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For most brands, TV advertising has long operated as an opaque, high-stakes gamble—an expensive channel dominated by middlemen, limited measurement, and a reliance on blunt audience estimates. That's the system Philip Inghelbrecht set out to disrupt when he co-founded Tatari. Tatari is attempting to rebuild the TV ad stack from the ground up—bringing automation, outcome-based measurement, and software-driven media buying to a medium that has historically lagged far behind digital.

In a recent interview, Philip explained how Tatari is turning TV into a performance channel that more closely resembles digital advertising, why the company has rejected the programmatic-heavy approach in favor of direct publisher integrations, and how falling cost barriers are opening the door for a new class of advertisers to enter the TV market.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

The rise of "sleep podcasts" has quietly reshaped a corner of the audio industry, turning bedtime into a high-engagement listening moment. Few creators have benefited more from that shift than Kathryn Nicolai, whose Nothing Much Happens podcast has grown from a scrappy 2018 experiment into what she describes as the largest sleep podcast in the world. Drawing on decades of experience as a yoga and meditation teacher, Katyrhn built a format that flips traditional storytelling on its head—stories designed not to captivate listeners through to the end, but to gently lull them to sleep. Along the way, she's expanded the concept into books, subscriptions, and a growing ecosystem of products built around relaxation and habit formation.

In a recent interview, Kathryn explained how she accidentally helped define an entirely new podcast genre, why word-of-mouth drove her early growth, and how she's built a monetization strategy around an audience that's literally falling asleep.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

Axios Local began as an experiment in translating a national media brand's playbook into the fragmented world of city-level journalism. After acquiring the Charlotte Agenda, Axios used it as a template to launch a network of local newsletters built around a simple idea: hire well-connected reporters, deliver concise, high-signal updates directly to readers' inboxes, and monetize through a mix of local and national advertising. The model leaned heavily on email as a distribution channel and "smart brevity" as a product philosophy, allowing Axios to build strong brand awareness in early markets while sidestepping many of the traffic and platform challenges that have plagued traditional local news.

In a recent interview, executive editor Holly Moore explains how Axios is using AI to shrink newsroom staffing requirements in smaller markets, why the company is experimenting with regional coverage models that stretch a single reporter across multiple geographies, and how its long-term ambition could see it expand into hundreds of cities.