The Medium Rules: Long-Term Trends in Media and Technology

For this episode of The Medium Rules, the first of 2020, we decided to delve into the headlines and take an in-depth look at the impeachment trial of President Trump in the US Senate from a trial lawyer’s perspective. For this discussion I’m joined by two of my HBA colleagues: our head of litigation, Adam Michaels, and Partner Mike Norton, a former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District who worked under Rudy Giuliani....

How do you crack the code on effectively messaging political advocacy on social media? What is the right tone, what are the right platforms, and what is the right targeting? One organization that seems to be nailing this challenge is the progressive, grassroots political advocacy organization, Swing Left.

Swing Left was founded in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election. The initial, basic idea was to develop a tool...

The explosion of so-called programmatic advertising over the past decade is one of those technological phenomena that has had so many and so varied a set of seismic second-order effects that we almost take it for granted that the world of interactive advertising was always so. Not the case. Consider this quote, which now reads as charmingly quaint, from the April 14, 2007 New York Times article annou...

With the explosion of podcasts and podcasting in recent years (there are 700,000 podcasts and counting, according to The New York Times), podcasting has become big business. In addition, there has been a recent spate of headline-grabbing podcast M&A activity, signaling that this new, highly intimate form of media is still in its early stages. However, the industry is struggling to find an advertising model that matche...

The past 15 years have seen the cooking show move from niche, daytime and educational “good for you” programming to the center of mainstream American entertainment.  This has fueled the rise of the celebrity chef and, it’s cousin, the rise of the TV chef. The beating heart of this explosion is the food competition show, principally among them “Top Chef”, but also “Hell’s Kitchen”, “Iron Chef”, “Masterchef” and a host...

Last November, after an extended RFP bidding process involving initially 280 cities, narrowed down to twenty “finalists”, Amazon announced Long Island City in Queens, New York as its “HQ2” winner. New York’s agreements with Amazon guaranteed $27 billion in revenue for New York with $3 billion returned to Amazon in tax credits.  In February of this year, however, on Valentine’s Day no less (slightly tone deaf!), Amazo...

The twin challenges of both monetizing content and managing the transition from a print-dominated world to a digital-dominated world are not for the faint of heart. For some, the scale and scope of this challenge would be at best daunting and, at worst, induce a level of anxiety and paralysis that would make many if not most media executives sprint in the opposite direction. Yet this is exactly the challenge that Troy You...

If there was one area of the consumer economy that you may have thought might be impervious to the “direct-to-consumer” disruption of the past several years, good chance it would have been the home renovation market. Yet this high degree of difficulty also creates opportunity. On this episode of The Medium Rules, I sit down with JasperMalcolmson, co-founder and CEO of the digitally-native home renovation platform Sky...

One of the more intractable problems with cryptocurrency is also one of the most basic: how do you keep digital assets on the blockchain secure? This is an issue of hacks and honeypots. But, as evidenced by the recent news that the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX may have lost $140 million in cryptocurrency when its founder died in December and took with him the only available electronic keys to the exchange’s...

If you stop and think about it, the category of home furnishings and home design is one of the most daunting to take online. As much as we have come to take the success of companies like Wayfair and One King’s Lane for granted, think of the logistics involved in a digitally native business that sells sofas, dining room tables and beds. And what about white glove service, damages and returns. Complicating things, any ...

What exactly is a security token? How is it expressed on the blockchain? How is it traded? Why is a security token better than an electronic share? What are the downsides? And, beyond all that, what are the limits of tokenization? And what are the political and philosophical implications?  

On this episode of The Medium Rules, Alan is joined in the HBA podcast studio by Alex Blum and Peter...

How can we define and identify seismic-grade disruption? Is this recognizable contemporaneously, or only with the benefit of hindsight? And if there is some kind of taxonomy of disruption, some kind of map or workflow template we can apply, can we convert these insights into actionable mandates across both investing, startups and organizational behavior generally? 

On this episode of The Medium Rules, Alan is join...

Kim Kardashian was recently featured on the cover of Business of Fashion with the headline “The Age of Influence.” “Truer” words may never have appeared in print. Indeed, the influencer economy on Instagram alone is worth an estimated $1 billion and rising with a bullet. While deals with the top influencers can be worth millions of dollars, there is a widening sweet spot for so-called MicroInfluencers (loosely define...

With technology disrupting all sectors of the economy and culture, it should come as no surprise that this reality also extends to how we play. On this episode of The Medium Rules, host Alan Baldachin speaks with Walid Fattah, the CEO and Co-founder of the tennis-court booking app, Kourts, Inc. Alan and Walid cover the Kourts platform and functionality, Kourts’ go-to-market vision and strategy and its approach to scaling ...

It is axiomatic that the big three “over the top” (OTT) streaming services—Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime—dominate what and how we watch television. But how has this revolution in long-form video consumption affected the creative process? How has the new media paradigm altered the way media properties find and build an audience? And what are the some of the opportunities and challenges creators face in successfully n...

As blockchain technology evolves, more and more blockchain networks are adopting a “proof of stake” concept with respect to operation and governance as opposed to a “proof of work” concept. But what does this mean, and why is this important? And, further, how should we think about these two modalities in terms of the broader blockchain ecosystem whether it be from a technical perspective or from the perspective of an inve...

“Alignment: Accelerating Funded Startups and the Agency of the Future”

With the proliferation of funded e-commerce startups focused on the direct-to-consumer, how is brand created and how can startups adapt to the changing tastes and trends to reach consumers and drive sales? Further, what are some models for agencies to reinvent themselves to not only survive, but to thrive as the media landscape evolves? How can age...