๐ฎ Happy Halloween! The Production Oracle is doing an actual reading this week ๐
Hey Reader,
Happy Halloween, witches. ๐ As I continue to figure out how to bring you my current baby, Sasquatch Media Grounds, alongside the woo in Sensible Woo (without turning into a human battery), it seemed only appropriate that The Production Oracle put her cards on the table.
Except today, I don't need Tarot cards. The inspo? Instagram is bringing back long-form video.
Some of you religiously pick through every link in this email each week, and some of you skim (I know who you are ๐), so you may have missed the earlier signs that Instagram wants out of your phone and into your living room on that big flat screen you've got hanging on the wall. Well... the plot just thickened.
Instagram announced this week that it's testing Features, horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, aimed at creators making podcasts, interviews, comedy, and other long-form content. Short Reels can point viewers toward the full piece, and Instagram has been steadily expanding its TV experience across the devices sitting in people's living rooms.
Raise your hand if you're IGTV old. ๐๐ปโโ๏ธ Instagram launched that particular attempt at long-form video eight years ago, before eventually abandoning it for the great clipping wars. So, in case you needed the knife of time twisted directly into your aging ego... that was eight fucking years ago. โ ๏ธ
๐ I predicted this in 2021. Sort of.
Back in 2021, I started saying long-form content was going to come back, and as with most energetic readings, my psychic timing was absolute shit. To be transparent, I never promise linear timing in any reading for any client. I have never had a reliable anchor in timing and a good reader will never promise you that something will happen on X date. That's just bad reading hygiene. So, I thought โsoon.โ It literally felt like "soon" and apparently I meant five years from now. ๐
I also didn't completely understand what I was seeing because I thought blogs and articles would come roaring back. And... kind of? But the bigger movement has been toward podcasts, books, audiobooks, long conversations, serialized storytelling, and now video designed to move from the tiny vertical screen in your hand onto the giant horizontal screen in your living room. This is another interesting thing with readers because our ability to communicate what something is will always be rooted in what we already know and the way that content has evolved in five years was not something I could ever accurately describe in 2021.
Which is why I love using Tarot as a metaphor for forecasting. A good reading isn't fortune-telling, it's pattern recognition. One card can mean twelve different things, but when several cards start pointing in the same direction, the picture gets clearer. Business works the same way. And right now, I have enough cards on the table that I'm willing to make another forecast.
๐ฎ Long-form is back, but short-form isn't going anywhere.
If you finally figured out Reels or TikTok, congratulations... your skills are not about to become obsolete. Instagram itself is testing the relationship I think we'll see everywhere: the clip becomes the invitation, the longer piece becomes the destination.
Short-form is spectacular at discovery. Give me thirty seconds from a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific, a tiny business experiment, a joke, a transformation, or a ridiculous moment, and I'll stop scrolling. But once I care? I want more.
That's where the longer conversation, documentary, interview, essay, audiobook, podcast, newsletter, or series earns its keep. And increasingly, that โmoreโ may be consumed from your couch, which changes the creative assignment because if you're asking someone to give you thirty minutes instead of thirty seconds, you'd better have a fucking story.
๐ Story is about to get expensive again.
Not exclusively in dollars... in skill. For years, internet marketing has been obsessed with compression: the perfect hook, shortest clip, fastest cut, headline, carousel, 140 characters, three-second attention span, and seventeen other ways to cram an idea through the tiniest possible opening.
Now AI can produce an enormous amount of competent copy, graphics, clips, hooks, and summaries for almost nothing, which means competent is becoming cheap.
What gets more valuable in response? Taste, judgment, voice, narrative, surprise, a delicious turn of phrase, an interview question nobody else thought to ask, the ability to hold someone's attention after the hook worked.
You know... the human shit. ๐พ I think we're going to see the same split we're already watching with visual art: mass-produced material gets cheaper and more plentiful while high-craft human work becomes easier to recognize as something different.
That doesn't mean every blog post needs to become The New Yorker. It means
- if writing is your medium, get really fucking good at writing
- if you're extraordinary in conversation, have the conversation
- if you tell incredible stories, tell stories
- if you make killer short-form video, keep making it.
You do not need to master every medium the internet invents. You need to become very good at the one that lets people experience how you think.
