communication is essential to business making and it involves more than the ability to name your product, write a tag line or a press release. It's an intricate, rational and scalable effort and, let's face it, not anyone can do it.

4/25/2010

Digital industry - chilly days

Last Friday a couple of the people running digital agencies met with a UK planner to discuss the options of putting together a sort of knowledge camp for digital. It was like back in the old days with planners' meetings only this time it was supposed to be focused on digital.

It was funny to watch how, being the young pups that we are, we looked at this as both a threat and and opportunity. An opportunity because it would give us a chance to go after new business maybe in the portfolios of other agencies present, and a threat because it would mean sharing knowledge which we think is proprietary and makes us hold on to our clients. Overall the meeting was sad and inconsequential because we were all heads of agencies and all we cared about were procedural issues and "industry" problems as opposed to being really concerned with the systemic lack of know-how that the industry suffers from.

I cannot blame us however. In times of affluence, everyone is focusing on expanding knowledge, on finding out better and smarter ways to create and innovate. In dire straights, we focus on survival, and, being the bureaucratic people that we are, for us survival comes from making rules. Other people, in times of need, become inventive and get smart. With Romanians it seems that in times of need we start imposing regulations [just look at what the government is doing].
i'm not saying this is a bad thing. I personally do not have a solution at this time, but that meeting just felt sad. Because nobody was there to talk about how we can become smarter as an industry. everyone was out to protect his slice of the pie....
I hate this effing financial crisis :(

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