Clusterluck. Part 2
April 25, 2017
By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com
- Business thrives in clusters.
- Promiscuity.
- Most industries operate like groups of stray cats in an alley: they might sound like they are fighting but they are in fact mating.
- A ckusterf*ck in the very best sense of the word.
- Let’s call it “clusterluck” (wink wink nudge nudge) or the sake of coining a catchy corporate jargon-friendly neologism.
- Forgive me for stating the obvious and using some off-color clichés (ironically of course).
- I’m doing so with a rhetorical purpose.
- It is funny how we must remind ourselves of these truths (or truisms) once and again.
- Particularly if an industry that badly needs innovation.
- Cuz, let’s face it, you hardly will get any disruptive new thinking from the WPPs, Omnicoms or Publicis of this world.
- They are not in the business of innovating, as much as they claim otherwise.
- They are legacy brands with legacy biz models.
- They will never admit it but they regard innovation as friction.
- If anything, their innovation boils down to cutting costs behind their clients’ backs.
- A race to the bottom to inoculate themselves -only temporarily in most cases- against the nasty law of diminishing returns that dangles over the head of pretty much all business models based on hourly fees.
- Madison Avenue needs little startups to scoop them up and absorb their rejuvenating blood.
- Because here’s a dirty little secret (conveniently protected by ironclad NDAs and NonCompete agreements)
- An awful lot of the work your big international agency is pitching you as its own actually comes white-labelled from little boutiques like López Martí Miami.
- It is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
- They have the access, we have the ideas.
- The proverbial win-win.
- They are just middlemen, essentially buying it from us and selling it to you with a substantial mark up.
- Until one day, they decide to buy us altogether.
- It is a natural part of the cycle.
- Eventually, clusters undergo consolidation waves.
- A big dog usually buys up the smaller ones.
- Or a big cat, if you will
- Until it collapses under its own weight and becomes the fertilizer that’ll allow the process to begin again in full atomized mode.
- In short: build it and they will come.
- “They” being clients and colleagues slash competitors big & small trying to feed off of you.
- Or even buy you out.