Welcome back to In the Room. I’m Dylan Byers, with a final dispatch from the placid, idyllic, and largely WiFi-free San Juan Islands. In today’s issue, a curated grab bag of delights from across the media universe, featuring my inimitable colleagues Matt Belloni, John Ourand, Lauren Sherman, and Marion Maneker. Let’s get into it…

🎭 Ari vs. Casey: It’s been a rough month for Casey Wasserman. On August 1, the L.A. Olympics chair and founder of his namesake talent agency was the subject of a blistering Daily Mail exposé detailing his “serial” affairs over the past decade and change—news that apparently catalyzed the departure of star clients Billie Eilish and her brother/collaborator Finneas from Wasserman to WME, Ari Emanuel’s rival agency. But as Matt reported last night, Eilish had apparently been unhappy at Wasserman for a while, and while the tawdry revelations might have been the last straw, “the Wasserman relationship was almost certainly ending anyways.”

In any case, the drama has refocused a spotlight on the long-simmering “only-in-Hollywood frenemy feud” between Ari and Casey. Over the past year, Matt reports, Emanuel and Endeavor president Mark Shapiro have been hearing whispers that Wasserman had been bad-mouthing WME and its various businesses to his friends in the rarefied investor/billionaire circles in which he travels. At one point, “Ari went full Ari Gold” on Casey, berating him over the phone and “threatening to come after him if the trash-talking persisted.” A détente was reached during the Paris Olympics after Emanuel, Shapiro, and Wasserman sat down and hashed things out. Then came the Daily Mail story.

Matt waved away the possibility that Ari had a hand in its publication, however: “Ari has better things to do than coordinate a tabloid hit piece on a business partner.” After all, the two men are slated to work together during the ’28 L.A. Olympics—Endeavor’s On Location unit secured contracts to host events and offer special ticket/experience packages, and there’s enormous pressure on LA28 and Wasserman to turn a profit, as the 1984 Olympics did for L.A.

It’s still unclear whether there will be more fallout for Wasserman, and if clients like Chappell Roan, Kendrick Lamar, or Megan Rapinoe might follow Eilish out the door. As Matt notes, “Rival sharks are certainly circling.” (Read the full story here.)

🎧 How Kamala is reframing the race: If you haven’t yet, I implore you to stream the latest brilliant episode of my partner John Heilemann’s Impolitic podcast, featuring an incisive conversation with veteran Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, focused on the ways in which Kamala Harris has completely reframed the ’24 race and electoral map. Sosnik, of course, was once the political director for the Clinton White House, and one of the guiding hands behind Bill’s 1996 landslide reelection. Now, with the ’24 race suddenly flipped on its head, he offers a handful of insider observations on the tug-of-war to define Kamala’s public image—and the wisdom of her efforts to focus on the future. (Listen here, here, and here.)

💫 A quick update on the future of Condé Nast’s… sales department: As my partner Lauren Sherman noted this week, “chief revenue officer Pam Drucker Mann really did leave in early August, and C.E.O. Roger Lynch … told the sales team he’ll replace her by the end of the third quarter.” And lo! Today, the company announced that it had hired Elizabeth Herbst-Brady as its new chief revenue officer. Herbst-Brady, who has held senior jobs at places like Snap and Yahoo, will now oversee the company’s sales and consumer marketing teams. Notably, the corporate memo mentioned that she “will bring these teams together for the first time in the company’s global operating structure”—which, of course, sounds like a round of painful cuts are forthcoming.

And a little detour into the art world, where Marion Maneker has identified a few promising signs for the market…

🖼️ Leading indicators: In his Tuesday dispatch of Wall Power, our sage art market correspondent uncovered a few clues that seem to indicate the art market, in fact, is not mired in a lasting slump—despite the year’s disappointing first-half auction total of $2.87 billion. As Marion wrote, “The press routine measures the market’s health by auction volume, which hardly captures the nuanced dynamics at play.”

With a hand from the analytics firm ARTDAI, Marion homed in on two more salient metrics: the average prices of lots sold, which “help us see if rising volume comes from a growth in top lots or more lots selling for lower prices,” and sell-through rates, or how many lots an auction house actually sells against the inventory available.