๐๏ธ The fight is moving into the living room.
For years, businesses have been asking how to get into someone's feed. Instagram is now asking how to get onto someone's television.
That's a completely different physical relationship with media because you're no longer only competing for a thumb hovering over a phone while somebody waits for coffee, you're potentially making something people deliberately sit down to watch.
And as creator media moves more comfortably onto televisions, I expect another ripple in the opposite direction: sometimes we're going to want the fucking screen OFF.
Podcasts and audio obviously aren't new, but I think excellent sound and narrative design become more valuable as people move between watching, listening, reading, and getting the hell away from screens. People don't need another reason to stare at glowing rectangles. They need something worth spending time with.
๐ฏ๏ธ And public social media keeps getting less social.
This one is my reading, not an Instagram announcement. I don't think I have to tell you that people are fucking exhausted.
For years, businesses have tried to engineer comments, likes, shares, saves, DMs, stitches, duets, follows, and seventeen other tiny actions because Engagementโข told us those behaviors were valuable. Meanwhile, some of the most interesting audience behavior I'm watching is much more human.
People want to obsess over Taylor Swift Easter eggs, scream about Rebecca Yarros cliffhangers, disappear into private spaces to discuss spicy books, show up to an "old music rave" because a creator they follow invited them, or follow a guy sailing across an ocean because for sixty seconds today they got to see a piece of the planet they may never see themselves.
They don't want to engage with content. They want to care about something. And content can absolutely be what brings people together... before taking them right back out into the real world.
A few issues ago I told you about Oliver Widger, who's currently attempting an around-the-world sailing adventure and posting short-form updates along the way. His audience is deeply invested because he's giving them access to something extraordinary, while those little pieces can become raw material for longer YouTube storytelling.
That's the ecosystem. Short doesn't have to fight long. One discovers the audience, the other deepens the relationship.
So if you're currently thinking, Well shit, I finally learned how to make Reels and now they're changing everything again, you can unclench. ๐ Your skill isn't disappearing. Your relationship with the format is changing.
๐งโโ๏ธ Which brings me back to Tarot.
Tarot 101: the cards aren't driving the fucking car. You are. The point of reading a pattern isn't to predict your inevitable fate, it's to notice what appears to be developing early enough that you can participate in what happens next.
So if I were doing a communications reading for your business this Halloween, I'd tell you to develop a recognizable point of view, stop regurgitating somebody else's thought leadership because it performed well for them, get better at story, figure out which medium lets people experience how you think, use AI for the fiddly shit when it helps without letting it flatten the parts people were supposed to connect with, and stop assuming you're supposed to execute all of this alone.
Because I have one more prediction...
๐ฌ The producer is the new coach.
HELLO THERE. ๐๐ป No, I did not engineer the entire creator economy solely to make my career choices look prescient.
But I did leave coaching because something about that industry's old sales machinery started smelling stale to me while media smelled fresh. I thought I'd end up blogging and vlogging again with sponsors paying the bills like it was the Cretaceous period. ๐ฆ Turns out the thing I was supposed to bring forward wasn't merely making my own content. It was producing.
Because a producer isn't just the person who makes your podcast or YouTube video. A producer takes the thing floating around in your head and helps drag it through blood, sweat, technology, deadlines, creative crises, terrible first drafts, and eleventy billion decisions until it exists in the real world... and then helps you do it again.
You can do a tremendous amount yourself, and AI will let you do even more, but eventually everybody needs somebody in their ear who can say, Don't step there. That's quicksand.
That's what I think becomes increasingly valuable in this next era of media: not more content, another template, or seventeen hooks guaranteed to stop the scroll, but human judgment around what is worth making in the first place.
So yes. That is what I got from watching Instagram announce what I'm lovingly calling IGTV 2.0.
This is the brain of a producer. Welcome to my brain.
๐ซ It's weird until it works! Happy Halloween, witches. ๐ง This is one of the final weeks I'll leave the end-of-year reading up if you wanted to get a read on patterns and energy through the start of 2027. Scroll to the "something for sale" box below... โคต๏ธ
๐ณ๏ธ SMG made its campaign debut.
I'm very proud to say that Sasquatch Media Grounds worked on its first political campaign for the 2026 midterms, producing messaging and media for Evan Jones, a Democratic candidate for Washington's 20th Legislative District, Position 2.
