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This week’s session featured Alessandro De Zanche, a senior adviser with more than two decades of experience across global publishing, platforms, and telecommunications. He has held senior and advisory roles at organisations including News Corp, Yahoo, and Telefónica, working through the shift from owned-channel media to platform-driven distribution and advertising systems.What happened this year, factually

He was joined by Davi Alves, former Group CIO of Sonae, whose career spans board-level governance, incentive design, and operating complex retail and platform businesses at scale.

The session examined why media organisations struggle to adapt even when leadership understands what has changed, and the real opportunity for senior professionals ( advisors, board or fractional) to add value here

Public discussion about media’s troubles often starts in the wrong place. The prevailing explanation is technological disruption: platforms, algorithms, artificial intelligence. Alessandro De Zanche rejected that framing.

Content, he argued, has not lost value. What has changed is how audiences reach it, and how institutions organise themselves around that reality. Media companies did not fail because platforms arrived. They failed because they continued to behave as if advertisers were the primary customer, and audiences a means to an end.

That inversion shaped incentives long before social media or search engines dominated distribution. Editorial decisions optimised for volume. Product teams chased reach. Commercial teams prioritised fill rates and short-term yield. The organisation functioned, but against its own long-term interests.

When distribution shifted outward, many institutions responded by defending old models rather than redesigning themselves around audience relationships. The result was not collapse, but cumulative friction.

Media today looks fragmented: newsletters, podcasts, vertical publications, creators, niche video formats. This is often presented as a problem in itself.

De Zanche offered a narrower diagnosis. Fragmentation is not the risk. Assumptions are.

Media organisations repeatedly assume that audiences behave uniformly, that formats scale predictably, and that what works in one context can be replicated in another. These assumptions lead to templates and blueprints that ignore the reality that different audiences tolerate different trade-offs.

Audience-centricity, in this framing, is not a slogan. It is operational discipline. It requires constant feedback loops, hypothesis testing, and a willingness to abandon generalised strategies.

Institutions that treat audiences as interchangeable eventually lose relevance. Not suddenly, but steadily.

One of the clearest signals of this shift is the rise of independent creators building durable media businesses. This is not a cultural trend; it is an economic one.

Three mechanics explain why.

First, creators own the relationship. Subscription platforms such as Substack and Patreon enable direct monetisation of attention. Control over distribution and billing allows creators to convert trust into recurring revenue without relying on advertising intermediaries.

Second, creators diversify monetisation. Subscriptions are often combined with events, merchandise, sponsorships, and commerce. This reduces dependence on any single revenue stream and allows experimentation.

Third, production and distribution costs are low. Newsletters, audio, and short-form video require limited capital compared with traditional media operations. Scale is achieved through relevance rather than infrastructure.

The numbers are no longer marginal. Substack reports millions of paid subscriptions across its platform. Patreon supports tens of millions of memberships globally. Income is unevenly distributed, but the model itself has moved beyond experiment.

The implication is not that creators replace institutions. It is that the economics of media now favour direct relationships over mediated reach.

The same mechanics explain why non-media companies increasingly behave like media organisations.

Retailers, consumer brands, sports teams, and artists control moments of attention and rich first-party data. When they treat attention as an asset rather than a by-product, they unlock new revenue streams and deepen loyalty.

Retail media networks are the most visible example. Amazon, Walmart, and others monetise shopping surfaces by selling advertising tied to intent. Industry forecasts show retail media growing faster than most other digital advertising segments.

But De Zanche and Alves were cautious.

Monetisation is easy at first. Sustainability is structural.

When every surface becomes an ad slot, the experience degrades. Customers notice clutter and irrelevance. Brands lose signal. Trust erodes.

Alves drew a parallel with retail assortments. Customers do not want infinite choice. They want relevance. Bombarding users with options signals that the platform is optimising for itself rather than for them.

Successful commerce-media models resemble trusted editorial environments. They limit inventory, prioritise context, and favour long-term partnerships over short-term yield.

The session’s most concrete insights concerned incentives.

De Zanche described organisations where leadership understands the need for change but execution stalls. Alves explained why.