When ARTDAI charted the correlation between these metrics going back over a decade, it revealed some fascinating patterns. “Interestingly, we found that the convergence of a rising sell-through rate, with an increasing percentage of lots sold above estimate, portended strong sales seasons,” Marion wrote, noting that the first half of an otherwise-dreary 2024 saw a “pronounced rise in both the percentage sold above low estimate and the sell-through rate.”

Whether this presages a strong fall season “will depend more upon the consignments than any other factor, but these numbers are encouraging. Remember, when the auction houses pitch clients on whether to consign, they’re using some of this same data to make their case. It’s not foolproof: There was a rise in 1H22 that was followed by falling auction totals. And, of course, this is a small sample size. Nevertheless, we’re beginning to see encouraging patterns.” (Read the full story here.)

🎧 Lastly, in Matt and John Ourand’s rollicking two-part conversation on The Powers That Be, they broke down the latest inflection point in the demise of linear television—or, as Matt likes to say, the “Cable-pocalypse”—and how these changes are playing out across the entertainment landscape, from Hollywood to the sports realm. Click here to listen to part one of their conversation, and click here for part two.

And speaking of Ourand…

Another insidious sign can actually be detected under the hood of Comcast’s extraordinary successful Olympics coverage. NBC, itself, accounted for nearly 118 billion viewing minutes throughout the event’s 19 days, according to a good source of mine. That’s a 46 percent increase from the Tokyo Games, in 2021, and simply an insane number given the media environment in 2024. Peacock also had a great run, streaming 23.5 billion minutes of the Paris Olympics, up 40 percent from all the prior Summer and Winter Olympics combined. Notably, however, Comcast’s cable networks could not keep that pace. In fact, total minutes viewed on the cable networks this year fell short of even the Tokyo Games: NBCU’s cable channels logged close to 31 billion minutes of viewing this year, down from 33 billion minutes during the summer of 2021.

These days, it’s apparent that cable assets find themselves squeezed into a murky middle between streaming and broadcast. It’s not just about cord-cutting, which of course is decimating all the pay TV channels. Mediacos have changed the way they view sports on broadcast TV. Increasingly, sporting events that would have never made it to broadcast television just a couple of years ago are anchoring their primetime schedules. NBC has now committed to devote two nights of programming to NBA regular season games—a decision that would have been unfathomable a decade ago. CBS will air a Parma-AC Milan match on its broadcast channel—a first for Serie A—next weekend. Fox will have Friday night college football and college basketball this season. ABC carries as many NFL games as it can. In short, the broadcasters are increasingly using sports rights to manage their costs, possibly cannibalizing cable assets in the process.

There’s a reason for this new strategy: Broadcast is the one place that can draw a mass audience. NBC Sports president Rick Cordella saw this play out first-hand earlier this month. In the middle of the Olympics, he flew back to work out of his network’s Stamford, Connecticut, command center. Just before the primetime show kicked off, he would drive home and gather around the television to watch with his family. “Growing up, I’d watch things with my family because we only had one TV in the house,” Cordella said. “Now, people are scattered. But my teenage daughters, my son—we’re all watching the Olympics together. It was sort of heartwarming to see that you have become a throwback to yesterday where people gather around the TV.”

Cordella, who previously served as Peacock’s chief revenue officer, echoed what I’ve heard from other sports media executives about how broadcast has become the best place to watch sporting events, making it one of the last vestiges of monoculture. “If you want to have the highest rating possible, broadcast is where you want to be,” he told me. “Now augmenting that with streaming will just elevate it even further.” CBS Sports president David Berson made a similar point yesterday. “We think that the broad reach of broadcast TV with our streaming strategy is a phenomenal combination, and it’s been super successful for us,” he said.

As is so often the case these days, this narrowing view is also a reflection of the challenges that David Zaslav and his WBD currently face. WBD, of course, doesn’t have a broadcast asset and is trying to spread a hodgepodge of sports assets across legacy cable assets that, despite the write-down, still make up its profit center.