20250703 TT Intro Macro Angle v230
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Introduction
Theme Theory is about building direct audiences online—for people doing it in order to drive a business or endeavor by sharing something they know or have expertise in. In the creator world, this is often called “giving value.”
This kind of audience-building has emerged with the rise of digital, and it continues to develop and become more consequential. However, while among creators, “giving value” is near gospel, outside that group it’s often dismissed.
I think this kind of audience-building is more substantial than it’s often given credit for and has far more potential, possibility, and scope than many realize.
What Is Theme Theory?
The idea behind Theme Theory is that this kind of audience building is theme driven and that core of what makes it work is a particular form of theme unique to the context of “giving value” and the particular need of the form to have a premise that is able to hold attention consistently over the long-term while also driving business or organizational benefit.
This form of theme is not at all unfamiliar, yet I think it is unrecognized sitting right there at the heart of these efforts whether creators themselves realize it or not. So, first, it doesn’t contradict proven practitioners. Instead it provides an abstract case for what they are doing and why it works. The benefits of that is the abstract case can be used both by other creators to get the most out of going direct and by those who aren’t building audience yet but can to do so.
And the form is not complicated. Again, it’s not unfamiliar but it’s not immediately obvious I think that it is so fundamental in this form. I take time in the next section to define it and provide the chain of reasoning for it. It’s actually a fascinating walk through a process of understanding new creative forms so that we can best employ them that has repeated throughout history.
What Does It Give You?
But what fascinates me the most about this is that this particular form I think ends up having just a core set of highly desirable properties that enable forming audiences, engaging and developing them, and naturally tapping them to generate benefit for a business or endeavor.
Following is an overview list of these benefits and that I cover at the end of the paper. They are in more of their abstracted form here, but their promise is most of why I am writing about this and most of what I plan to write about going forward is the reasoning behind them and how to employ them: I think these benefits are highly desirable for all creators and potential creators. For example:
Prospectively identifying your maximally potent theme, given the value you offer
Prospectively estimating the scale and value of your potential audience
Enabling producibility of creative at scale even with minimal resources
Designing feeling and emotion strategically into the whole effort
Fostering passion, energy, and authenticity in creative product and production
Producing creative content that is legible to LLMs
Building software to support your audience’s pursuit of the theme
Using data and generative AI to deepen engagement
Offering transactional goods and services to treat the theme
Providing a strategic path for existing businesses—even large incumbents—to participate
Offering a strategic approach for creators to make full use of the form’s opportunities
The rest of the paper builds toward this. But the central idea is simple: it all flows from a particular form of theme that emerges once you begin with “value.”
As you can see, I think this kind of audience building can go beyond just digital media and just creators. For instance, it is inherent in the form itself to natively extend beyond just digital media and to data, software, AI, and goods and services all in the service of engaging the audience. And, incumbents who already have goods and services can conversely go direct to build audience based on leveraging value they already know as a basis for making interesting creative.
And therefore I think it’s much more broadly accessible to employ than realized – literally anyone with value to share has the opportunity to go direct. Yes, creators. But also solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, SMBs, large incumbents, public orgs, charities, not-for-profits, etc. Basically anyone that has value that they can share with an audience.
Origin Story: My Family’s Personal Styling Business
I don’t come from a background in classical narrativization or narrative creative forms. My interest in digital audience building began years ago while working with my family’s women’s apparel and styling boutique. We started experimenting with ways to stay connected between visits—creating online style books, wardrobe builders, and eventually posting creative content on Facebook. That wasn’t my skillset, but I became fascinated by the ability to go direct and build our own audience.
I came to this backwards. I didn’t know creative forms or classical narrativization were established domains with so much depth. I had only developed a rough understanding of theme, and a sense that story structure—distinct from storytelling—was somehow important. Eventually I came across these constructs and reached for them because they seemed to fit. Once I did, I realized they weren’t just helpful—they were exactly what this situation called for. I don’t have deep expertise in either, but I feel like I understand their shape and purpose clearly enough to use them. So that’s what I’ve tried to do: pick them up honestly, use them carefully, and follow where they lead.
Because styling has always been the mental model I return to when working through these ideas, I use it throughout as a running example.
What’s Next
In the next section, as mentioned earlier, I take time to define the form, which is not complicated, and provide the chain of reasoning that leads to it so you can scrutinize it to first principles. It’s actually a fascinating walk through a process of studying new creative forms so that we can best employ them that has repeated throughout history. It makes the case that we should look at this type of audience building as a creative form in its own right, for instance just like the novel, the short story, the feature film, or episodic and serial television, etc. And that the we should look to apply classical narrativization to it to get the most out of it – just as happened with prior forms. It turns out it applies perfectly with this particular case based in “giving value” for business or organizational effect.
After that I present a few ways to visualize what is actually happening with the creative publishes, the unique independent impact this form has on the audience, and how that audience impact ends up generating business or organization benefit.
Finally, I provide a full preview of all of the benefits that I argue follow from the form. This is the list above. This sets up the majority of what I plan to write about on this site going forward – why these benefits are native to the form and what implications they have and how to realize them.
Showing My Work: Chain of Logic in Seven Steps
This section walks through the reasoning behind the two central ideas in Theme Theory:
That a particular maximal form of theme emerges when you begin with value.
That this form, once identified, enables a rich set of capabilities for building and engaging audience.
The logic isn’t rocket science! But I think it’s worth laying out, because what it reveals is fascinating: it’s all surprisingly classical. Audience-building based on giving value turns out to follow many of the same deep narrative patterns we’ve seen before. I hope that becomes clear as we walk through the reasoning.
There’s a lot here that could each be explored at length: the emergence of a new phenomenon with strong underlying dynamics, enabled by digital technology; the identification of a new creative form; the use of classical narrativization to help sustain attention; and the structuring role of theme. Any one of these could be a deep dive.
But my main goal here is simply to show how each part of the reasoning builds on the last. That includes showing how this new form, far from being something unrecognizably new, fits squarely into what we already know about how attention works. In fact, I think it helps clarify much of the advice already circulating among creators. What’s missing, I think, is simply recognizing how premise-driven this form is — and once that’s clear, we can apply what we already know to even greater effect.
Insight One: A “Going Direct” Phenomenon
Framing the Section
Before describing the phenomenon in detail, I want to be clear that I’m zooming out here to look at it as a whole. The goal is to talk about it as a concept—not just from inside it, but by stepping outside and observing it.
We already know it’s real. We see people and organizations building audiences online by sharing value in exchange for attention, often to drive a business or endeavor. That’s the activity we’re observing. But in this section, I want to consider that activity in full—as a concept—and explore what it is, why it’s happening, and what it means at a macro level.
Yes, this is a “forest for the trees” moment. I want to make it clear when we’re taking that meta stance versus when we’re back in the details. This section is where I step back and intentionally frame the phenomenon conceptually.
Now, let’s define what the phenomenon is.
Defining the Phenomenon
The phenomenon I’m focused on is this: people and organizations trying to build audiences online by offering value, in order to drive a business or endeavor. That’s it. That’s the specific kind of audience-building Theme Theory is concerned with.
I use the word phenomenon deliberately. I’m not proposing this as an abstract idea—I’m pointing to something we already observe. It’s a real, ongoing pattern of behavior in the world.
Here’s how I’m defining it:
First, it’s grounded in “giving value.” That means trying to be interesting enough to earn attention by offering the audience something useful or meaningful. This assumption—that interesting creative is created by giving value—is foundational.
Second, I define the phenomenon in terms of its intended successful outcome: building an audience that can drive a business or endeavor. That doesn’t just mean attracting followers; it means building strategic social capital. We’ll see the main way that operates is by generating awareness, consideration, or preference for what you’re trying to drive.
Third, it’s not strictly defined by achieving success. What matters is intent. Even if someone doesn’t achieve that outcome, they’re still part of the phenomenon if they’re putting value out into the world in hopes of building an audience to support their endeavor. The key is that they’re trying.
Fourth, just to clarify what this isn’t: this is not advertising (which isn’t about building a direct audience), and it’s not pure entertainment based (which doesn’t rest on “giving value” in the way we’re using the term here).
