The Year of the Crowd, Unfair Advantages and the Rise of Narrative Economics. Plus, a Decision-Grade Intelligence Platform Just for You.
Welcome back to Inside the Media C-Suite, and to this special New Year edition. I’m Dr. Thomas Kingston, Publisher of the Media C-Suite.
As we step foot into the second quarter of the 21st Century, our industry is now firmly embedded in the top ten sectors of the global economy as measured by annual global revenues.
This last year saw global consumer audiences pay over US$2 trillion for access to content (entertaining or otherwise). At the same time, advertisers paid over US$1 trillion for access to those consumer audiences. In total, M&E drank in an estimated US$3.065 trillion in revenues last year.
For much of my career, I’ve been involved in the efforts of some of the world’s largest professional investors to understand, and invest into, the Media & Entertainment industry. For the most part, those investors have been attracted to the consistent revenue growth our industry demonstrates.
After 30 years as a Private Equity professional, I started the Media C-Suite as a bridge between professional investors and the many media professionals trying to engage with them.
The Media C-Suite was never intended to be a match making service. I’m not an introducer.
Rather, I set out to solve a problem.
That problem was, and still is, a language barrier.
Let’s Get Started
With any language comes vernacular, concept and cultural literacy that hides enough nuance to kill a great joke, or to induce laughter when it really isn’t sought. The dramatic effect of a failed capital raise, based purely on miscommunicated proposition, is heart breaking.
For both sides.
What I repeat often to my professional clients is that capital and entrepreneurs both need the other.
Professional investors need to find high-quality investment opportunity as badly as media professionals need capital.
In fact, that pressure is growing as the private capital markets expand past US$22 trillion in AUM this year. Of that vast amount of money, professional investors within the private capital markets will be under pressure to deploy more than US$3 trillion in accumulating dry powder.
That actually pales in comparison to the public capital markets, which this year will hold more than US$127 trillion in value, with untold trillions in retained earnings to invest with.
We wrote about private capital some time ago in Private Equity’s Inevitable Impact on Media and Entertainment (April 22, 2024). I think an update is needed. Any of your comments on where to focus are appreciated.
The point is that these numbers matter. They can help frame the minds of media executives and entrepreneurs as we set out into 2026.
There is no shortage of capital for entrepreneurs and executives within Media & Entertainment. The shortage, unfortunately, is in the number of investor-ready media companies able to speak the right language and engage with investors.
Our Take
If you do the reading, you now know that the money is out there. The question then becomes, from the media perspective, how do we to get to it?
The Media C-Suite has been offering strategy and tactics to answer that question.
Insights
The Unfair Advantage of Capital Literacy: What the UK’s Enterprise Investment Scheme Reveals About M&E’s Capital Problem
As our industry breaks new records in annual global revenues, and as audiences demand ever more content, creative entrepreneurs struggle to raise capital. Needlessly.
This is Recommended Reading
This recent article is a great example.
With billions in risk capital on offer to British companies every year, the UK’s Enterprise Investment Scheme (“EIS”) has been begging media execs and entrepreneurs to learn the language of capital to build better, investor-ready media companies.
That effort has been underway since the mid-1990s, when the Media & Entertainment industry was much more fragmented.
Technology has changed that dramatically, creating an infrastructure that is uniquely beneficial to the upstream, creative production end of M&E. That has led to direct-to-consumer business models and the emergence of a creator economy that led us to declare 2025 to be the Year of the Audience.
This year, we see momentum taking that audience-first perspective on content creation and distribution into slightly less idealistic territory.
In our most recent New Year’s Feature, we declared 2026 to be the Year of the Crowd, as audiences become more self-aware of just how critical they are. More importantly, we can see that realisation having real-world effects on how audiences exercise their alter-egos on the streets as consumers, communities and voters.
Features
Welcome to the New Year: What Comes Next?
The year 2026 has arrived. Is this a fresh start? Unlikely. Yesterday still matters and tomorrow is all about the story we believe. What comes next is narrative.
