connect creators, entertainment on legacy media and brand partnerships, with scalable, industrial execution.
The question I keep coming back to: how do you pay shareholders without destroying the relationship with the audience? Few single creators stay profitable in the long term. The industrial version may look like temporary businesses that merge, exit and start over.
What you can do with it
On contentwithaview.com you can find what to check before going into a media partnership, and a free test: does your brand talk like a creator or like a broadcaster? Subscribe for free and see.
If you want to know how your content performs, send me a DM for a free test of the Brand Communication Score (BCS): an agent I built, still in beta, that scores from 0 to 100 how effective a brand’s communication and content are across social platforms, on attention and engagement parameters, against sector benchmarks drawn from public data. It does not measure the relationship itself, but it shows whether your content earns attention or only gets delivered.