Why be so specific? Because each of these points becomes load-bearing in the sections that follow. Don’t worry—it’s not rocket science—but when we arrive at the core idea that a particular form of theme emerges once you begin with “value,” these details will help make the logic as clear and simple as possible.
Why It’s Emergent
So, why is this happening now? Why did this emerge?
Because digital made it possible. You no longer need permission to publish. The cost of reaching others has dropped to near zero. And if your work earns attention, the platforms will show it to more people. That shift—the combination of permissionless publication and algorithmic discovery—made this kind of creative work newly viable. You could start small, earn interest over time, and grow from there.
What’s especially notable is that this environment created a path for creators whose primary draw wasn’t entertainment. When the key variable for discovery becomes whether your work is interesting—and when offering value is a reliable way to be interesting—people with something useful to share suddenly had a real shot. And that’s what we see: content rooted in what someone knows, what they can explain, what they can help with. It may be entertaining, but at its core, it’s valuable.
There’s motive, too. A direct audience can generate real returns—demand, trust, preference. All things that matter to a business or endeavor. When the means are accessible and the potential payoff is real, it’s no surprise this pattern took hold. The incentives made sense. People acted accordingly.
This is what I mean when I say the phenomenon is emergent. No one coordinated it. People simply responded to the environment. That’s why it’s worth calling out and examining—not because it was designed or imposed, but because it grew organically from the incentives and affordances of digital distribution.
Dynamics
If we step back and look at this creatively, we can ask: what’s animating the phenomenon? What’s driving it forward? We’re still drawing on the same means and motives described earlier, but now casting them in terms of dynamics.
Think of dynamics as the structural forces that sustain or accelerate a trend. In this case, the incentives are natural and strong. More people and organizations are being pulled into this kind of audience building—and the pool of those who could benefit is larger than most realize. These forces are what animate the phenomenon and suggest it’s still early, not tapped out.
The returns are real. If building a direct audience contributes to your business or endeavor more than it costs to do so, then the incentive is clear: participate. That economic logic pulls new participants in.
And the potential participant base is broad. As mentioned earlier, anyone with value to offer qualifies—creators, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, small and midsize businesses, large incumbents, nonprofits, public institutions, and more. That’s a deep pool of viable entrants, most of whom haven’t engaged fully yet.
There’s also a creative advantage: offering value gives people a more accessible path to making interesting content. Pure entertainment is difficult. Value-based creative offers another way to hold attention—one that’s often easier to execute. That dramatically increases the number of people and organizations who can plausibly make compelling work.
There’s no gatekeeper. Publishing is permissionless. Discovery is governed by attention. If your content is more interesting than the alternatives in someone’s feed, it gets shown. That’s it.
All of this gives the phenomenon staying power. These dynamics aren’t just fueling a trend—they’re establishing a durable path for creators and organizations alike. And by all indications, that path still has room to grow.
Why It Matters
The dynamics behind this phenomenon are still very much in play. The conditions that gave rise to it haven’t disappeared—if anything, they’ve strengthened. The tools are better, the platforms are larger, and the incentives are clearer.
At the same time, many of the people and organizations who could benefit from it still haven’t entered. The participant pool is largely untapped, and the creative tools keep improving. That’s part of what makes this worth studying: whatever the size of the phenomenon today, the conditions suggest it’s likely to keep growing—and likely to become even more important.
Next: The Form Emerging Within It
That’s the shape of the phenomenon. That’s the context. Now that we’ve taken a step back to define it, the next move is to zoom in and look at what’s happening inside it—the creative form that’s emerging as people and organizations try to succeed within it.
Insight Two: Treating It as a New Creative Form
In the last section, I made the case that there’s a substantial, observable phenomenon of building an audience by “giving value,” and defined it in terms of achieving the success those audience-building efforts are aimed at.
In this section, I make the case for taking seriously that what has emerged from practitioners working to achieve that success is, in fact, a new creative form. And if we treat it the way we would any other creative form, we can begin to look at it with structure and clarity.
The key insight: the organizing principle isn’t in the posts, but in the overall premise.
Assume a Creative Form
The biggest thing I want to contribute here is simply to look at what’s happening in this mode of audience building as its own legitimate creative form. Yes — on the same footing as the novel, dramatic plays, feature films, short stories, episodic TV, prestige serial TV, and so on.
In the introduction, I said I think many people still look at building an audience by “giving value” as something that isn’t serious media. That’s why I think this is worth calling out explicitly. By choosing to look at it as a legitimate creative form, we assume there are real patterns and structures at work — ones worth examining, ones that can yield insight into how to operate effectively within it. It also assumes that the form has the potential for excellence, which in this context would mean achieving the success criteria we laid out earlier for the phenomenon.
This form is animated by its purpose: to achieve that success. It’s about using creative work interesting enough to attract attention, build audience, and realize the intended outcomes. And in that sense, as we’ll see, we have at our disposal all the domains of understanding about how to make creative work that’s worth attention — the same as in other established creative forms like the ones I listed above.
One unique difference here is that the interest is built on the value you share or give. That difference matters, because as we’ll see in later sections, it shapes the success criteria — specifically, the ability to drive a business or endeavor through the audience that’s built. But it’s important to note that while this is a difference from prior creative forms, it doesn’t separate it from them entirely.
Next, we’ll look more closely at the creative structure of the form.
The Form is Built of Posts
The next step is to recognize how this form is actually employed in practice. While it might seem obvious, it’s worth pausing to name the first-principle elements — posts, algorithms, and organic reach — as we sketch out the shape of the form.
At the fundamental level, this form consists of posts. The nature of the work usually demands continual publishing — often at high frequency, commonly daily or even more. Posts are the atomic unit. They’re how the creative work is actually made and shared. I use the term “posts” deliberately because it spans so many forms: a post can be anything from a short caption to a long essay, from a single image to an hour-long video.
But whatever form it takes, it’s all posted — published and distributed through a platform or feed. And these posts are mediated and distributed by platform algorithms, which promote work based on demonstrated audience interest, as measured through views and other signals the platforms track. Because the algorithms favor novelty, recency, and frequency, creators often work at a very fast cadence. And while an audience might develop over time, each post mostly needs to earn its place on its own.
Another key feature here is organic reach. This form is fundamentally based on creative work that can gain reach through its inherent interest — that is, if it’s put into a feed, it’s interesting enough on its own for viewers to care and choose to engage. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t boost it (pay to increase its distribution), but the foundation of the form is organic appeal.
So while much of this might seem obvious, it’s worth defining these terms clearly as we go forward. This creative form, at base, is the production and publication of posts, mediated and distributed by platform algorithms — and it rests on the foundation of organic reach.
Audience Formation is Fundamental Level
The fundamental organizational level of the form is not the post, however, it is at the level of the whole. While the atomic unit of creation, distribution, and demonstrated interest in this form is the post, what ultimately matters is how successful the work is over time. The size of the audience and its ability to drive your business or endeavor only become meaningful when viewed cumulatively — across longer stretches, often with the presumption of operating indefinitely.
In other words, attention and audience must not only be acquired, but held and grown in a way that adds up meaningfully over time. To make that less abstract, for example: you would need to generate results at a level that matters across a year — and then do it again, year after year. These audiences typically generate the kinds of outcomes familiar from traditional brand marketing: awareness, consideration, and preference. For the form to succeed, those outcomes must reach a scale that materially supports the business or endeavor it’s tied to.
That’s why I describe this form as operating at the level of audience formation. The effort is about the whole body of work and how it performs consistently over time. This focus on sustained, cumulative impact is a defining characteristic of the form — and it’s what shapes how creators work to succeed within it.
Overall Premise
That is the reason that the fundamental unit of organization of this creative form is the overall premise and not the posts themselves. The premise is the thing that operates at the level of audience formation. The premise defines or characterizes the overall effort of a particular instance of this creative form. The premise is the central idea the work is about. It aligns the entire body of creative work. If the premise is strong and consistently held, the audience will understand what they’re being invited into. If the premise is absent or scattered, the result is confusion and drop-off. The premise is what allows the work to hang together.
Creative Form Concepts of Continuity and Unity
I want to use two fundamental creative concepts — continuity and unity — as a quick lens to examine this form.
