Earlier today Chris and I hosted a session at the Boards Summit called Business Unusual. It was an exploration of how companies can and must fulfil their long term potential if they are to meet the seismic changes facing creative businesses today.
I opened the presentation with a recap of the issues as we see them, then turned it over to Chris who hosted a compelling conversation with the owners of three companies: Furlined, Epoch and Motion Theory.
The text of my talk is here, together with the extraordinary images from Rodney Smith's work that I used to bring the narrative to life.
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Good morning. Welcome to Business Unusual. 
To start, can I ask how many of you have a definition of what business AS usual means today?
Or are comfortable predicting what the rules will be a year from now. Or five years from now?
The reason that no-one raised their hand is that the advertising food chain is dead. The model on which this industry has depended for fifty years, advertiser - agency - production company - post production and music doesn’t exist any more.
Today, everyone in this room faces a future that is entirely unknown.
One of the themes of the last two days has been the advertising industry’s adaptation to the digital age. Bob Greenberg’s talk this morning describes how the production model needs to adapt to the demands of digital technology.
Clearly, he’s right. He’s also one of the best, and only examples so far, of a company that started as one thing in the advertising supply chain evolving into something quite different. In the ten years since he led the way, you could argue no one has followed him.
But, in my view, talking about digital at all misses the point. It’s not the demands of digital that this industry is responding to.
It’s the demands of the consumer.
Which starts with the inability of traditional agencies to connect clients to audiences with the insight and impact they used to. Which in turn is creating all kinds of opportunities for other companies to step into that void.
Today, some of it is being filled by companies who are mastering the fact that connections to consumers are evolving weekly.
But even companies like Mekanism and Motion Theory and the Barbarian Group are faced with the reality that for all their fluidity and media ambivalence, where we will be as a society a year from now will require a completely new perspective.
Because the differences we’re participating in require a much bigger leap than even the introduction of television demanded.
The first television commercial was broadcast in 1941. To 6,000 homes in the New York metropolitan area. If the media planner had added Chicago to the buy, they would have reached another 50 television sets.
It took television 13 years to reach 50 million people.
It took facebook 9 months to add 100 million users. The same time it took Apple to download a billion iPhone apps.
The world is changing in real time. And when, almost certainly next summer, we are introduced to devices that finally merge entertainment and information into one by combining the best of our laptops and our televisions, it will all change again.
And yet, while the way society communicate undergoes a revolution, the advertising production community is gingerly exploring evolution.
The introduction of AICP Digital for instance, while clearly a step forward, also highlights how far this industry has to go. After all, today, what’s not digital?
The production community is trapped by its past. And can’t yet see its future. Which is no surprise. Give that we’re living through an epoch. A period of history that will be measured by what came before and what comes after.
Which makes the production community its own greatest obstacle.
Creative companies are usually started by people with a single-minded passion for a craft.
After working for someone else, they realize they’d rather work for themselves. Their talent and determination establishes their success. They focus on the work. Which attracts other like-minded people, the business grows, bringing financial success, more talent, perhaps another office, and for a number of years, 8-15 typically, they run a successful, and largely satisfying business.
Of which they are an integral and usually essential part.
Which isn’t a problem until one of two things happens.
One, the founders start thinking about what they want to do next, even if that is simply less of what they do now. Which reduces the company’s emotional and talent power supply.
Or two, the industry changes overnight, and redesigning the business model means the founders have to see themselves entirely differently.
Because they are the business.
After working for someone else, they realize they’d rather work for themselves. Their talent and determination establishes their success. They focus on the work. Which attracts other like-minded people, the business grows, bringing financial success, more talent, perhaps another office, and for a number of years, 8-15 typically, they run a successful, and largely satisfying business.
Of which they are an integral and usually essential part.
After all, what’s MJZ without David Zander? Radical without John and Frank? Smuggler without Patrick and Brian?
We see this model all the time. It’s why there are very few creative service companies that are more than twenty years old.
A tiny handful that are thirty.
And only one that we can think of that is forty.
Because creative companies almost never outlive their founders.
Which if you think about it as an industry, is an extraordinary waste of human, emotional, financial and creative capital.
After all, why shouldn’t there be great long-term brands in the creative services arena. Why shouldn’t Smuggler, Epoch, Human, or Framestore be just as relevant thirty years from now? Adapting, innovating, leading the change into the beam-me up Scotty world of 2040.
We believe every company has the potential to outlive its founders. And that would change everything.
Because when no one can predict what the world will look like even five years from now, those are exactly the kind of companies we need to build.
Companies that are fluid and adaptable.
Companies that see Business Unusual as Business AS Usual.
Companies that in our vernacular Plan The Last Day First.
This would represent a sea change. One that would unlock innovation in torrents. After all, creativity is the fuel of innovation, a natural resource in this industry.
It requires four things.
First. That we see the industry differently. Which the last two days have started to bring into focus. And which Bob’s talk provides one lens on. Though one that I think is still too agency centric.
Second. That we see our companies differently. And specifically, that we see what makes them great. Which is usually not what we think. After all, for 100 years Kodak thought they were a film company. They weren’t. They were an image capture company. A difference they realized too late.
Third. That we see ourselves differently. As innovators. Not passengers. Today, you can sit as high on the creativity food chain as you think you have a right to.
And Fourth. That as founders we learn how to make ourselves irrelevant. A condition most business owners avoid pathologically until it is too late to make a meaningful difference. But which is essential if your business is to outlive you.
Today the advertising food chain is one link long.
The advertiser.
What you do about that depends on how you build your company from here.