His campaign came to me with a question I LOVE: how can we create media that gives us better engagement data about what voters respond to?
There wasn't much time left on the clock before Washington voters received their ballots (we vote by mail here ๐ซ), so we kept the production focused: high-quality radio ads, vertical social videos his volunteer base could easily reshare, bespoke messaging and scripts, and on-camera coaching for Evan. No complicated content machine... just useful media designed to help the campaign communicate his platform clearly and learn from what happened next.
I'll have the full case study up on the SMG website after the election, because there is A LOT more I want to say about what we learned from the messaging, production, and distribution.
And there's more coming in 2027. I'm already working with regional organizers on workshops designed to help people make the leap from โoh shit, I need to post on social mediaโ to โohhhh shiiiitttt... I'm controlling my own narrative.โ
Because that's the transformation, whether you're running for public office, building a company, launching an online course, or trying to get people to give a shit about an idea: media isn't just promotion. It's your opportunity to tell your own story instead of leaving someone else to tell it for you.
๐ณ๏ธ๐ณ๏ธ๐ณ๏ธ๐ณ๏ธ๐ณ๏ธ๐ณ๏ธ
And since the midterms are November 3, here's my civic-service reminder: make a plan to vote. Washington voters can return ballots through an official drop box by 8pm on Election Day, and voters elsewhere should check their local election rules and deadlines.
๐ข For transparency, I support progressive candidates for public office, and political media is work I intend to do more of in 2027. It's not a perfect system, but disengaging from it doesn't improve it. I'm choosing to use my zone of genius to make a bigger difference, one recording session at a time.
Funny how the lessons I keep publishing about business also have an irritating habit of applying to the rest of our lives. ๐ If you've felt powerless under the current administration, my advice is:
- Get more local and help people closer to home.
- Use your skills and apply them to the greater good... you'd be amazed how much you're needed.
- Get off of social media... posting and reposting or getting angry on Reddit is not the same thing as actual participation.
- The best participation is casting your ballot on November 3rd.
๐๏ธ Gossip from the creator trenches...
๐ Stereotypes are on notice, officially
I love comedy and I love cleverness... so when the two meet in someone's brain, get translated with heart, and then delivered to perfection, I'm beyond delighted. This is what Charity Ekezie has done, and I feel like I could take SO many notes from how she uses humor to dismantle stereotypes about African people and culture. NGL, growing up half Asian in this world has left me with more than a few chips on my shoulder. Maybe all I've needed this whole time was humor.
โI love this so much โโ
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๐ฅ Little big leagues are here
I've been waiting for this news! Dhar Mann's creator compound is opening in Los Angeles, and this is a massive development in the professionalization of creator media. What I'm watching now is how smaller creators eventually benefit from what bigger creators build first. Someone has to clear the path ahead, and this is one giant leap out of the gatekept studio system. The quality markers are shooting up. When you see this happen, it's coming for you next.
โYou are the invited to the party โโ
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๐ฏโโ๏ธ Group projects
There's a creator trend where, instead of going it alone, you team up for increased growth and engagement. Honestly, I dig it. It's definitely not for everyone, and you'd need a strong agreement with your collaborators... but I've met a LOT of y'all who struggle to hit publish consistently for more than a few weeks or months at a time. I get it, it's not always easy. But as โtheyโ say... if you don't make time for marketing now, pretty soon you're going to have a lot of time for marketing.
โStrength in numbers โโ
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Something For Sale
No, I have not quit readings entirely... I just need to figure out how to do them without sacrificing myself to the astrology gods. ๐ My 90-minute Astrology + Tarot forecast for JulyโDecember 2026 is $47 and walks you through the big energetic shifts, what I'm watching, and how I'd work with the weather instead of screaming at the sky about it. If the second half of 2026 has had you asking WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?!... start here.โ
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Something For Free
You probably don't need another microphone, camera, or piece of software. You need to know what the hell you're building. My free white paper, You Don't Have a Production Problem, breaks down what creator studios sell, what creators actually need, and why those are frequently two very different things. There's also a self-audit to help you figure out whether you're ready to launch... or whether you need to build the infrastructure first. ๐ Download the white paper for FREE.
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