Continuity refers to the sense of smooth, logical, and perceivable connection between parts over time. To hold attention across the long time frames this form demands, it’s important to establish continuity at that scale. Breaking continuity can break the hold on interest. But in this form, you can’t rely on strict continuity between posts, like you might in a film or novel. That’s why premise becomes so important. In this form, continuity isn’t post-to-post — it’s the relationship of each post back to the premise. The premise is what provides the throughline over time.
Unity is the degree to which all elements of a work contribute toward a coherent whole — everything aligning toward the same central purpose or effect. In this form, the premise is the vessel for that central purpose, which is defined by the success criteria of our audience-building phenomenon: to build a direct audience that enables you to drive your business or endeavor. So we look to align everything with the premise, ensuring that all elements contribute meaningfully toward the central objective. It’s how in this form we focus all efforts to what effect.
In this form based on “giving value,” we’ll see in the next section how that alignment manifests through the premise.
Next: Premise and Classical Narrativization
So, this section was about looking at the effort to engage in this phenomenon of audience building, anchored in its success criteria, as its own creative form. It has a distinct structure: it’s built on posts, but the actual organizing principle isn’t at the post level — it’s at the level of the overall premise. Premise is the natural unit of organization for the form. It’s the unifying structure that makes the whole legible and cumulative. And it positions the creator to meet the only success criterion that ultimately matters: the ability to form and sustain an audience that drives what they’re building.
Now that we know the overall premise is the fundamental unit of organization, we can turn to the next step: applying storytelling — using classical narrativization to make the premise engaging, meaningful, and maximally interesting.
Insight Three: Using Classical Narrativization to Shape Premise
If we accept that this is a new creative form, then the natural place to turn is to the fundamentals of storytelling — to understand how to invest the endeavor with interest and the ability to hold attention. We do what creators have always done when working within a narrative form: we explore how classical narrativization applies.
Historical Pattern: Application of Classical Narrativization
That pattern — applying classical narrativization to new creative formats — has repeated many times. It happened with drama, with the novel, with the short story, with the feature film, with episodic television, with serial television. In each case, the process was similar. A new form emerged, often driven by shifts in available technology. Then, through practice and refinement, creators figured out how to make it work. And one of the most important moves in that refinement — almost every time — was learning how to apply the underlying grammar of narrativization to the specific dynamics of the new form.
Classical narrativization has often provided the foundational grammar, even though each form ultimately hybridizes or extends it.
This section simply looks to follow that pattern. If this really is a new form — and we just outlined its shape in the last section — then it’s natural to ask: how does classical narrativization work here, specifically at the level of the premise?
Defining Classical Narrativization
Let’s pause to define what we mean. Classical narrativization refers to a foundational pattern of storytelling that has appeared across cultures and eras. At its core, it is goal-oriented, character-driven storytelling: a subject with a clear desire encounters a complication, takes meaningful action, and moves toward some form of resolution.
What makes this structure powerful isn’t just its plot shape — complication, action, resolution — but its underlying logic. It connects causality, agency, change, consequence, desire, and time into a coherent whole. It binds reason and emotion: the audience not only understands what’s happening but also why it matters, and to whom.
This structure isn’t limited to fiction. It works wherever people want to generate and sustain attention. It works because it mirrors how we understand change — and how we assign meaning to the world.
While later creative movements have complicated or challenged aspects of the classical model — introducing ambiguity, irony, or open-endedness — the underlying scaffolding remains one of the most effective ways to shape stories that resonate across time and audience.
Applying Classical Narrativization to Our New Form
In the creative form we’re describing, the primary application of classical narrativization happens at the level of the premise — the foundational “what it’s about” of the entire audience-building effort.
As we saw in the last section, the premise is the structural foundation of this form. It operates on the same time frame as audience formation and is where creative unity is focused. When creators apply narrativization at the premise level, they give the whole effort shape and meaning. They build the clarity, coherence, and continuity that make audience formation possible and sustainable.
Premise in Classical Narrativization Is Theme
When we look at this form through the lens of classical narrativization, the premise becomes what narrativization calls the theme.
And here’s the key point:
In a form built on giving value, the theme doesn’t just borrow pieces of the classical narrativization structure — it naturally absorbs the whole thing.
It carries change, agency, causality, consequence, desire, and time — all compressed into a single narrative promise. The audience is cast as the protagonist; the value offered becomes the agent of change; the outcome is a meaningful, realized end state. This isn’t abstract theory — it’s the natural shape meaning takes when value is projected toward an audience.
Just to clarify: I’m making a structural argument here about the theme that serves as premise. Given that it takes on the full classical narrativization structure, when the premise is built around giving value, the theme becomes almost synonymous with resolution. It’s not the resolution itself — it’s the promise of resolution, including its meaning and stakes, projected over time.
In this form, the theme embodies the entire narrativization arc: it holds the promise of goal-oriented resolution, set in the context of a protagonist (the audience) and guided by the story logic that has been honed over centuries to align with what humans are drawn to and find interesting.
Application of Classical Narrativization Also Works Across Scales
This might seem like a technical point, but I think it’s more than that — and I’ll aim to make that clearer in the next section. In this creative form, when built around “giving value,” the structure naturally aligns with classical narrativization. That means you’re not just adding narrative after the fact; you’re building your entire audience effort with it baked in at the foundation level. That pays dividends because it lets you apply the same narrative logic more effectively at every level downstream — including across all your posts.
Classical Narrativization: Section Summary
This is the third insight: the structure that works in this new creative form is classical narrativization, applied not to individual pieces of content, but to the premise itself. And when that narrativized premise becomes the organizing center of the effort — when it becomes a theme — it gives the entire creative system its shape, coherence, and force.
And no — you don’t need to master narrative theory to do this, as I’ll explain in the next section. What matters is recognizing that when you offer value to an audience, you’re offering a change arc they can enter — and that’s what makes the creative work meaningful.
That’s why this project is called Theme Theory.
Insight Four: The Most Effective Premise Is an Idealized Achieved State
We now have a way to apply classical narrativization to the premise of our audience-building effort — and we start with the idea that we’re offering value. We’ve identified classical narrativization as the underlying story structure best suited for holding attention over time.
In this next step, we focus on finding the most interesting possible theme to anchor the effort — the one that will serve as the foundation for building an audience that supports your business or endeavor.
Here’s where “giving value” becomes unexpectedly powerful. I want to make the case that when you start from the value you offer, there’s not just a general direction for your theme — there’s a maximally interesting theme available to you. That’s what I call the Idealized Achieved State.
In this section, I’ll introduce what that is, show how to derive it from the value you offer, and explain why it has specific properties that are especially useful for audience building at the scale and purpose we’re aiming for.
Raise the Stakes: Finding A Maximally Interesting Theme
Now that we have the premise structured through classical narrativization — with the audience as protagonist and the creator’s value as the agent of change — the next step is to make that premise as compelling as possible. In other words, we want to maximize the inherent interest of the theme to give the audience-building effort its strongest possible foundation.
I want to offer two practical ways to approach this. No, you can’t technically “prove” them with a formula, but for this context — building audience through giving value — they provide a sound, workable path.
What’s remarkable here is that in value-based creative work, there’s often a practical answer to the question: What’s most interesting? It’s about following the value to its most meaningful, most human resolution — and using that as the anchor for the entire effort.
The most familiar approach comes from classic storytelling advice: raise the stakes. In this creative form, we have a clear and practical way to do that by asking:
What is the ideal outcome the audience could achieve through the fullest, best use of the value being offered?
If they had complete access — as much time, help, and support as needed — what would the best-case result look like? What’s the transformation they would experience?
In this context, raising the stakes means raising them for the audience. What’s at stake is the gap between where they are now and where they could be if the value worked at its fullest potential.
Importantly, this approach fits naturally within the full classical narrativization structure. That ideal outcome aligns with the resolution, and the theme becomes the promise of that resolution as the maximally meaningful version imaginable for the audience.
A second framing is to imagine the audience looking back from the future, after they’ve had full access to the value, and asking: “What was supposed to have happened?”
In both cases, it’s an imaginal exercise: envisioning the ideal, most desired outcome as it relates to the value you offer. And if you have a solid understanding of the value you’re providing, it’s a surprisingly practical and doable step.
For example, using our personal stylist’s example, the value offered is styling outfits. So, what’s the idealized outcome if someone had full, ongoing access to that value? They would look and feel beautiful every time they got dressed, and that would be the theme — and therefore the premise — of the audience-building effort.
