From creativity to scalability.

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

• When the Winkelvoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, sued their ex Harvard chum Mark Zuckerberg under the accusation that he had stolen their idea for a social media platform, Mark’s answer was a smart one: social networks already existed.
• MySpace, Friendster and other now defunct companies were launched several years before Facebook.
• All Zucks did was improve something that’d already shown potential.
• Originality is overrated.
• Ideas are a dime a dozen.
• What is an idea anyway?
• Anyone can have one.
• Few can execute it.
• Even fewer can scale it up.
• It is extremely difficult to know beforehand whether an idea, a mere hypothesis, is scalable.
• It is a leap of faith.
• The proverbial “proof of concept”.
• Mark Zuckerberg arguably has never had an idea of his own.
• As per the Winkelvoss bros he did not ideate Facebook.
• Zucks’s two other crown jewels, Instagram and Whatsapp, were purchased from their original founders (whom he bullied out the door shortly thereafter).
• But let’s define scalability before we get ourselves into a semantic rabbit hole.
• Lest we incur the same issue we have with “strategy”, which seems to mean something different to everyone you ask.
• 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.
• Knowing how to open 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.
• Harnessing untapped energy.
• For instance, this is a somewhat crude example but you’ll get the point: using flight attendants as international couriers.
• Or smugglers.
• Birds, bees and pollination.
• Scalability in certain industries such as advertising is not easy.
• In the ad world most of our “ideas” are reactive and short lived: a client presents a problem in the form of a brief, we create a customized solution in the form of a campaign and a couple months later we’re back to square one.
• Unused or rejected advertising ideas, for a number of psychological, cultural, emotional and, sometimes, legal reasons, can rarely be “sold” to another client.
• Advertising is painstakingly inefficient and mired in friction.
• The output of the human workforce in the ad business model is restricted by insurmountable confines.
• Flesh and bone employees.
• Artificial intelligence is not ready to replace the organic intelligence of creatives (yet).
• How many passable campaigns can the most productive of creative teams come up with, say, in a week?
• What’s the limit between a prolific creative and a hack cranking out clichés?
• The SuperCuts parable: the only way to expand its business is by adding more stores, more chairs and more barbers.
• Granted, a trendy hair salon might be able to add value and thus charge a premium through the star power of celeb hairstylists or the addition of perks such as bartenders serving cocktails or espressos, DJs.
• Nevertheless, cutting people’s hair is one unscalable industry.
• Scale, that annoying Silicon Valley mantra.
• A cliché?
• Oh yes.
• We could argue that volume-based business models built single-mindedly on the notion of growth will sooner rather than later hit a ceiling.
• Possibly.
• For the foreseeable future though, scalability is the name of the game.

To be continued next week.