The Change Worshippers
If it were up to Jason Hirschhorn, President of Sling Media Entertainment, Richard Branson would be elected President of the USA. Government, of course being the stodgiest of all stodgy organizations. But bashing the established model is the easy part, and while the panel did spend a good amount of time writing its own b-school case study on the past ten years of the music industry, moderator and BusinessWeek Columnist Jon Fine circled back to the harder task: providing guidance for established firms that must learn how to survive or even thrive in a disruptive world.
Clearly, change is hard for the establishment; there is always risk in doing things differently. Yet that is exactly what the panel prescribed. Brad Jakeman, a former Executive VP with Macy’s Inc., has dubbed ROI as “removal of imagination.” In his mind, doing the same thing, over and over, does not guarantee success. It’s the idea that counts.
Paul Woolmington, Founding Partner of Naked Communications agreed, urging firms to invest in R&D. “Innovation is the lifeblood of America. Marketing services agencies are bereft of embracing the R&D attitude to learn...and to make mistakes.”
While most focus on disruptive technologies, Jakeman wisely pointed out messaging can also be disruptive, as in the case of Dove’s Real Women campaign. “I was fortunate enough to launch Live Richly,” he said, referring to Citibank’s disruptive ad campaign where the world’s largest bank basically told the world that there is more to life than money.
When Fine pressed Jakeman to respond to a disruptive message’s effect on sales, the response was candid. He said he was not close enough to those teams, but that it did provide notoriety, a good place to start. He also acknowledged that one of the greatest challenges in disruption is that firms allocated the gross majority of their time making sure that day-to-day operations are running, which sometimes leaves very little time and resources to allocated towards innovation.
And of course, the ad agency conspiracy theory was put front and center by Woolmington, who said that it is not in the best interest of large agencies to disrupt, as it screws up the manufacturing machine built in the 50s. And so it is the start ups to play the role of disruptor. At least until they grow large enough or are acquired, at which point they become protectors facing anew generation of disruptors.