While that might not seem obviously empowering, next I present specific properties of this maximized form of theme that enable the full audience attention and engagement effort. The first is what it means that the maximized theme resolves to an ideal state.
The Maximally Interesting Premise Is an Idealized Achieved State
Let’s now clarify the kind of premise we arrive at when we maximize interest. I don’t have a clever name for it, so I use a functional one: the Idealized Achieved State (IAS).
By applying conventional storytelling approaches — like raising the stakes — we end up with a familiar but powerful narrative shape: the world as it is now, and a transformation toward something better or ideal. The method we use to identify the maximally interesting premise guides us toward an idealized outcome: a projected best-case future derived from the value being offered.
One key characteristic of this outcome is that it tends to be a state, rather than a one-time resolution. That’s a major advantage. For example, in the stylist case, the idealized achieved state is: looking and feeling beautiful every time you get dressed.
This is fundamentally different from a closed resolution like getting styled for a single event. Why does that matter? Because closed resolutions end. They resolve and complete — and that’s not an optimal premise for an ongoing audience-building effort.
What you want is a premise centered on a state that’s achieved but requires ongoing care to maintain. In the stylist example, even after you achieve the ideal — looking and feeling beautiful when you dress — you still need to refresh your wardrobe, adapt to changes in body, lifestyle, seasons, and taste. That continuous relevance is what makes the premise enduring.
That’s why I use the term Idealized Achieved State. It’s the premise form that is maximally interesting and inherently renewable. It offers the audience an ongoing, meaningful pursuit — not a one-and-done resolution.
Next, I’ll show why the IAS has a set of fundamental properties that are especially powerful for building and engaging an audience, particularly when the goal is to drive a business or endeavor.
Desirable Properties of the Idealized Achieved State
As I’ve been pointing to throughout, the IAS carries a set of fundamental, highly desirable properties for building and engaging audiences — especially when the goal is to drive a business or endeavor. None of these properties are novel on their own, but it’s their presence together, within this form of theme, that gives the IAS its distinctive potential. I want to explicitly call them out here because all the later benefits — what I call the toolset of this creative form — make sense in light of them.
First, the IAS is fully audience-centered. It frames the premise entirely from the audience’s point of view — not “here’s what I do,” but “here’s the ideal you could achieve.” This shift follows naturally from how we derive the IAS by maximizing the stakes for the audience. Importantly, the IAS can be stated without even referencing the creator’s value directly; it’s recast entirely in terms of the audience’s perspective. That structure is inherently more compelling — and better aligned with how attention and meaning flow in narrative.
Second, the IAS is future-oriented. This is a quietly powerful property. Unlike pure entertainment, which is often centered in the present moment, the IAS points forward — it orients the premise toward an idealized future state. That shift from moment to arc dramatically increases the form’s ability to sustain attention and interest over time. The premise doesn’t end when the viewer finishes consuming the creative; to the extent they find it compelling, it stays active in their mind. This provides the foundation for a durable relationship with the audience — and, as we’ll see in the toolset, it also opens the door to expanding beyond media into tools, services, data, AI, and more, all in the service of satisfying the theme.
Third, the IAS is tightly connected to the creator’s value and business. Because the IAS is derived directly from the value being offered, it remains deeply linked to the creator’s core offering. It’s not an abstract vision or detached ideal; it’s a narrativized projection of what should happen when the value works as intended. That connection makes it especially effective as a business premise — helping the audience realize the IAS is inherently tied to helping the creator or organization succeed.
Fourth, the IAS is inherently shaped by classical narrativization. This is worth pausing on. The IAS doesn’t just borrow from narrative structure — it’s built from it. The foundation we’ve laid in earlier sections was all about showing how the IAS naturally embodies the elements of classical storytelling: goal, challenge, agency, transformation. That means the core of the creative effort has narrative structure embedded from the start, supporting everything from strategy to execution, from premise to downstream tactics. This is a major part of what makes the form operational.
Fifth, the IAS binds emotion with reason. When we use classical narrativization to shape the premise around an Idealized Achieved State, we’re not just specifying stakes — we’re invoking emotional meaning. The value you offer might be rational and concrete, but the IAS is anchored in human desire, centered on the audience as protagonist. It identifies the richest emotional terrain connected to your value and your business, making the creative effort coherent and compelling. It gives the work shape, meaning, and emotional salience.
Together, these traits — audience-centered, future-oriented, value-connected, narratively structured, and emotionally resonant — fully enable the success conditions we laid out when defining the phenomenon. That’s why I’m highlighting this premise form so explicitly: it’s not just narratively effective; it’s structurally and strategically aligned with what works in this creative form.
Insight Five: Audience’s Overriding Interest is Theme Satisfaction
Once you define your maximally interesting premise as an Idealized Achieved State (IAS), derived from the value you offer, you — the creator — are no longer the center of the creative effort. The IAS becomes the center. This shift fundamentally changes what you post about, how you present yourself, and what your audience comes to trust and value.
Two quick notes for this section. First, I’ll refer to the stylist example to help illustrate key points. Remember, the value the stylist offers is outfit styling. The related theme, expressed as an IAS, is about the audience member — the viewer — looking and feeling beautiful every time she gets dressed.
Second, I’ve used the terms maximally interesting premise, Idealized Achieved State, and theme to describe the same underlying concept. For simplicity and alignment with the broader argument, I’ll use theme as the default term from here on.
What Theme Represents to the Audience
Because the theme is the maximally interesting premise derived from the value you offer, it becomes the organizing object of attention for the audience. What’s compelling about the theme — what matters to the audience — is their relationship to it. That relationship is what they care about and what draws their interest.
In the stylist example, the theme centers on looking and feeling beautiful every time the audience member gets dressed. Importantly, this ideal exists independently of any particular creator. It’s fully grounded in the audience’s perspective: it’s the outcome they care about and want to move toward. What holds their attention are things they perceive as relevant to that goal or that help them feel closer to achieving it.
The language I want to adopt here is that they care about things that satisfy the theme.
That doesn’t mean the audience doesn’t care about you — they should, and ideally they do, as we’ll explore in the next section. But the primary reason they engage is because of the theme. What most interests them is that idealized state, the vision of progress toward it, and anything that seems to help them along that path.
You matter to them as someone who understands their relationship to the theme and plays the classic guide role within that story structure.
Theme’s Role for the Creator: Post to Satisfy the Theme
This is the culmination of the chain of reasoning so far: when building a direct audience online to support a business or endeavor, the logic of the form points to one guiding principle — you post to satisfy the theme. This shift reshapes what you post about.
The key practical implication is that your creative work is not centered on your business, your personal backstory, or your opinions for their own sake. It’s about sharing things that relate to satisfying the theme: what it is, why it matters, how it can be reached, and what it means for the audience. There’s wide creative latitude here. As discussed earlier, posts can stand alone; what matters is that they consistently relate back to the theme.
You can and should appear in the work — but only in relation to the theme. Your business or endeavor takes the role of guide or enabler: something that helps the audience move toward the IAS, not something that replaces it as the focus.
In the stylist example, you can see how posts about fashion opinions, styling tips, insights from working with clients, her background, her own outfit choices, or observations from her day-to-day work are all viable content — as long as they are in the context of stratifying the theme of the audience looking and feeling beautiful when they get dressed. The focus and context is how it relates to the theme and not the stylist herself for her own sake.
Theme’s Discipline on the Creator: Authenticity
This orientation also demands something deeper: authenticity. Audiences are quick to sense when the creator’s primary concern is themselves, rather than the theme. When you anchor your creative work on the theme — the maximally interesting premise — you are signaling what your work is about. If you present as focused on the audience and their relationship to the IAS, but your content turns out to be centered on yourself or your business, it will feel like a bait and switch.
To sustain attention and trust, you have to genuinely care about the IAS and the audience’s relationship to it. Without that genuine concern, the connection breaks — and the creative effort loses its ability to hold and grow an audience.
In short, once the theme is defined, the creator’s role shifts. You are no longer the hero. The audience is. The IAS is the goal. And you — and your business or endeavor — become the guide.
