The playbook that reached this family two decades ago reaches one of them today.
By Jasongoldberg · September 15, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
The playbook that reached this family two decades ago reaches one of them today.
Same couch. Same room. Same popcorn bowl, except now nobody is eating it (no one wants butter on their screen).
I built these two images because I wanted to actually look at the thing we keep calling fragmentation. And I think we describe it wrong. Content was already fragmenting in 2006. Cable, TiVo, early YouTube. The audience was splitting well before the iPhone existed.
What broke is co-viewing. Four people in one room used to be one audience. Now it is four.
Before anyone tells me mass reach is dead, it isn't. The Super Bowl still does exactly what it always did. So does a finale people decide to watch at the same time. Ehrenberg-Bass has been right about this for forty years: growth comes from reaching people who don't buy you yet, and that takes reach.
Here is the actual change. We used to inherit a shared culture. Now we have to build one.
Inheriting was free. Buy the right dayparts and you were in that living room by default. Building is not free. It means paying up for the few moments that still assemble people, and then doing the unglamorous work of showing up in four separate feeds for everybody else.
Too many media plans I see are still written as though the first panel is true.
Which panel is your 2027 plan built for?