I was reading Edward Bouche’s Five things agencies need to get good at over the weekend and I couldn’t help but think that his five point plan of “innovate, innovate, innovate”, speed and agility, customer engagement, attract the best talent and “give GenY the opportunity to change you” mirrors the ideas being touted by the Tech Start-Up gurus and the thought leaders in the media industry.
But I guess that’s what convergence is all about. Industries coming together to think the same way and operate using the same methodologies.
A kind of media tech nirvana if you like where the winners will be the most talented, agile, fleet of foot, innovative group of youngsters in the game. Right?
Wrong. While everybody is chasing the group think the next generation of winners will be those who think differently.
This isn’t to suggest that the old advertising, media and tech companies will survive by just doing what they have always done. It is merely to suggest that it will become very crowded in this convergence space if everybody is thinking and doing the same thing.
In the end the reason I think this model will fail is because the existing players in the media and tech landscape will struggle to attract the best young talent.
Take the advertising industry for example. Throughout the 20th Century advertising attracted the best young talent not because these energetic young minds wanted to make TV Commercials or Glossy Magazine Ads. In reality they wanted to make Films, write books, have their own radio shows, make pop music or photograph magazine fashion spreads. They wanted to make media their way. The reason they chose advertising is because they couldn’t afford to do any of these things. The barriers to entry were simply just to high.
What advertising allowed them to do was to leverage other people’s money to explore their ideas and their art. The result was a generation of campaign advertising where Art was tagged with a brand.
Today those barriers to entry simply no longer exist. Information technology has brought the cost of entry down to practically zero. Today anyone can take photographs, make films, write an eBook… etc and then distribute them on the web. The best compete with the worst for their 15 seconds of fame.
The same applies to the established technology brands. It doesn’t really matter if its hardware or software. The barrier to entry are negligible. So why aspire to spend your day in a cubical when you can sweat it out with your mates in your own garage band?
The reason traditional media, advertising and now information technology struggle to attract the most talented, agile, fleet of foot, innovative group of youngsters in the game is simply because they just don’t need to be there to do the things they want to do with their lives. Either today or tomorrow. They just don’t need their ideas, their technology or their art to be branded anymore.
Posted on August 23, 2011
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