Reprise: Audience is Formed on Demonstrated Interest
It’s important to remember that the context for all of this is the goal of building a direct audience that can drive your business or endeavor. The foundation is simple: you have to be interesting enough to warrant attention and hold it over time.
This section — and the entire chain of reasoning leading up to it — has been about understanding how to do that.
Next, we turn to how such an audience can actually drive a business or endeavor.
Insight Six: Creator’s Results are Derivative of Theme Satisfaction
Up to this point, we’ve focused on how to build a direct audience by giving value, using the theme — expressed as an Idealized Achieved State (IAS) — as the maximally interesting premise. Now we turn to the next step: how this audience-building effort actually drives business or endeavor outcomes.
Demand Generation: Driving Your Business or Endeavor
At its core, this is a form of demand generation. It plays the classic brand marketing role — generating awareness, consideration, and preference (A/C/P) — but does it by building a direct audience on the theme, rather than through paid media alone.
To be clear, the creative work here is not advertising. It’s not designed to push transactions in the near term. But when done well, it produces something that advertising typically tries to buy: a large pool of people who like, know, and trust you — and by extension, your business or endeavor.
This happens because of the fundamental audience dynamics established through Theme Theory. The audience sees themselves as the protagonist; the theme is the maximally interesting, audience-centered premise that draws and holds their attention; and you, along with your business or endeavor, take the role of the guide. If you play that role faithfully — showing up consistently, offering value, and keeping the focus on the audience and their relation to the theme — you generate real trust and appreciation. You become known, liked, and trusted across the audience you build. And that dynamic naturally extends to your business or endeavor.
In this setup, the audience comes to hold awareness, consideration, and preference toward what you do — not because you demanded it, but because you earned it through a body of work centered on what matters to them. This is the maximal way to generate demand from the maximal potential audience.
Theme Based Demand Gen as Distinct from Advertising
Importantly, this kind of audience-building is not antithetical to advertising — it enables it. You are creating the best possible environment for advertising to work, because you’ve already built a foundation of trust and attention. Whether it’s through independent advertising campaigns or small, clearly marked ads embedded in your creative (for example, a short note or segment at the end), the audience will understand and accept that it’s the business or endeavor that makes the creative effort possible. As long as the advertising is not intrusive, forced, or misleading — and remains secondary to the theme — it fits.
Similarly, if you show your own product or service in the course of the creative work, no one will begrudge you doing so, as long as it’s genuinely in service to the theme. The key is to avoid the bait-and-switch. When you maintain the audience’s trust by staying anchored to the theme, you not only make room for your business or endeavor to be present — you create conditions for it to be seen, appreciated, and ultimately in demand.
Transition: Toward the Biggest Opportunity
While this kind of demand generation fulfills the primary objective — building an audience that can drive a business or endeavor — the unique nature of a theme derived from your offered value opens up what may be the biggest opportunity of all.
Insight Seven: Theme Theory and Audience Participation
At this point, we have established — except for one last idea — the full chain of logic underneath Theme Theory: how you can build a direct audience by giving value, using a maximally interesting premise structured as an Idealized Achieved State (IAS), and delivering creative that satisfies the theme.
Through consistently satisfying the theme at the necessary tempo and quality, you can form an audience large enough to generate meaningful demand generation — that is, awareness, consideration, and preference (A/C/P) — for your business or endeavor.
The Toolset
From this foundation, Theme Theory highlights a set of desirable properties that make it possible to attract, engage, and grow an audience in ways that meaningfully enable demand generation.
The next section of this essay (and the broader work of this site) focuses on what those properties unlock — what I call the toolset. These implications extend beyond media alone and include data, software, AI, and even goods and services. For example:
Prospectively identifying your most potent theme, given the value you offer
Estimating the scale and value of your potential audience
Enabling scalable creative production, even with minimal resources
Strategically designing feeling and emotion into the creative effort
Fostering passion, energy, and authenticity in production
Producing creative that is legible to large language models (LLMs)
Building software to help your audience pursue the theme
Using data and AI to deepen engagement
Offering transactional goods and services aligned with the theme
Providing a strategic path for existing businesses — even large incumbents — to participate
Giving creators a framework to make full use of the form’s opportunities
These are only previews. The real point of Theme Theory is to offer creators, builders, and organizations a way to rethink what’s possible when you go direct: building audience by giving value, organized through a theme, to support a business or endeavor.
Audience Participation in the Theme
There is one last foundational concept: audience participation in the theme.
Remember, the IAS is the most interesting outcome promised by the value you offer. The theme, as we’ve defined it, is about that idealized state and the audience’s relationship to it.
That relationship inherently involves participation. In the Models section, I represent this as the Theme Funnel — a simple way to visualize how audience members engage with the theme, from initial awareness to deeper forms of interest, action, and realization.
Just being in the audience is a form of participation. To the extent that audience members give their attention to creative that satisfies the theme, they are engaging meaningfully — and that attention alone can generate robust demand generation.
But participation can extend beyond that. Any movement toward the IAS — any moment of real-world engagement or progress — is a meaningful, positive sign. It’s evidence that the creative work is not just attracting attention but enabling change.
This is not a burden or a requirement. It’s an opportunity. And it’s what opens the door to the full toolset Theme Theory points toward: media, software, services, data, AI, and more — all aligned to help the audience participate more meaningfully.
Orienting to Enable, Not Encumber
The key here is orientation. As a creator, you can use the Theme Funnel as a guide — a way to think about what kinds of creative work, tools, or supports might help your audience, without letting that focus weigh down or overcomplicate your media effort.
It’s not about optimizing every post to drive behavior. It’s about caring, in a genuine and practical way, about the audience’s relationship to the IAS — and creating with an eye toward enabling awareness, interest, progress, and when possible, realization.
This is what opens up the bigger opportunity. It’s not required to fulfill the promise of Theme Theory, but it’s what allows the creator to make the most of it.
Why This Is the Heart of Theme Theory
That’s why this section is titled simply: Theme Theory.
At its core, Theme Theory is about recognizing that once you define your maximally interesting premise, the audience’s engagement centers on the theme — and your own orientation, as the creator, naturally shifts toward enabling not just attention, but participation.
If you stop at audience formation, you already have something real and valuable. But if you let audience participation guide your creative vision — carefully, without burdening or distorting the effort — you open the door to a deeper, more expansive set of tools and possibilities.
That’s the heart of it. And that’s what sets up everything we’ll explore next.
The Payoff: A Practitioner’s Toolset
Once the theme is shaped in IAS form, the structure doesn’t just clarify what to post or how to organize the work — it unlocks a whole set of capabilities. These capabilities are built into the form itself. They arise naturally from the structure, and they exist to be picked up and used. They include ways of seeing and understanding the audience, ways of helping them act on what you’re offering, and ways of expanding the creative effort into services, tools, software, or even goods — all aligned around the same underlying movement toward the IAS. (Put more plainly: creative work that satisfies the theme is, by definition, oriented toward enabling or facilitating that movement.)
That’s what I want to show you in this final section: the practical range of what this form makes possible once the IAS is in place. These are not abstract affordances. These are capabilities that flow directly from the structure we’ve already developed — and they open up real leverage for any creator or team working to build an audience and support a business or endeavor. They follow from Theme Theory, but they also point forward: each one is the seed of a longer conversation that deserves its own dedicated attention.
I’ve already worked out much of this material in what I call the corpus — a series of earlier essays and internal documents that explore these ideas in detail. It’s all published here, not as a polished output, but as a coherent and organized foundation. If you’re inclined, you can dive in now. But it’s also there so you can load it into the LLM of your choice and query it directly. My goal is to revisit and rearticulate those ideas within this refined account of Theme Theory — to make the toolset as practical, concrete, and usable as the form itself allows.
I’ll introduce them briefly here, one at a time. The point isn’t to be exhaustive — it’s to make visible the scope of what this form enables. If you’ve made it this far, I’m guessing you’re already starting to see how the whole shape of a project can change once the premise is expressed in IAS form. What I want to do now is show how that premise, once in place, sets up an entire toolset. And that’s what Theme Theory, as an ongoing project, is here to explore.
