From creativity to scalability. Part 2.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Scalability is the ability and proclivity for expansion and growth of a concept, process or platform.
• Not to be confused with “excess capacity”.
• “Bandwidth” can be used as synonym in certain cases though.
• In the business world, it is the ability to streamline and systematize a process with the least possible friction.
• Opening the spigot with minimum effort.
• When a business initiative gets a life all its one.
• Frequently, it means reducing the human factor or removing it altogether.
• Robotization, automation, etc.
• In some ways, it might entail piggybacking in a judo-like way on pre-existing social or market wide forces.
• Pollination.
• Harnessing untapped energy.
• Eg; using flight attendants as international couriers.
• What we call “ideas” in advertising are rarely scalable.
• Most of our “ideas” are painfully labor intensive and short lived.
• Now, what if I told you that social media platforms are massively scaled up advertising agencies in disguise?
• To wit:
• The users, unbeknownst to them, play the dual role of staff and consumers.
• They are the actual creatives & producers of content pitching products and services to one another, stealthily harnessed and channeled by algorithms and bots to do Zuckerberg’s bidding free of charge.
• Silicon Valley is the new Madison Avenue.
• I’ll close with a little quote from the film My dinner with André, directed by Louis Malle (1981).

“I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison (…) Escape before it’s too late.”