Know thy frenemy. Part 1 of 3. Home of the brave, land of the free-lance.
May 27, 2015
By Gonzalo López Martí – LMMIAMI.COM
- If, like yours truly, you run a more or less conventional advertising operation you might be quite aware by now of the fact that there’s an awful lot of excess capacity out there.
- Brainpower for hire.
- Free agents.
- Galore.
- They are hungry.
- They are equipped.
- They are MILLENNIALS.
- You pro’bly know too that these little bastards are digitally and socially ganging up on us.
- Let’s call it “crowdsourcing”, for lack of a better neologism.
- No new news there.
- Well.
- We can circle the wagons.
- We can try and ignore them.
- Block them.
- Even attempt to defeat them.
- (No chance).
- Or we can join them.
- How?
- Co-opt them.
- Use them.
- I was gonna say “hire” them but the word is a bit of a misnomer.
- “Retain” them would be a better notion.
- Cuz they’re not interested in a 9-2-5 job.
- They couldn’t care less about health benefits, a 401k or vacations.
- They don’t need a cubicle or a computer.
- They don’t need visas or work permits from La Migra.
- You might not ever meet them face 2 face IRL.
- IRL stands for In Real Life.
- They just want a piece of the action.
- Needless to say, they will take it.
- They will cut the middlemen (and middlewomen).
- Sooner rather than later.
- Whether we like it or not.
- We can steward them into the game.
- Coexist.
- Or they will steward us out.
- The action is far removed from Madison Avenue these days.
- Remember the old adage that said something like “the main asset of an ad agency rides the elevator up every morning at 9 and rides it down at 5.”
- Those Don Draper days are over.
- Let’s see what the Harvard Business Review has to say about the aforementioned excess capacity talent pool:
- “… there are now an estimated 17.9 million ‘solopreneurs’ — people working at least 15 hours a week outside of traditional jobs — and another 12.1 million “side-giggers” who do regular independent work but for less than 15 hours a week, according to the fourth annual ‘State of Independence in America’ report from MBO Partners. The number of solopreneurs making more than $100,000 from their independent work was estimated to be 2.7 million…”
- These 17.9 million are on US soil.
- Add the rest of the world to the equation and the talent pool could easily be multiplied by 20.
- Darling, if you thought free-lancing is the province of little odd jobs like logos for neighborhood hairstylists or hipster gastropubs, think again.
- This ginormous availability of talent could solve the oldest conundrum in the business world: navigating the uneven tides and waves of bottlenecks and excess capacity.
- Reducing delays, drag & friction.
- Increasing efficiency in unheard of ways.
- Needless to say, it might & will undercut our already slim profit margins.
- Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.
- Encroaching will be futile.
- We’re witnessing firsthand the reaction of the establishment against Uber (and Lyft, its competitor): the taxi lobby is rattling its saber.
- It’s just a matter of time though.
- Taxis as we know them must evolve or they will die.
- They won’t defeat the new paradigm.
- They’d better join it.
- As should we in the ad racket.
- The digital era is about processing large amounts of data in a short period of time?
- Yes.
- The digital era is about mobility & cutting cords?
- Sure.
- But none of these definitions fully captures the essence of the era we are living in.
- The digital era is, simply put, DIY taken to 11.
- On steroids.
- Millions of little Don Drapers, male & female.
- Hungry, equipped and ready to rumble.
- To be continued next week.