1. The Prospective Use of the IAS (Your Core Contribution)
One of the most powerful things Theme Theory enables is the ability to evaluate a theme before making anything — to reason forward from the value you have to offer and ask: what is the Idealized Achieved State that would fully express that value from the audience’s perspective? That IAS becomes the conceptual foundation of your theme — a premise with structure and direction, not just flavor or aesthetic. If that premise holds up, it can orient all future work and audience formation. But even before execution, it offers a meaningful way to evaluate the premise itself.
What I’m trying to show you here is that this prospective reasoning lets you size up the potential of the theme — not with certainty, but with insight. You can evaluate its scope (how large the audience might be), its depth (how much it might matter to them), and its viability across the full range of tools the creative form affords. In other words, TT gives you a way to evaluate the opportunity before you commit to the build. That includes not just media, but also the possibility of extensions into digital services, software, products, and more.
That’s why I think this is the conceptual engine of the whole approach. The IAS doesn’t just help you move toward satisfying the theme — it helps you evaluate the premise itself as something worth pursuing. If that premise is strong, then everything else the form makes possible becomes available to you in a coherent and targeted way.
2. The Media Toolset (from Creative Dev/Prod/Dist)
Once the IAS is in place, creative production becomes not just feasible, but richly generative. The core tools are familiar: social posts, videos, essays, podcasts, and any other format used to reach and engage an audience. But Theme Theory doesn’t treat these as random surface-level content. Instead, it offers a way to produce creative work that satisfies the theme — which is to say, work that is naturally aligned with the audience’s movement toward the IAS. That alignment unlocks a reliable and motivating center of gravity for ideation, production, and publication. It also creates coherence across your body of work, even when formats or tones vary widely.
This alignment enables more than consistency. When the work flows from a theme in IAS form, it supports the creative process itself. It taps your core interest in the subject, draws on your expertise, and helps you speak from a perspective of lived conviction — which is exactly where authority and authenticity come from. And because the IAS is fundamentally about your audience’s transformation, it connects your creative motivation to something external and meaningful. You’re not just expressing yourself — you’re helping someone. That sense of purpose is especially important in a creative form that demands frequency, volume, and endurance. The creator must keep going — and this gives them a reason to.
The classical narrative structure introduced earlier becomes especially valuable here. It can be adapted to this form to support daily or high-frequency content production without losing structure or momentum. Rather than prescribing formats or rigid sequences, it helps creators recognize arcs, turning points, and emotional movement in the themes they already care about — and then shape their work accordingly. The result is creative output that is deeply rooted, emotionally resonant, and able to scale. And because the work is satisfying the theme, it also supports the audience’s movement through the Theme Funnel, from initial awareness to lasting transformation. Creative work doesn’t just represent the brand or business — it directly contributes to the phenomenon Theme Theory helps enable.
(A more detailed treatment of this section exists in the Theme Theory corpus and can be explored or queried alongside the rest of the toolset.)
3. The Technology Toolset (from Extend)
One of the more surprising outcomes of Theme Theory is how directly the structure of the IAS lends itself to technical application. I’ve written and posted a full example of this in the corpus, built around a personal stylist use case, and I’ll be revisiting that work in light of this newer articulation. If you’re curious now, you can load the corpus into the LLM of your choice and explore that material in detail. It’s not just conceptually worked out — it’s specific and practical.
The key claim here is that satisfying the theme can be pursued not just through media, but through the full stack of digital technology: data, software, and AI. This is because the IAS form is not only outward-facing — centered on the audience — but is always oriented toward a desired future state. That structure aligns perfectly with the logic of tools and services: you’re not just describing the IAS, you’re helping the audience reach it. If the theme is strong enough, then this kind of development becomes available and viable — not as a stretch, but as a natural extension.
That includes:
Data, made possible when you offer useful or interesting services that invite the audience to share information. When they do, you gain visibility into their progress relative to the theme. I call this primary theme data (what they share directly) and theme graph data (what you can infer about their connections, clusters, or behaviors in context).
Software and digital services, which can support audience members in taking meaningful steps toward the IAS. These might include utilities, workflows, or interactive experiences — anything that helps satisfy the theme through action.
AI, which offers powerful leverage. It can personalize and scale support toward the IAS in ways that would be impossible manually, unlocking reach and resonance that match the creator’s original value.
While I’ve often referred to “creators” throughout this essay, I hope it’s clear here that Theme Theory also speaks directly to builders — those who make tools, applications, and systems. If the media side of this work is about creative expression, this side is about creative implementation. But both are oriented around the same thing: satisfying the theme.
4. The Traditional Goods and Services Toolset (from Extend)
Just like with media and tech, physical goods and in-person or 1:1 services can be viewed as creative work — as long as they satisfy the theme. That means they support movement toward the Idealized Achieved State (IAS), or help maintain it. These types of creative tend to be more transactional in nature, and they don’t always carry the same durable connection that comes with a podcast, an app, or an AI-powered service. But they’re no less meaningful if they’re aligned with the theme. They can offer real value to the audience, and they can support a thriving business for the creator.
This part of the form is especially relevant to makers. If the stylist’s app and digital tools show what’s possible for builders, her actual styling services and apparel recommendations show what’s possible in this mode. The physical goods and services in that example — clothes, accessories, 1:1 styling help — are theme-aligned, and help audience members experience the IAS for themselves. I’ve written up that example in detail in the corpus, and if you’re interested, you can load it into the LLM of your choice and explore the full development there.
Theme Theory also applies in reverse. If you already offer a good or service — say, through an existing business — you can work backward to uncover the value you’ve been offering all along. That value can then be translated into a theme, expressed as an IAS. That gives you a foundation to build a media presence around what you already do, with the goal of cultivating a direct audience that supports your business more actively and resiliently over time.
This isn’t about adding media for media’s sake. It’s about rooting what you offer in a theme strong enough to support all three kinds of creative work: making, building, and publishing.
5. The LLM Toolset: Writing for Semantic Legibility and Discovery
We’re now entering an era where LLMs — not traditional search engines — are becoming the first stop for discovery. That changes the game for creators. Discovery, context-building, and even recommendations are now coming from models trained to attend to patterns of latent meaning across vast bodies of work. So what becomes discoverable? What gets surfaced?
This is where the IAS form of theme may offer a major, if unexpected, advantage. It wasn’t designed for LLMs — it was designed to anchor a creative form that builds and satisfies a media audience. But the very structure that makes it powerful for human audience-building — an outward-facing premise, narrativized, clearly oriented toward helping others reach an idealized outcome — is the kind of thing that LLMs are particularly good at recognizing, linking, and retrieving.
In other words, the IAS helps creators become semantically legible at corpus scale.
This is still an emerging frontier, but my working belief is that LLMs are most likely to surface creators who are (1) publishing regularly, and (2) doing so around a coherent theme that resonates semantically with user intent. In that light, Theme Theory might be understood not just as a system for building a direct audience, but also as a system for becoming legible to LLMs — and therefore more likely to be surfaced in relevant queries.
The key idea is simple: The IAS form of theme may be one of the best ways to write for the human audience you want — and the machine attention that increasingly mediates access to that audience.
6. Integrated Application
The tools described so far — media, technology, and traditional offerings — aren’t separate silos. What makes this form so powerful is the ability to integrate them around a single throughline: the idealized achieved state (IAS). When a theme is expressed in IAS form, all parts of the creative and business effort — from individual posts to complex software systems — can pull in the same direction. It’s not that every output is the same, but rather that everything shares a coherent intention: to satisfy the theme and help the audience realize the state it represents.
This coherence isn’t just internal. The IAS structure also enables broader integrations. Theme Theory doesn’t replace other disciplines — it opens an interface to them. The work here draws on classical narrativization and adjacent principles not to reframe or supersede them, but to hook into their most useful aspects and show how they can be applied to this form. The same goes for existing advice about building audiences online — from tactics like titles and thumbnails to broader strategic models. Theme Theory offers a way to understand why these things work, and how to employ them more deliberately in service of your theme.
That’s how I came to all of this myself: not by standing apart from the advice and practices that were already working, but by trying to understand the form beneath them. Theme Theory is shaped by that process. It’s designed to integrate what already works, and to help you see how far it can scale when everything is aligned around a single, compelling premise.
