Evan Shapiro: Media’s “inbreeding” crisis is stunting its future

Keynoting the opening IBC2026 event, the Media Cartographer said, “The sector is now led by executives drawn overwhelmingly from the same socio‑economic backgrounds, the same universities, and the same cultural experiences, creating a leadership class unable to adapt to rapid technological and audience change. 

Overall, 59% of senior leaders in major media and tech companies come from just 34 universities worldwide, institutions attended by only 1.1% of the population in Europe and the US. Graduates of these schools are 50 times more likely to reach the C‑suite than the average university student. “95% of the people running the most powerful companies in the history of the world come from upper‑middle‑class or dynastic wealth.” 

This concentration of privilege, Shapiro argued, has produced executives insulated from the realities of their own audiences. “No one’s in the room who grew up too poor to afford Netflix and HBO,” he said. That absence, he added, directly contributes to repeated strategic missteps: abandoning advertising during the streaming boom, chasing identical business models, and now leaning on AI‑driven layoffs as a default response to financial pressure. 

Shapiro compared the current state of media leadership to the decline of the Habsburg dynasty that collapsed after centuries of intra-marriage. 

“Culturally impotent. Strategically daft. Absent anyone who will tell them bad news.” The result, he said, is an industry that “can’t get ahead of its own curve,” resisting change until the last possible moment and then rushing en masse toward the same “shiny object”. 

The consequences are visible across the sector. Pay disparity between executives and workers has widened dramatically, with the average media CEO earning 652 times more than the median employee, and more than 1,100 times the pay of film and TV crew. Meanwhile, companies have cut investment in staff development by 67% over six years – a trend Shapiro called “illogical” in a sector dependent on creative and technical expertise. 

He was particularly critical of the rush to replace workers with AI. “Intelligence is more valuable than artificial intelligence,” he said. “Actual humans to run your AI are going to be vital, or your company will be destroyed as a result of it.”  

Shapiro’s prescription to invest in talent. “It’s just so obvious,” he said. “Stop taking money out of talent development.” Companies must diversify not only demographically but socio‑economically, he argued. “If you do not have people around you who didn’t grow up in great wealth, you’re not going to have a room full of people who know how to tell you ‘no’.” 

He urged companies to hire creators directly. “Put a creator mindset in your company,” he said. “Someone making five episodes a week probably knows how to solve problems better than someone sitting in an air‑conditioned room looking at spreadsheets.” 

Ultimately, Shapiro argued, “If you want to avoid the media groupthink epidemic then you need to surround yourself with people who come from lived experiences.” 

He was not alone in urging media companies to draw from a more diverse talent pool. 

“Groups that contain only ‘people like us’ lose their edge, while diverse groups gain a huge, often decisive advantage,” said Lisa Opie, Chair, ScreenSkills and Chair, Ravensbourne University. “In an era where users control their entire suite of services from a remote or a console, we have to put them at the centre of everything, including decision‑making. So while it’s tempting to focus only on mid‑career progression and not entry‑level, we cannot afford to ignore young people. 

If investment in talent is not addressed, Opie warned, “we could lose the expertise we’ve built and that leads to unemployment, declining quality and falling productivity.  

“Get it right, and we can build a more inclusive, more talented and more secure workforce that drives growth, opportunity and investment in every community.” 

Opening the event, Carrie Wootten, Co-Founder, Media Talent Manifesto, said, “The pace of change across our industry is only accelerating, but the way we attract and develop talent hasn’t kept up. How do we prepare the workforce of the future? Is there an opportunity to ensure we genuinely have that diverse pipeline of talent that we still desperately need? The World Skills Café is a forum for all of those conversations.” 

Launched in 2025, World Skills Café is now expanding into a multi-channel global broadcast spanning news, sport, film, and culture, providing hands-on experience across the full media workflow. 

The event at IBC2026 was supported by sponsors including Amazon Web Services, Deluxe, DTG, IAMT, Platform Communications, and Vizrt.