What was once a stabilizing force – media as a broker of democratic discourse and economic value – is now a fault line. Fragmented, politicized and increasingly treated as a risk rather than a utility, the business of media is being reshaped in real time.  

And if that sounds abstract, just look at how advertisers (the supposed bedrock of the industry) responded to Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! suspension: with silence, with hedging and a shared commitment to saying absolutely nothing.

As one media buyer put it: ”I haven’t really heard much about brands canceling schedules with the network, but I can tell you that they’re definitely staying close to it so that it doesn’t feel super reactive.”

It wasn’t always like this. In 2020, George Floyd’s murder prompted a loud, albeit temporary, reckoning. Statements were issued, donations pledged, typefaces blacked out and solemn. CMOs acted like the cultural stewards they pretended to be.

Now? Crickets. 

Not because the risks are gone. But because they’ve multiplied. The turning point came in April 2024 when Bud Light’s collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney triggered a backlash that tanked sales and led to internal restructuring at owner Anheuser-Busch InBev.  

Since then, the instinct inside marketing departments has calcified: avoid controversy, scale back DEI, let the keyword-blocking software do the talking. The era of “brand purpose” has been replaced by one of ambient fear.

“We’re now seeing a trend line here, and I’m afraid most advertisers will hide in the herd,” said Lou Paskalis, CEO and founder of AJL Advisory. “They’re not going to raise their hand and choose courage over cowardice.”

But this isn’t just fear. It’s a cost-benefit analysis. In a market where even buying time during a late-night chatshow feels like a political statement, advertisers aren’t making moral decisions. They’re managing downsides.

“So much is politicized in some form or fashion, even being adjacent to a late night show can feel like a political statement,” said one media buyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Now, the definition of political commentary content is broader than ever, and we are restricting news altogether.”

That kind of restriction is as much a media problem as it is a democratic one. For decades, brand dollars underwrote journalism, and journalism held institutions accountable. Today, those same dollars are being rerouted toward platforms and partisan media, if they’re spent at all. In fact, earlier this year, WARC estimated that global ad spend on news had fallen by a third since 2020.

The result is an attention economy governed by fear, policed by brand-safety software and drained of some of its most essential voices.

Looming over all of this is Google, the architect of media’s financial precarity. For years, the company has skimmed billions from the open web by controlling every layer of the ad supply chain – buy side, sell side and everything in between. Publishers never stood a chance. And now, finally regulators are getting serious.

This week the Department of Justice has been in court making the case to dismantle that empire, arguing that no single company should control the plumbing of online advertising, let alone the financial lifeline of independent media. It’s a reckoning as much as it’s an antitrust case. 

“A viable future for journalism probably requires Google to sell off parts of this ad tech monopoly … This is not a partisan issue,” said Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Tech Institute and Honorary Professor at UCL Laws, during a press briefing earlier this week. “The reason that it’s not a left-wing or a right-wing issue is because we’re seeing the most concerted attacks on freedom of press and free speech we’ve had in decades.”

She’s right. The crisis, whether it’s in newsrooms, late-night studios or on media plans, isn’t just about revenue or audience. It’s about power. Who funds information, who controls distribution and who gets to decide what’s safe enough to sponsor. 

Marketers aren’t bystanders in this collapse. They’re the accelerants. These foundations don’t erode on their own. They erode when the people holding the purse strings stop treating media like an investment in public discourse and start treating it like a brand safety risk to be managed.

Which brings us to the final shoe dropping: TikTok. 

The Trump Administration’s long-sought deal with TikTok should give marketers pause for thought. If the deal closes as anticipated, some of the president’s closest, most influential allies could gain control over a version of the world’s most powerful social platforms – while also owning cloud infrastructure, entertainment studios, cable networks and more. 

“I believe that the level of censorship and bans on TikTok will dramatically increase,” said Amir Kaltak, CEO and cofounder of Own. App, a decentralized social media app. “It will turn into a tightly closed hyper-echo chamber with little international and alternative content to be seen. It will limit users’ ability to express themselves in never-seen ways.”

So yes — Kimmel, Google, TikTok. Three stories, same trajectory. 

The firewall between marketing and comms is starting to look like a screen door

The sealed-lips policy adopted by advertisers in the last week was, in part, due to a power shift that’s been playing out behind the scenes at major brands.

Since the pandemic, comms professionals have become powerful figures in U.S. and U.K. boardrooms, evolving from press fixers to strategic advisors for CEOs – their influence reaching into decisions over employee policies, supply chains and brand positioning. Comms chiefs spend at least one day a week counseling their CEO, according to a 2023 survey of Fortune 500 execs conducted by Edelman.

So, while the choice to sponsor a talkshow host or launch a new ad campaign would once have been the sole domain of a CMO acting on advice from media agencies, chief communications officers (CCOs) now also get a say. Their voice might carry more weight than that of a marketer for boardrooms fearful of political blowback or a tonal misstep.

“The media buyer had very unilateral control,” said Lou Paskalis, CEO and founder of AJL Advisory, even in tough moments like the recent Kimmel imbroglio. “Now, it’s a team sport and corporate communications has to weigh in, senior leadership has to weigh in, and there needs to be a consensus decision.”

In part, this change is a response to the complexity involved in stewarding a brand’s reputation and image online, according to MediaLink managing director Donna Sharp. With more digital channels there’s more surface area for public scrutiny, meaning that marketing and comms decisions “have to be made in tandem.”

CMOs and their opposite numbers on comms teams now work more closely, Sharp noted. That doesn’t just have implications for CMOs faced with ceding part of their domain. It’s translating into higher demand for joint comms and media accounts with agencies.

“We’ve seen a lot more interest in PR-comms-media,” she said. “If I were a betting woman, I would say that you should be thinking about adding on more of that PR comms skill set.” — Sam Bradley