7. The Theme Space
This last section shifts perspective from the individual creator to the broader phenomenon. If Theme Theory is correct — or even directionally useful — then it implies something larger: a mapable space of human interest and meaning. A Theme Space. Each IAS-style theme represents a particular projection of value, captured in a premise that resonates with others and compels attention. If you accept that these themes can be reasoned from real-world value, then you also accept that they don’t need to be invented from scratch. They already exist. They are out there — embedded in human desire, behavior, language, and culture.
That idea is speculative, but it follows naturally from the model. If themes in IAS form are real and recurring, then in principle the space of them is observable, at least in part. And if that’s true, then Theme Theory may offer a new kind of map — not just of how to build something, but what to build.
For creators and organizations, this offers a different entry point. Instead of starting with a known product or business and reasoning toward a theme, you might begin with a compelling IAS — a richly meaningful and interesting state — and then reason toward the kind of creative work, service, or software that could help an audience achieve it. This reverses the usual logic, but it might be a powerful way to spot opportunities, especially when paired with audience-first, media-driven go-to-market approaches.
From that view, the Theme Space isn’t just conceptual — it becomes strategic. It can help shape new projects, identify gaps in what’s currently being served, and guide attention toward themes that feel both culturally resonant and structurally under-addressed. It’s also worth noting that if Theme Theory is right, and if large language models are especially good at surfacing latent meaning, then themes expressed in IAS form may be unusually legible to LLMs. That could make them more discoverable, more remixable, and more likely to show up in relevant future contexts — a subtle but growing part of the discovery landscape.
All of this is speculative, but none of it is unfounded. It simply follows from the same starting point: that a theme, properly formed, expresses a compelling projection of value. And when you see that clearly, the field of possibility opens up — not just for how to build, but for what to build, and why.
This idea is developed more fully in the Theme Space essay within the corpus. If you’re working with your own language model, it’s ready to explore in more detail and apply directly — either as a thought experiment or as a practical way to generate or evaluate new project directions.
8. Close / Transition
Theme Theory gives creators not just a lens for understanding the form they’re participating in — but a structured, extensible way to participate in it with greater intention and effect.
Everything builds from one core premise: if you know the value you have to offer, and can frame that value as an Idealized Achieved State, then you can build an audience — and a business — around helping people reach it.
Visualizing Creator & Audience Activity: Three Simple Reference Models
To make sense of the creative form described by Theme Theory, it helps to break it down — not just by listing features, but by seeing the different ways it functions in the world. These three conceptual models do exactly that. Each one looks at the form from a different angle: how it’s published, how it’s received, and how it generates value. Taken together, they give us a clear and complete picture of how the form works.
But if you’re a creator, here’s the upshot: post on the theme. All of this — the structure, the models, the depth — is here to give you clarity and confidence. You don’t need to memorize it. You just need to work from a strong theme and keep putting posts into the field. That’s how audience formation happens. And when you’re ready, you can build on the theme — and begin to explore the rest.
Theme / Field / Post
This model explains how creative work is structured and published by the creator.
The theme is the underlying premise — the idealized achieved state the work is anchored on. Each post is a discrete unit of creative output — a video, a thread, a newsletter, an episode — that makes some expression of the theme. The field is the space those posts accumulate into — the public body of work that is ambiently available, discoverable, and rich with meaning.
The form supports both standalone and serial work. And like novels, drama, cinema, or television, it’s a distinct creative form — defined by its structure, shaped by its constraints, and made possible by a shift in technology. In this case, the enabling shift was the rise of digital platforms and permissionless publishing.
This model gives us a clean and functional way of understanding the publishing side of the form — how work is created, connected, and released into the world.
Theme Funnel
This model explains how audience members encounter and engage with the theme.
The funnel represents progression toward the idealized achieved state. At the top is awareness — simply recognizing and understanding the theme. In the middle is participation — any real-world movement toward the state the theme describes. At the bottom is realization — actual achievement of that state in a person’s life.
Participation is always voluntary — just like attention, it must be earned. That means the creative has to be consistently compelling, consistently interesting, and consistently aligned with the audience’s own desires. Participation also requires more effort than attention, which is why creative work can — and often does — build that engagement over time.
Because the funnel expresses movement toward a shared goal, it becomes the basis for something even more powerful: relationship. The audience isn’t just connected to the creator — they’re connected to one another through shared interest in the theme.
And that interest opens the door to extension. When the theme is well-formed and the IAS is clear, it becomes natural to imagine goods, services, or tools that support the audience’s movement. That makes room for real-world impact — and that impact is what gives rise to the Theme KPI: a conceptual measure of how much positive movement has occurred across the funnel.
This model gives us a way to think about not just audience size, but audience change — a new kind of reach, measured in progress instead of impressions.
Earned Awareness, Consideration, and Preference
This model explains how audience-building through creative work supports the creator’s business or endeavor.
When work is built on a theme derived from real value — and made with care and consistency — the audience naturally begins to like, know, and trust the creator. That’s the core of what content marketing aims to accomplish, and it’s exactly what happens here.
Unlike traditional advertising, this creative work doesn’t ask for anything. The offer is unconditional. The audience owes the creator nothing beyond engagement with the creative itself.
But that trust, once earned, becomes a real asset. It grants permission to advertise, to sell, or to invite — without undermining the relationship.
In marketing terms, that means the creator has earned awareness, consideration, and preference — not through paid reach or coercive messaging, but through meaningful audience formation on a theme.
It’s not that the creator’s business can never appear in the work. On the contrary, it can play a supporting role — even a visible one. But it is never the focus. The work is not about the creator’s business. It’s about the audience’s ideal state.
This model gives us a way to understand how creative work — even when not explicitly promotional — can still drive real outcomes. And it explains why that happens: because the audience has come to trust the creator through repeated, unconditioned value.
Theme / Field / Post
Our new “giving value” creative form has atomic units (posts), a conceptual container (field), and a unifying premise (theme). Essentially, creators publish posts to create a field that can directly connect with an audience. The theme gives it resonance and potential interest. It’s not hard to see — but this simple model makes it much more easily visible by showing the mechanics of what is happening with the elements: the inputs and outputs.
Posts are the atomic unit.
Every platform — YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Substack, podcasts, X, LinkedIn, Pinterest — operates on a post basis. Whether it’s a short text or a three-hour video, a post is the minimum publishable unit. It’s the container in which creative work is shared and released. It can take any shape, any tone, any form. All that matters is that it’s complete enough to be posted. This makes posts a general-purpose abstraction. They represent the creative granularity of this form.
Each post is published into a field.
All I mean here by field is a coherent, consistent basis of interest in a generalized attention environment. It’s not specific to one platform. It just refers to the conceptual space where attention is available — the open area into which posts are released. It’s the terrain a creator or organization operates within. Each creator effectively works within a field — defined by what they post, how consistently, and what conceptual territory they occupy. The field is what makes exposure possible. Posts are launched into the field in the hope of interacting with attention.
The field is structured by the theme.
The theme gives meaning to the field. It defines what this entire creative project is about. In Theme Theory, the theme is about the Idealized Achieved State and viewers’ relationship to it — a unifying premise derived from the value the creator offers in exchange for attention. By analogy, this theme is what energizes the field and gives it internal consistency. A more compelling theme leads to a stronger field. In this model:
The theme represents potential — what this is all for.
The field represents the environment — where the work takes place.
The posts are realizations — attempts to connect value to attention.
Each post is an expression of the theme. Its job is to make that potential real, in a form that might attract and hold attention. Whether that post is standalone or part of a series doesn’t matter. What matters is that it functions — that it participates in the broader audience-building effort in a way that contributes meaningfully.
Posts in the Field Acquire Attention
Creators publish posts and in effect create a field that an audience can directly connect with – giving their attention.
Continuity looks different here.
In classic creative forms, continuity was typically serially temporal — each scene or chapter built on the last. In novels, drama, or serial TV, you were expected to experience creative work in sequence. But in this form, that’s not guaranteed. Most viewers won’t see every post. Many will enter at random points over time. So the burden of coherence can’t live at the level of order. It has to live at the level of premise, or theme.
That makes this form closer to episodic TV, especially in its earlier days. As Jason Mittell has pointed out, early episodes of network television were built on the assumption that most of the audience would not have seen the previous week’s episode. So they designed stories to stand alone, while still participating in a broader conceptual world. That’s the model here too — but extended even further.
