Technology is the new rock and roll
Greg Grimmer: Imagine a testosterone-heavy flat in Hackney within a single speed racing bike’s ride of silicon roundabout and any number of unshaven techies living off nothing but toast and beans as they seek to create the next billion dollar web/mobile/digital revolution. Surely they should be working for the good of advertising?
Fans of the long forgotten comedy duo Newman and Baddiel will remember a similar headline to the one above citing ‘comedy as the new rock and roll’ back in the early 90s as the young comedians sold out Wembley Arena, rather than playing to half-pissed audiences in the back room of a pub.
At a suitably plush media do recently I was discussing this phenomenon with the ever-dapper Glen Wilson, who (while still looking as though he could play rhythm guitar in a half decent electro rock band) cited the fact that it is computer scientists and not comics or rock stars who are the new feted wunderkind.
The hubris around the $1 billion purchase of Instagram, the Facebook IPO and even the sale of dull as ditchwater website MoneySavingExpert have got the media chattering classes squawking like a murder of crows.
The success of two comedy shows that cover the Geek world – the excellent home grown IT crowd and the equally funny US import The Big Bang Theory – neatly close the circle around comedy and computers and help prove the point about the current coolness of uncool. But what are the implications to the media and advertising workers?
As recently as 2005 when I took over as MD of the ZED agency, media folk were still making jokes abut people in digital media being good with computers. My group CEO even asked me to set up the projector in a pitch on the basis that if I ran a digital company I must obviously be skilled with every aspect of computer peripherals.
Fast forward seven years and now every iPhone owner is an app expert, every media planner a member of the Twitterati and every CEO an expert in social media trends.
But where are the CTOs or CIOs in the big media companies? Whether it be the media owner side, where editorial and sales still rule the roost, or agencies where planners and traders hold sway, there appears to be a lack of technical (or even data) specialists at the top table?
The big agency groups are to be applauded for their promotion of ‘talent’ specialists to nurture their main asset (their people) but even truly digital CEOs like Rob Horler of Aegis will struggle to create great technology people (and crucially add shareholder value) in the same way as the true technology players.
Now as with all rules there has to be exceptions – and indeed in the new wave of digital media owners tend to proliferate with chief technology officers all eager to cookie your clients website to within one inch of their virtual lives. This takes me back to my rock and roll analogy. Anyone that has seen Hollywood’s version of the Facebook story will remember the Frat house environment enjoyed by Zuck and his mates when they first hit the valley.
The British equivalent will be less scenic, but imagine if you will some testosterone-heavy flat in Hackney within a single speed racing bike’s ride of silicon roundabout and any number of unshaven techies living off nothing but toast and beans as they seek to create the next billion dollar web/mobile/digital revolution. Surely they should be working for the good of advertising?
An influential piece in Fast Company magazine, which was picked up by the achingly hip SXSW festival and tweeted by the great and the good, called for “ad agencies to be more like tech start ups” but the reality is if you are running the R+D department of Vivaki or Group M you are about as far away from the Instagram-type start up as you would be working for Cisco or HP.
It is true media agencies have the benefit of being able to aggregate their technologies across their seemingly ever-expanding client bases but they still don’t create technologies with an exit strategy in mind.
Creative agencies have the massive disadvantage by their very nature of being creative and therefore being unable to re-cycle creative technology ideas across a disparate client base. By default this will mean their strike rate is far lower than with more ‘traditional’ creativity, meaning that margins will be disastrously affected the more digital they become.
If it isn’t stretching my rock and roll analogy too far ad agencies need to be more like the concert promoter or the record company rather than the budding guitarist living on the breadline to improve creativity. And as with rock stars there will be no-one counting those that didn’t make it but plenty happy to become the next Bono or Jay Z.
Similarly the money men, the VCs and Private Equity hounds, will back a bunch of toast-eating kids with the need for funding on the basis that 100 can fail if one succeeds at the level of a Facebook or Zynga. The agency model is still built on cash flow, making payroll and slim profit margins, meaning that any earn out multiple is going to be substantially lower.
So what does this mean for us mere mortals of media? Well the Talent Officers will be kept busy trying to both attract and retain the best technical talent within any corporate environment (sales or buying side) and if you really want to create a truly technical start up be prepared for a lot of beans on toast and start young.