A Nightmare Competitor for Studios

One of the techniques we've been playing with this year is The Digital Nightmare Competitor, a framework for stretching the thinking of executives in a business by showing them how their industry could look strategically, operationally and economically in a digital world. I recently did such an exercise for a studio client and thought I'd share a nightmare I particularly like. Think of it as a Grinch-like Christmas present :)...

November 5th 2026, London

In late trading, shares in Wintermute, the apex media business of the 2020's hit a record high, valuing the business at more than $400Bn. This success marks a remarkable rise to prominence for an organisation barely a decade old.

Classical disruption started with the customer

From its launch in late 2016, Project Wintermute targeted people turned off by the complex media distribution and rights landscape of the mid-2010’s. By offering a single monthly subscription to unlimited premium digital content at a significantly lower price point (EUR 15 a month, without contract) than the EUR 50 (typically with a 12 or 24 month contract) or more that the traditional pay TV industry charged, Wintermute created a ‘no-brainer’ decision for tens of millions of younger consumers around the world. Basing the experience around mobile and making it impossible to share subscriptions through ‘Totally Secure Streaming’ technology or find content without ‘Total Social Search’ (which only allows you to watch if you’ve been recommended and only being recommended if you’ve done likewise) only made Wintermute more cultish and compelling.

Top-to-bottom data redefined the industry’s value chain… backed by billion dollar parents

Although giving early equity to A-list content creators certainly helped build momentum, Wintermute’s unreal economics are really a combination of Digital Economy technologies and business concepts.

Making a virtue of short content windows enables the company to manage the cost of essential 3rd party content. Artificial Intelligence enabled Wintermute to assess the quality of talent and creative concepts from the structure of a pitch and find great behind the scenes and on screen talent from their own job network with radically greater success than the industry they replaced.

Combining funding with talent in a single platform created an instant and enviable ecosystem of virtual independent producers. And with billions of dollars of backing from the Valley’s largest funders it was able to ride out years of heavy spending while it built global scale, leaving Wintermute free to compete with the incumbents in an unequal competition between a global over-the-top player and local oligarchies.

Starting and staying lean is an essential strategic advantage

Despite its rapid growth, Wintermute remains a very small organisation, assembled from an ecosystem of seven-person, multi-disciplinary ‘icebreaker’ teams, each of which owns one of the business’ small set of outcomes. Each team operates semi-autonomously, drawing in external experts where they’re needed, resulting in a business that does the job of tens of thousands with a few hundred full time employees. By building its business around talent, rather than vice versa, Wintermute believes that it remains perfectly placed to lead further disruption in the trillion-dollar global media industry.

Impacts of a handset leasing model on mobile telcos

Following yesterday's post, here's some related thinking on the impacts on operators of handset leasing. Handset sales represent around 25% of operator revenues in a typical European market, but generate only around 5% of margin. It may therefore be the case that the scenario described would lead operators to a more profitable structural model than exists today. Oil companies are consistently and acceptably profitable, despite being (literally in some cases) the ‘dumb pipe’ that operators are so desperate to avoid becoming. One of the reasons for the oil majors sustained profitability is clear focus on their role in the value chain – to supply the fuel that enables transportation, relying primarily on location, then brand and finally product innovation to compete. BP or Shell do not need to subsidise the purchase of a car in order to drive consumption of fuel because consumers are ‘hooked’ on it (it gets them from place to place) and there are many credible car manufacturers an

Value drivers for telecoms retail

I've been doing a really large number of driver trees recently - we've taken to using them on every project to get really into the guts of value creation for businesses and thus decide where to focus initiative development (How To Win, if you're keeping score). Anyhow, I had to pause for thought recently to work out how to represent the subscription aspect of telecoms retail for a client. Since it took me a minute, I thought I'd share... its lack of elegance suggests that its not quite right, although it was enough to demonstrate that there was a certain lack of coverage in the initiatives that my client was pursuing and thus spark a debate. Enjoy.

Chief Strategy Officers II - Career Development

Here's a follow up to my earlier post on the starting point of Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) careers in the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 companies - a visualisation of two steps in their careers: their first employer or job and the job they had before they got their current position. Lots of work went into this... so any insights that you glean from the visualisation would be great to hear about :). The CSO is a crucial strategic role on the executive (!) and the owner of the tone and philosophy of decision making across much of the business, knowingly or unknowingly. Scrutiny of their experience in defining the process and language of strategic management is therefore appropriate not just amongst their executive peers, but in my view amongst shareholders. The days when being very smart and able to analyse large amounts of data were enough to be a CSO are basically gone... has the profession moved on enough to cope?

Versatile Amphibian

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