David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. You bring up this other concept, too, David. This exists with any influencers today. There’s a network [...] effect within the audience. There really is a critical mass thing that happens where if you could watch Oprah, that was doing all the exact same things that Oprah was doing or you could watch someone identical to Oprah that no one’s ever heard of and your friends weren’t talking about, and other people wouldn’t be reading those books, and other people wouldn’t be buying those products but still had the same charisma, amazing guests, you just would never watch that one because you want to be a part of the cultural zeitgeist that Oprah is creating. In some ways, it’s an audience network effect. The obvious modern-day analogy to all these is the Kardashian empire. The Kardashian-West empire now, combined. This kind of federation and the way influencers were today is it’s not just one person. It’s a career. You got Kim, you got Kanye, you got Kylie, Kylie’s got a cosmetics brand, Kim’s now doing a podcast with Spotify. I will talk more about this in Playbook to come. There’s really something to this audience network, but it’s now a federated network across influencers. That’s true, yeah. You have to imagine there is an audience overlap between Dr. Phil, Dr. Ross, Rachel Ray. The different jobs to be done in a shared audience by each of those creators in the same way that there are influencer cadres that each serve a different job to be done for the same person in the audience. You got to think Oprah is on her way, too, but if you can successfully build that, then that’s how Oprah can make her exit from it and it retains value on its own. Let’s go to what would’ve happened otherwise. What if Oprah didn’t spend $16 million and kept working for WLS? First of all, she might have stayed as important in the cultural zeitgeist, but I think it’s telling this is also in the podcast you referenced at the top of the show that Oprah felt like she was doing wrong by other people at the station by being so successful. When she would see people in the elevator and all their shows were fine but not nationally syndicated and she was the queen of television, it created cultural problems at the station. She talks about how she felt that she needed to bring the Oprah Show into its own physical space just to detangle from all the existing incentives that existed for everyone else in the building. The easy thing to say is she never would have become the mogul with the power that she has today. That’s really what she wanted. She probably wouldn’t have felt that she was doing right by herself, but it’s also hard to guess what the unintended side-effects were of staying in that station.…

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