What's Piqued Pinckney? #10

SO ABOUT CORNELL…

As a Cornell alum and an advisory board member for the School of Communication, I'm angry and disgusted by nearly everything about the Jane Doe case. I'm speaking for myself here, not the university.

A case like this should never have needed a governor to step in. There is a lot of blame to go around, and I hope everyone who failed her gets the reckoning they deserve: the men and the people and institutions that handled her case.

Institutions fail the way brands do. They protect their reputation faster than they protect people, and then they wonder why trust is gone. For anyone running an organization, how you respond when something goes wrong is your brand. An independent review you invite will always look better than one you're forced into.

Jane Doe deserves answers, and the next student deserves a school that provides them without being pushed.

FREE SPEECH FOR ME NOT FOR THEE

Do you know what October 9th is? Of course not because every platform that fights for every ad dollar just told a film distributor its money was a problem, and the film is about the wealthiest man alive.

Musk is a nearly four-hour documentary from Alex Gibney, the director behind Going Clear, opening in theaters October 9. In late September, YouTube, TikTok, Meta (Instagram and Facebook), and X all declined to run paid ads for the trailer, and the first three pointed to "political content." Then came the walk-backs. Meta called its rejection an error and restored the ads, and YouTube cleared the trailer. TikTok, which bans political advertising outright, and X have not moved.

My read: "error" is carrying a lot of weight in that Meta statement. These companies take money from nearly everyone, including advertisers selling things far more political than a documentary profile, and this one tripped the wire only until the press noticed. I can't prove why. The pattern looks like caution around a man who has called the film a "hit piece" and threatened to sue over it.

X is the cleanest irony. The platform owned by the self-declared champion of free speech won't take ads for the film or for any other movie on its upcoming calendar.

For anyone building a brand, the lesson is practical. A studio-backed film with HBO behind it could not count on buying reach for four weeks of promotion. If they can lose access to paid distribution overnight, so can you. The audiences you rent can be switched off by a policy reading you never saw coming. The ones you own, like an email list, cannot.

TEENS ARE PUFF, PUFF, PASSING ON WEED

Every argument against marijuana legalization eventually arrives at the children, and the data keeps refusing to cooperate. A new report from the Marijuana Policy Project found teen cannabis use has fallen in every state that legalized it for adults. MPP is an advocacy group, but its analysis is built on government survey data. Colorado high school use is down 56 percent, Arizona nearly 60 percent, Michigan almost 50 percent, and Nevada nearly 30 percent. New CDC data shows teen cannabis use has fallen 44 percent nationally since 2011.

That national number matters, because it means legalization didn't cause the drop. It just failed to cause the surge opponents promised. Alcohol follows the same curve: the latest federal survey shows fewer 12 to 17 year olds reporting past-month drinking and binge drinking.

The usual explanations are healthier lifestyles, better drug education, and cost. I think the bigger driver is screens. When I was growing up, everything happened in person. The share of high school seniors who met up with friends almost daily fell from 44 percent in 2010 to 32 percent in 2022. The malls and other third spaces where we used to hang out have mostly disappeared, and teenagers moved their social lives into group chats and games.

The research backs the mechanism, with a caveat. One review of the broad decline in teen risk behavior found the factor most strongly tied to it was less unstructured, in-person time with friends. A University at Buffalo researcher told ABC News the same thing: less unsupervised free time to get together, which is where substance use typically happens. The caveat is that individual heavy social media users still tend to drink more than their peers, so the story is about where teenagers gather rather than which app they use. Kids on their phones aren't smoking or drinking, because no one is handing them anything in a group chat.

For brands, the practical read is that the occasion moved. Alcohol and cannabis companies are looking at a smaller pool of future customers, and everyone else should ask where their audience's third space lives now. There is also a cost to flag. The U.S. Surgeon General's advisory reported that in-person time with friends dropped from about 30 hours a month in 2003 to 10 in 2020. Fewer teens drinking is good news. A generation that rarely hangs out in person is something to watch.

CREATORS GONNA CREATE

The future of marketing belongs to creators, and the money is already moving. I recently had the chance to talk about the creator economy at Capitalize VC's annual general meeting, and the case is easy to make with numbers. Goldman Sachs projects the creator economy will roughly double from about $250 billion in 2023 to about $480 billion by 2027. IAB data shows creator ad spend more than doubled from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024.

Four forces explain why creators have become marketers' preferred channel.

The first is referrals. People buy what people they know recommend, and a creator's recommendation lands like a friend's. In the BBB National Programs 2025 Influencer Trust Index, 58 percent of consumers said they had made a purchase based on an influencer endorsement.

The second is that companies have a trust problem. The same research found only 38 percent of consumers likely to trust recommendations that come directly from a brand, compared with 61 percent who trust influencers, friends, and family. In a Northwestern Medill survey of marketing professionals, 44 percent ranked creators as the most trusted source, ahead of social media ads at 34 percent and celebrities at 22 percent.

The third and fourth are engagement and conversion. The same marketers rated conversion and loyalty as the places creator recommendations most influence the business, at 55 percent each. There is a catch worth knowing. The survey found the benefits brands actually report skew toward sentiment and awareness, with sales trailing at 49 percent, and that measurement remains the biggest constraint. Creators clearly drive results, but most brands can't yet prove how much.

One more caution about the headline number. The $480 billion is the size of the whole market, and Goldman estimates only about 4 percent of creators earn more than $100,000 a year. The opportunity for brands and investors sits in the large middle tier, where creators have loyal audiences but haven't been priced like celebrities.

For anyone budgeting right now, trust is the scarce asset in marketing, and creators are where it lives. Pick fewer creators and keep them longer, because trust compounds like any other relationship. Brands that treat it as a media buy will keep wondering why it doesn't convert.

HOW CHRIS KIMBALL BUILT A FOOD EMPIRE TWICE

Of everything I watch, read, and listen to about food, the smartest business belongs to Christopher Kimball. I love all things food. I cook, I visit a supermarket wherever I travel, and I consume everything from Top Chef to Chef's Table, so I have opinions, and Milk Street is the platform I would study if I were building one from scratch.

Kimball is 75, a proud Vermonter who loves the Grateful Dead and Old Fashioned cocktails, who left America's Test Kitchen in 2015 after a contract dispute. He started Milk Street a year later, and it has grown into a multimedia operation that just turned ten. It now includes a weekly half-hour show on public television, a magazine, a cooking school, a weekly hour-long public radio program, a video podcast site, and live cooking events. His Substack has more than 400,000 subscribers. There is also a store with over 800 kitchen items, and culinary tours for people who want to cook where the recipes come from.

What makes it work is that every format has a different job. Public television and radio bring in new audiences through distribution Kimball doesn't have to build himself. The magazine, school, tours, and store turn fans into customers. The Substack and membership give him a direct relationship with his audience that no broadcaster or algorithm can switch off. Underneath all of it sits one promise, "Change the Way You Cook," delivered by one recognizable voice, so a viewer who finds him on PBS can follow him into any other format without having to relearn who he is.

If you're a founder or creator, that's the lesson worth stealing. Most people pick one channel and wait for it to pay off. Kimball treats each format as a layer that feeds the next one, and he rebuilt the whole thing starting in his mid-sixties. Start with one voice and one promise, and add a new format only when it has a distinct job.

The trade-off is that a personality-led network is only as durable as the personality. Everything here runs through one face, which is why succession is the question every founder-led brand eventually has to answer.

See you next month!

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