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At this year's Social Innovation Summit, Al Roker moderated a panel from Al Roker Entertainment with a deceptively simple question at its center: why are we telling these stories?
This weekend, as America turned 250 and The New York Times published the six sentences that shaped American history. Wesley Morris chose a line from Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam", a song she wrote in under an hour, in a rush of fury, after the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four little girls.
François Bazini, former CMO of Suntory Europe, has spent years writing and speaking about one of the defining frustrations of modern marketing: the widening gap between what brands spend and what they can actually prove.
Not impressions. Not reach. Not the kind of "engagement" that lives and dies on a social media dashboard. Business impact.
A new report from Sprout Social landed in my inbox this week with a stat I haven't been able to stop thinking about:
Only 10% of organizations can translate a real-time social signal into tangible business action within hours.
Ten percent. In 2026. After years of investment in social listening tools, data dashboards, and analytics platforms.
The rest? They're sitting on insight they can't act on, watching it age out in a reporting deck while the moment passes.
For the brands and companies Sprout surveyed, that's a missed revenue opportunity. For the impact entertainment sector, it's something even more serious: it's a story told, a viewer moved, and a moment for change that simply disappears.
Diagnosis v. Treatment
The Pitt’s Public Health Students Confirmed Media's Biggest Missed Opportunity
Last week, I had the privilege of speaking to students at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, and I left more energized than when I arrived.
Evan Shapiro's recent comment on PBS that 2026 is "change or die" for the media isn't hyperbole. It's a structural diagnosis.
The prescribed treatment, however, is being misread.
For mission-driven transportation providers, the ability to serve more people depends on something that rarely shows up in an operations budget: community trust.
A powerful idea is gaining traction; the minutes immediately after a film ends may be the most psychologically valuable window in the entire storytelling experience.
For years, content creators, marketers and nonprofits have chased precision: the perfect target, the perfect message, the perfect moment. But there’s a downside to precision. Too narrow means…too narrow!
If COP30 were a brand campaign, it would have all the makings of a blockbuster launch: global visibility, massive anticipation, the world’s most influential stakeholders, and a unifying narrative about an issue that affects every human being. Billions of people tuned in. Headlines were written. Leaders stood at podiums delivering lines that sounded strong and urgent.