Professional investors have kept up on these changes and see an industry even more enticing than ever before.
Just not for the reasons we might expect.
Just Catching Up?
Aren’t we all!
It’s taken me decades to come to terms with what the Media & Entertainment industry really is. Or more accurately, what M&E has become. It has been catalysed by technology, particularly the internet, in a process that has taken more than 20 years.
As an industry, M&E is now much more coherent than most market analysts have yet realised. Central to this coherence is the effect of narrative on common knowledge.
The natural tendency for common knowledge to be shaped by narrative has been transformed by the effects of influence, fame and commerce into a highly lucrative, global industry upon which all other human initiatives have now become dependent.
That may seem a bold statement.
To put this another way, a different way of thinking about our industry has been coalescing within the minds of Big Money. For an increasing percentage of professional investors, the value proposition within the Media & Entertainment industry has changed from pure profit motive and financial performance, to influence at levels never before recognized.
Here at the Media C-Suite, we’ve begun referring to the value inherent in (and unique to) M&E as Narrative Capital; an asset class generated by industrialised story-telling at scale.
What It Means
Narrative Capital is a term of art that fits within a wider economic system inherent in M&E that includes other concepts, such as Audience Resonance and Capital Resonance.
This system of Narrative Economics has become something of a focus for us here at the Media C-Suite.
We introduced these concepts by describing the mechanism with which all other industries have become dependent on M&E for their messaging, marketing and positioning.
Features
Narrative: Why Media & Entertainment is the World’s Apex Industry
If money is the metric, M&E is near the top of the league tables. But add inherent control over all narrative, and we see all other industries bow before it.
This is Highly Recommended Reading.
Looking Forward
The concepts within Narrative Economics are quickly becoming central to our thinking about M&E within the Media C-Suite.
Stay tuned for a wider discussion on the opportunities this approach presents to executives, entrepreneurs and professional investors alike.
At the same time, we are now in process of rolling out the 2026 Media Investor Survey, our annual assessment of what capital is seeking from M&E, how it is approaching dealflow and what media execs and entrepreneurs can do to better engage.
The Media Investor Survey
Last year we published our analysis of the data from 98 media-focused professional investors, ranging from high-net-worth individuals to some of the largest Sovereign Wealth Funds around. The results were published in our 2025 Media Investor Survey Report.
The Media Investor Survey
If you haven’t read through this, you should.
We expect to widen our net in 2026. Family Offices are a rising force in M&E capital allocation, and we are focused on increasing their participation in our survey. That effort will also focus on more data from investors based in Europe, the Middle East and Asia to equalise the geographic representation and test any differences in behaviour.
I’ve been pleased with the volume of questions and comments that have come out of this year’s report. Please do keep those comments coming.
Knowledge Products
In 2025 we tested the production of “knowledge products” with the publication of a handbook, How Production Companies Generate Value, plus a series of summary documents including a Briefing, an Executive Summary and a OneSheet.
Check out: Premium Knowledge and let me know your thoughts.
We are in the process of expanding the number of titles on offer. Again, I’m grateful for the feedback we’re receiving, and the suggestions for what title should come next.
Keep them coming.
All of this begs the question: What is the value of information?
From my perspective, the answer is simple: The decisions we can make with it.
I’m proud of what the Media C-Suite is growing into; a decision-grade intelligence platform for the Media & Entertainment Industry.
I invite you all to help shape it.
Register as a member of Our Community to comment and participate in our Forums.
Thomas is our founder, acting Publisher and contributes an outsized proportion of our articles and editorial pieces.
He is an American lawyer & private equity specialist with 30+ years of international experience in investment strategy. He has lived and worked in London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Nicosia as both adviser and executive to several of the world’s largest family offices, institutional investors and State-investment companies. He is also founder of Coherent Media Group, a corporate holding company dedicated to media & entertainment businesses globally.
In his spare time, Thomas is a corporate and political speech-writer and has ghost-written numerous Op-Eds, political/espionage thrillers and science fiction novels.
