( Jerry Wind from Wharton asked me to answer this question. Here's what I came up with. I'd love to hear how you'd answer the question. Thanks.)
I believe that capitalism runs on the
inefficiencies in any given market. These inefficiencies force evolution. They
force change and innovation. Often rendering old business models irrelevant.
I’ve seen this over decades. Looking back, the
change that’s happened, and the pace at which its taken place, is hard to
fathom.
I was born into media. Ink in my veins. Four
generations of newspaper owners. I’m not talking about Hearst kind of newspaper
owners. I’m talking about newspaper owners from the other side of the tracks.
The kind of newspapers like the Canton Daily Ledger or the Oqwauka Current. Local,
family-style affairs. (I just checked Facebook; The Current now has 33
followers.)
At my dad’s paper (and, my grandfather’s before
him) everyone was involved. The same people wrote the stories, typeset the
paper, and ran the presses. Back then, it took 35 people to put out The Canton
Daily Ledger.
When I was a kid, before I became a paperboy, I’d
go down and hang out with the typesetters. These guys were all about the craft,
all about the process. They’d melt the lead, pour it into the Linotype machine - a big, frightening contraption, like
something out of a Steampunk nightmare. Then they’d pull the letters from the
Linotype and organize them upside down and backwards on a special rolling brass
table. A few quick moves of their hands and presto, the page was laid out. They
were fast. They were passionate. They were craftsman.
By the time I joined the paper – not counting my
time as a paperboy – I was in high school. The linotypes were pretty
much gone. And with them legions of craftsman. Folks who’d worked for decades
to create the perfect layout. It took more time to put a paper together the old
way, but that time allowed some space to be creative. Creativity would often
emerge from the negative space, the steps in the process. The time spent waiting
for the Linotype to print a few more letters. And, of course, from between the
letters themselves.
By the time I got to college, the computer
revolution was on. Now stat cameras took pictures, and huge type-setting
machines cranked out type. Sure, you still had to run the long galleys of type
through a wax machine and use your penknife to make layouts, but it was a
radical innovation.
Each summer I would work all the jobs at the
paper so that people could take their vacations. I’d write the obits for a
week. Run the press for a couple. And, of course, sell a few ads.
We’d take the layouts to the local Ludlum’s
Grocery store every afternoon, and discuss the price of the meat for the next
day’s ads. If you didn’t get enough wax on the back of the 3,9 and 8 you could find
yourself advertising a pound of meat for $.89 versus $3.98. Making a very
unhappy – and non-paying – customer of Ludlum’s Grocery
The job I liked the best on my summer rotation was
running the press. Pushing these huge, 900-pound rolls of paper around, loading
them into the presses, and then watching the paper come out, finished.
I started my first company in 1986. I bought a
magazine, Rocky Mountain Running News, and used it as the foundation to start a
larger magazine, Rocky Mountain Sports. It was a purchase made possible by another
radical shift in technology. Instead of paying $35,000 annually for typesetting,
I was able to buy a Mac Plus, a 20MB hard drive and a laser writer for
$23,000. I also got my hands on a beta version of Quark, which was, at the
time, basically a type-setting program for Macs.
So, there I was, a complete amateur, trying to
figure out how to typeset my magazine. While I didn’t need a typesetting house
for body copy, I’d still use them occasionally for ads.
You should have heard them when they saw those
first few issues. They just laughed. Gave me all kinds of grief about how awful
the kerning and leading was. How the choice of type was horrible. Every time we
talked they’d say, “This desktop publishing thing will never work. You’ll be
back.”
Well, we all know how that story ended.
We’re in the midst of another such revolution. And
it’s having a direct and profound effect on the advertising business. How it’s
created, how it’s consumed. And this revolution is all about connectivity. Now,
people can participate in culture, and by association, in the process of
creation, advertising or otherwise - by connecting digitally. They don’t have
to move to the right city, or work for the right company, to be involved.
It doesn’t matter whether they’re amateurs or
professionals. They now have the ability to work where they want, with whom
they want and how they want. We’re evolving, as Eric Raymond
so aptly put it, into a world ruled by the creative bazaar, and away from the
cathedrals of advertising that agencies have created.
You can call it crowdsourcing, co-creation or
open source innovation. The point is, the reality is, advertising will continue
to be democratized.
With this radical democratization, the structures
of advertising organizations are being transformed. Radically. Now one person
with a wireless connection can be an agency, a media company, or even a
manufacturer with the help of a 3D printer.
The other cultural shift that will only
accelerate this change, is that advertising is becoming more tactical. Especially
in the mobile world. Platforms like Google will make their money not from
interruptive display advertising, but from things like monetizing the call
button that comes up when you search for your local pizza shop.
There will be room for agencies. They’re not
going away. But they will be, they must be, radically smaller. Cultural
curators, tapping into talent from everywhere.
What will advertising be in 2020? It’s anybody’s
guess. But in the same way that the linotype machine gave way to the mac,
whatever it is will be radically different than it is today.
