iHeartMedia's "Guaranteed Human" Pivot Will Make You Rich
6/8/202624 min
iHeartMedia rolled out a new tagline: Guaranteed Human.
Not better content. Not award-winning journalism. Not bigger distribution. Guaranteed Human. Two words. That is what one of the largest media companies on the planet decided to lead with.
They have the research to back it up. 90% of listeners want their media made by humans. This includes people who use AI themselves every single day. Consumer preference for AI-generated content dropped from 60% in 2023 to 26% today. In less than two years, the floor fell out.
The AI content flood did not make creators obsolete. It created a valuable scarcity. It created an attention void. Every brand, every media company, every platform flooded the zone with AI content. Faster. Cheaper. More of it. And the consumer said no thank you. They said it loudly with their attention and their wallets.
When everything looks the same and hits the same predictable beats, the human who shows up with a real point of view becomes the only thing worth paying for.
The new scarcity is not production quality. It is not your distribution. It is not even your audience size. The new scarcity is a real human with a real point of view who has earned the right to hold it.
If you are blasting out AI slop, you are competing in a race to the bottom. If you are leaning into your specific, nuanced, contrarian humanity, you are building a moat that compounds over time.
In this episode I break down the economics behind this shift, the 2022-2026 timeline that got us here, and the three-move playbook to price yourself like the scarcity you are:
- Name your point of view
- Put it on record consistently
- Price it like the scarcity that it is
You have a voice that no LLM can replicate because it was built from your life, not some mashup of data points. Name that point of view. Put it on record. Price it accordingly.
I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsRyan Hanley· Host0:00
iHeartMedia, one of the largest media companies on the planet, just rolled out a new tagline: Guaranteed Human. Not better content, not more authentic, not award-winning journalism or anything like that. Guaranteed Human. And according to iHeart, they have research to back it up. 90% of listeners, 90%, including people who use AI themselves every single day, said they want their media made by humans. This is the countertrend that no one's talking about, and here's the numbers that should stop every content creator, every founder, every person building a personal or business brand cold. The consumer preference for AI-generated content dropped 60% in 2023. 60% to just 26% overall. That means only one quarter, one out of every four people appreciate 100% AI-generated content. That means in less than two years, the AI content gold rush, it didn't create this massive glut of abundant content. It created a valuable scarcity. It created an attention void. It created scarcity at a level that we as creators can take advantage of in a way we haven't been in decades. Now, you might