There can still be continuity in the form of recurring formats, serial sequences, or thematic arcs — and many creators do this successfully. But it’s never required. What matters is that each post can hold its own, while still participating in the larger whole. The theme is what provides that unifying structure.
The form is radically flexible — and that’s a feature.
There’s no one right answer. A creator might post nothing but short, freestanding videos. Another might develop a fully serialized show. Others might blend the two. It doesn’t matter, as long as the creative work builds an audience that drives the business or endeavor. That’s the success criterion. The right format is whatever works.
This flexibility is a feature, not a flaw. It allows for experimentation, iteration, and individual style. It means creators can shape their output to fit their voice, their time, and their goals — and still work within a coherent structure. The form accommodates variation.
The form also accommodates excellence.
This is a form in which excellence is possible. That might mean effectiveness — content that actually builds the audience and achieves its demand generation purpose or even exogenous audience participation in the theme . But it can also mean creative excellence. That might show up in craft, tone, message, performance, resonance, or conceptual strength. Just as great directors created commercially successful but artistically significant work, the same is possible here. The platform and format may differ, but the stakes of quality remain.
Theme Funnel & Audience Participation
Up to this point, the focus has been on the creative form from the creator’s perspective. But that same form can be viewed from the perspective of the audience. When seen that way, it reveals something powerful: the creative work doesn’t just entertain or inform — it invites participation. It frames a future state that the audience can enter, aspire to, and move toward.
The theme is structured as an Idealized Achieved State.
In Theme Theory, the theme is not just a topic. It’s a particular kind of premise — an idealized achieved state (IAS) derived from the value the creator offers in exchange for attention.
From the creator’s point of view, the IAS is the most powerful and unifying way to structure a creative effort.
From the audience’s point of view, the IAS represents something else entirely: a desirable future different from the current state. It’s a classic form of them and it this change from as-is to some potential ideal state is what gives it resonance and meaning.
The funnel represents the viewer’s voluntary progression toward that state.
You can use a funnel metaphor to represent this concept. In this case I use the term Theme Funnel — a simple conceptual frame for understanding how different levels of participation represent different degrees of progress toward the IAS.
At the top of the funnel is awareness of the theme. The viewer has seen the premise and recognizes what the creative work is oriented toward.
Further down is participation — a viewer taking real action or making real progress toward that ideal state, supported by the creative work.
At the bottom of the funnel is the actual realization of the theme in the viewer’s own life.
So the funnel offers a way of thinking about audience not just as attention captured, but as impact created.
Participation is a higher hurdle than attention — and it’s always earned.
Because this is not traditional entertainment, the funnel doesn’t end with a watch or a like. It offers more, but participation is a higher hurdle.
Participation is always optional. The viewer decides whether to engage beyond the moment. That decision is earned the same way attention is earned: through work that is consistently compelling and meaningful.
Importantly, participation, to the extent it happens, happens over time. The threshold is higher than simple viewership, but there’s no deadline. Interest leads to familiarity, familiarity leads to trust, and trust opens the door to action. The funnel reflects this natural development of increasingly meaningful participation.
And the relationship is built on the theme. The audience and the creator have something in common: the theme about the IAS. That shared interest creates a real basis for connection — a relationship. The rest of the audience represented in the funnel also shares the same common interest in the theme, which is why they are there.
The funnel enables a meaningful KPI — based on actual impact.
Because the funnel represents voluntary movement toward a real-life state, it becomes possible to imagine a metric that reflects that progression. I call it the Theme KPI — a conceptual measure of impact across the audience.
In theory, it would reflect how many people are in the funnel and how far they’ve moved toward the IAS. Unlike traditional metrics, this is not for optimization. It’s for orientation. It reminds the creator what matters: not what they’ve produced, but what has landed — and where it has taken people.
That kind of KPI points to a kind of mission. The creator isn’t just broadcasting. They’re helping people. And if they’re doing it well, they’ll see that reflected in flow in the funnel.
The funnel grounds natural extensions — including technology, goods, and services.
One of the most important implications of the funnel model is that it shows how different kinds of creative work can foster material participation. If the funnel is real, and the movement it describes is real, then software, services, and even traditional goods can be natural extensions of the creative effort to enable meaningful participation in the theme.
This helps explain why it’s conceptually coherent for creators to offer things like styling services, journals, planners, platforms, or even physical stores — so long as those things in essence satisfy the theme. The funnel is simply a means to make that alignment visible.
The funnel complements the creator’s model — and completes the picture.
From the creator’s side, Theme Theory introduces the Theme / Field / Post model — a way of modeling the creative work and releasing it into the world.
From the audience’s side, we now have the Theme Funnel — a way of understanding how that work is received, interpreted, and acted upon as meaningful participation in the theme.
Together, these form a two-sided model of the new creative form. Each post is launched into the field in the hope that it will spark awareness or participation. The theme gives coherence. The funnel helps visualize audience trajectory. The funnel makes clear that impact can extend much more beyond just reach — it can entail real, earned, audience-led progress.
Satisfying Theme for Audience Produces Earned A/C/P
This third model shows what happens through the creative form. While the Theme / Field / Post model describes how creative work enters the world, and the Theme Funnel describes how it lands with the audience, this model explains how acquired audience itself drives a business or endeavor. When someone builds an audience around a well-formed theme, it has the natural potential to produce the classical outcomes of brand marketing — awareness, consideration, and preference — but earns them, rather than buying or demanding them.
And for all the detail we’ve gone into across these models, what it resolves to for the creator is: Post on the theme. Build on the theme. That’s essence of the creative form.
The model describes the marketing effects of theme-driven audience building.
The creative work is not positioned as advertising or sales copy. But it achieves the same goals:
Awareness — The audience knows who you are.
Consideration — They’ve spent time with your creative work and the value it offers.
Preference — They trust and appreciate what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it.
These are the objectives of classic brand marketing. But here, they’re not generated by focusing on the brand, but on satisfying the theme.
The mechanism is like / know / trust.
This is a known idea from content marketing, and it applies directly here:
Viewers come to like the creator from repeated exposure to valuable posts.
They come to know the creator over time through continued engagement.
They come to trust the creator through the consistent delivery of value.
This process doesn’t happen all at once. It accumulates as long as the theme remains well treated through posts forming a significant enough field enabling direct connection with the audience.
That trust is an earned asset.
In posting on satisfying the theme you are primarily going to market for attention. The benefits to you are derivative to that and therefore there’s no pressure to buy. No requirement to take action. The creative work is the offer. That’s the entire exchange: attention in return for satisfying the theme.
But what builds up over time is a well of goodwill which is a strategic asset. It’s its own form of demand generation. It can support all kinds of outcomes down the line — sales, referrals, partnerships, collaborations — without needing to be the actual focus of the creative.
The business can show up in the creative — just not as the premise.
It’s not that the creator’s business or endeavor must stay hidden. On the contrary, it can play a meaningful supporting role:
It can appear in stories, anecdotes, examples, or behind-the-scenes glimpses.
It might be what makes the creative work possible.
It might even reinforce the value of the theme.
But it’s never the main point. The premise is always the about the idealized achieved state and the audience’s relation to it. The theme stays centered on that. And when it does, the audience knows the creative isn’t contingent on any purchase. That’s what enables real trust.
This model works across creators and organizations of all kinds.
Solo creators. Entrepreneurs. Small businesses. Large incumbents. Nonprofits. Public institutions. This approach doesn’t require a particular scale or structure. It just requires something to offer — and the willingness to offer it on a theme.
The result is the same: An audience forms. Trust builds. And a well of awareness, consideration, and preference accumulates — not demanded, but earned.
Summary
Taken together, these three models give us a clear and comprehensive view of how the simple mechanics of the form for the creator and the audience and the inputs and outputs for each. They reveal the mechanics of the creative act (Theme / Field / Post), the arc of impact for the audience (Theme Funnel), and the outcomes that accrue to the creator (via earned awareness, consideration, and preference). And, the basic guidance for creators remains disarmingly simple: post on the theme (with media), and for those ready to go further, build on the theme (with data, software, AI, and goods and services). These models just show why that works — and now that we’ve laid them out, we can turn to the implications: what this means in practice, and how the form can be used intentionally through a set of enabling tools.