The tin can telephone is a warning sign

From The Odyssey's sold out IMAX screenings to a $12 toy phone, the signs are everywhere. The hard part is proving they matter

By Chris Marine, Founder/CEO, Campfire

A few weeks ago I was at a friend's house and their kids ran to answer the phone the second it rang. Not a smartphone. Not a tablet. A landline, plugged into the wall, shaped like an actual tin can with a curly cord and all. The product is literally called Tin Can. My friend's kid was thrilled every time it rang, because it meant grandma, a cousin, or a friend from school wanted to talk.

I laughed at first. Then I thought about it for the rest of the drive home.

That phone isn’t a novelty item. It is a small, specific decision a parent made on purpose. And it’s happening in a lot of houses right now. Parents are buying kids devices that intentionally cannot scroll, cannot recommend, and cannot learn what keeps a eight year old staring at a screen. A CNN piece on the trend framed it plainly: landlines are ringing in homes again, and parents say the retro technology is delaying social media use and building real communication skills in their kids. Colorado Public Radio found the same pattern with families who had never owned a landline in their adult lives, buying one specifically to put off the day their kid needs a phone that can also feed them content. The Christian Science Monitor traced it to the same root cause: a growing body of research connecting smartphones and social media to real risks for kids, and parents responding by reintroducing the old household phone.

A researcher at McGill put words to what's actually driving this. It isn't the device itself. It's that platforms are built to keep handing you new content every time you pick them up, and parents are starting to notice, and push back.

That's one tin can telephone. But it isn't alone.

People are also walking back into the theater

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened in July shot entirely on IMAX film, and the box office response wasn't subtle. AMC reported more than 4.3 million moviegoers across its US and international theaters in the film's opening days, with some locations running showtimes continuously for more than 85 straight hours just to keep up with demand. IMAX shares jumped on the news, with the company on pace for what could be a record year of ticket sales built substantially on this one release. Forbes pointed out that some IMAX 70mm screenings sold out at 3 a.m., which is not a scheduling accident. It's audiences specifically chasing a format, not just a movie.

People didn't need to see The Odyssey in a theater. Streaming exists. They chose to anyway, and they chose a premium, deliberately old-school format to do it.

And back toward the format with a person behind it

Vinyl just crossed a billion dollars in US sales for the first time since 1983, according to the RIAA's 2025 year end report, its nineteenth straight year of growth. That is not a niche collector story anymore. It's real spending, growing every year, in a category everyone assumed was dead twenty years ago.

Radio tells a similar story, and it comes with a warning for anyone planning media around algorithmic platforms. A 2026 industry study found consumer fatigue building specifically around algorithm-driven and AI-generated content, introducing the idea of "habit softening," where people still show up to a platform but visit it less often. Social media took the steepest year over year decline of any platform measured. Radio was one of only two categories that held steady, losing less than a single percentage point of frequent listeners while nearly every algorithmic platform around it eroded.

Here's the part that should get any marketer's attention. Nielsen's own research shows marketers rank radio dead last in perceived effectiveness, while it actually delivers some of the highest measured ROI of any channel, trailing only social media. We are undervaluing a channel because it doesn't look modern, not because it doesn't work.

The pattern we're actually watching

None of this is really about tin cans, IMAX film stock, or turntables. It's about whether people's stated values are starting to show up in their actual behavior. For years, people have told researchers they're uneasy about algorithmic feeds, worried about kids and screens, and nostalgic for media made by an identifiable person instead of a recommendation engine. The interesting question was always whether that discomfort would ever change what people actually do with their time and money.

The early answer looks like yes. A parent buying a landline is choosing a device with no algorithm behind it at all. A radio listener tuning into a local DJ is choosing a person over a playlist built for them by a model. A theater full of people at 3 a.m. is choosing a shared, physical experience over a screen they already own at home. Print, local broadcast, radio, and film all share one thing TikTok and Instagram don't: there's a person, or a room full of them, making editorial choices you can actually name.

Now the harder question: how do you measure any of this

This is where it gets genuinely difficult for our industry, and it's the part we spend the most time on at Campfire.

Social platforms have spent the last year getting better at proving they drive sales. TikTok Shop now runs checkout directly inside the app, and its integration with Shopify has matured to the point where product catalogs, orders, and ad performance sync automatically. Programmatic DSPs and streaming networks - also directly tied to Shopify now. TikTok Shop's US sales alone are projected to clear ten billion dollars this year. That's a real, closeable loop, and it's exactly why platforms keep getting more credit in the numbers.

But that same closeable loop is part of the problem. Multiple studies now show platform reported conversions running well ahead of what actually shows up in Shopify's own order data, with one analysis finding platform claimed sales exceeding real orders by 150 to 200 percent once brands cross reference multiple sources of truth. TikTok gets to grade its own homework, and unsurprisingly, it grades generously.

So here's the question we think matters more than any single platform's dashboard: if people are increasingly finding their most meaningful media moments offline, in a theater, on a drive with the radio on, in a physical record they chose to own, how much of the influence that actually moves someone toward a brand is even visible to a pixel? A black box algorithmic feed can prove it captured your attention for four seconds. It cannot prove that attention changed how you feel about anything. Attention and influence are not the same measurement, and treating them as interchangeable is how budgets end up misallocated for years at a time, exactly the way Nielsen's own data shows has happened with radio.

What we'd actually do about it

We don't think the answer is abandoning platforms that can prove a sale. We think the answer is refusing to let the easiest number to measure become the only number that counts. That means triangulating across sources instead of trusting one platform's self reported view of its own contribution to growth, and it means being honest that some of the most valuable media moments, the ones that build real familiarity with a brand, are still going to happen somewhere a pixel can't reach.

If your media plan only rewards what's easy to attribute, you'll keep funding the loudest channel instead of the one actually doing the work. We'd rather help you find out which one that really is.