Strategy is articulated at the top. Incentives are experienced locally. People optimise for what is measured, rewarded, and visible in the short term. Quarterly targets, siloed KPIs, and narrow bonus structures encourage local success at the expense of system coherence.

Even non-financial incentives matter. Status, recognition, and internal prestige often reward behaviours that look productive in isolation while undermining long-term goals.

This is why transformation fails quietly. Not because of resistance, but because governance structures contradict strategy.

The pattern is not unique to media. It appears in commerce platforms, marketplaces, and large retailers attempting digital transformation. Institutions drift because incentives pull in different directions.What kept repeating all year

Artificial intelligence entered the discussion late, deliberately.

De Zanche framed AI as a pressure multiplier. It accelerates outcomes but does not determine direction. Organisations without clarity will produce more content, faster, that looks increasingly similar to everything else.

Public scepticism reinforces this risk. Surveys show that audiences are wary of AI-generated news, particularly for sensitive topics. Trust, already fragile, cannot be delegated to technology.

Across thousands of AI pilots De Zanche has observed, failures rarely stem from the technology itself. They result from weak planning, unclear ownership, and misaligned incentives.

AI rewards organisations that already know who they serve and why. It exposes those that do not.responsibility, trade-offs, and transition.

Trust emerged repeatedly, not as a value statement but as a constraint.

Trust limits how aggressively an organisation can monetise attention without narrowing future options. Growth tactics that sacrifice trust may improve short-term metrics, but they reduce long-term resilience.

In media, trust underpins subscriptions and repeat consumption. In commerce, it underpins conversion and loyalty. Once eroded, it is expensive to rebuild.

Both speakers treated trust as infrastructure: invisible when it works, decisive when it fails.What we are doing about it

And yes, more structured ways to invest. In people. In ideas. In companies. In ways that align with how senior professionals actually want to spend their time and energy.

In the end it It’s about acknowledging that a lot of experienced people are standing between chapters, and most ecosystems don’t know what to do with them.

Several patterns discussed in the session are visible in practice.

The New York Times’ shift toward a bundled subscription model, including the acquisition of The Athletic, illustrates how incentives change when recurring revenue becomes central. Editorial, product, and commercial teams align around retention and lifetime value rather than pure reach.

Independent creator platforms show the opposite dynamic: small organisations built from the outset around direct relationships, experimenting rapidly without legacy incentive structures.

Retailers investing in experiential spaces and content illustrate how commerce firms attempt to deepen relationships beyond transactions. These efforts succeed when governance protects the experience and fail when monetisation overwhelms it.

The lesson is consistent: structure determines outcome.

For senior executives, the session suggests a simple but uncomfortable starting point.

Run an incentive audit before launching new products or technologies.

Choose a single audience cohort. Define one system-level metric tied to long-term value, such as retention. Align editorial, product, and commercial teams around that metric. Allocate part of compensation to its outcome. Run experiments for a fixed period and observe behavioural change.

If behaviour does not change, strategy alone will not save it.

At one point, De Zanche recalled preferring a small room of attentive listeners to a large, distracted audience.

That observation captures the session’s core argument.

Scale without alignment weakens institutions.
Growth without coherence erodes value.
Technology amplifies intent; it does not replace it.

Media is not dying. But many media organisations are organised for a world that no longer exists.

The question is not whether they can reach more people.
It is whether their incentives allow them to serve the right ones.

Both Alessandro De Zanche and Davi Alves are members of the EVOLVE Club.

That matters less as a credential and more as a signal of how the club operates.

EVOLVE is not built around speakers, stages, or events. It functions as a working environment where senior operators, board members, and advisers remain accessible over time. Conversations like this one do not end with the session. They continue privately, in smaller settings, and often around live strategic questions.

If you are a CEO navigating transformation, or a senior leader stepping into board or advisory responsibilities, access to people who have operated inside these systems — and understand where incentives, governance, and execution fail — is often more valuable than frameworks or reports.

That is the role the club plays.

Curated. Personable. Global.
That is EVOLVE

If you’d like to learn more how to partner with us during 2026 please email us at [email protected] or [email protected]

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