gcp

Nice review of the year in the agency world by Ben Lunt over at Leo’s. Production companies are certainly where a lot of my best candidates are looking to head too.

fictionlab:

2010 review, part 1: Have you tried turning it off, and turning it on again?

Let’s be honest: 2010 has been far from an easy ride.

If the noughties were defined by an atmosphere of integration and mashable openness - in which all startups would support and empower one another, and the whole would be worth more than the sum of the parts - those days now seem like a dim and distant memory.

Open collaboration has been replaced, for the most part, by openly aggressive competition. Google now lives in fear of Facebook. Apple hates Adobe (and Google, for that matter). No one can agree on what it means to be “open” or “closed”, and friendship is defined primarily by convenience, where your only friend is your enemy’s enemy. Hence Facebook integrates with Bing but not Google; and it’s okay that MacBooks no longer ship with Flash, because Android phones support it just fine (kind of); and everyone knows the future is mobile, right?

Meanwhile, not only does the old world still steadfastly refuse to play ball, but it’s started fighting back. Cardinal Murdoch, no doubt still smarting from his experience with MySpace, decides to think the unthinkable (although “think” is perhaps too big a word here), choosing to build a massive paywall around The Times, and lose 90% of his online eyeballs as a result. Meanwhile, all the major US networks gang together to promise an extremely shaky start for GoogleTV. And then Hollywood pitches in with a hatchet job on Mark Zuckerberg (yes, The Social Network was great fun, but frankly WarGames had a more progressive portrayal of computer geekery; and that was made in 1983).

Naturally, the ad industry was in no way immune to the turmoil going on out there in the real world. The agency landscape has shifted irrevocably in the last 12 months, and has been rendered unrecognizable as a result. It’s no secret that Agency Republic and Lean Mean are in less than rude health. GT has been turned into a landing strip to support VML’s expansion into Europe. Dare appear to be taking over MCBD from the inside (which, let’s face it, is going to be very interesting to watch). But Farfar is gone forever (sniff). Meanwhile, pretty much all the more traditional agencies are finally starting to develop their digital chops, which is only accelerating the brain drain from specialist digital shops.

But the brain drain isn’t just confined to agencies; for every digital specialist headed apparently “above-the-line”, there are several others destined for a nascent digital production company. Independent prodcos (and this is particularly true of London) are thriving, with new faces such as Stink, Your Mum, Weir+Wong, Pirata and Half Cyborg going from strength to strength, and promising to challenge the (relatively) more established players such as Unit9, Rehab and B-Reel.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that 2010 has been something of a reboot for all of us; and nowhere more so than in digital. And with that comes both excitement, but also uncertainty. For all the changes we’ve seen in the last 10 years, I suspect they’re nothing compared to what the next ten will bring. And yet for everything new and challenging, there will also be something familiar and comforting. And more than that: a great many of those things that are shiny and new will also have something about them that we’ve seen before, and will be all the more accessible, and resonant, for it.

It is amazing to me that Murdoch can seriously believe that turning The Times into a Tory newsletter is a smart move. But it is equally astonishing that Google can develop something as ball-breakingly awesome as GoogleTV without bothering to get even one of the major networks on board first.

And those of us in ad land are not, of course, immune to the same kind of arrogance. Traditional advertising types might sometimes like to consider the possibility that digital sorts have been doing this for a while, and that they quite often know what they’re talking about. But, by the same token, digital specialists should remember that above-the-line knows a thing or two about telling a story – not to mention (whisper it) actually selling stuff – and doing so smartly and concisely.

We are all too prone to boiling everything down to a binary opposition … web vs TV, open vs closed, desktop vs mobile, advertising vs utility. But for this reboot to be meaningful, we need to learn from and respect one another. Because while some people are busy posturing and drawing battle lines, others will be grabbing, magpie-style, on to anything they can get their dirty little mitts on, and doing what works. Whilst the future might be digital, it certainly won’t be binary; it will be polygamous. The future is, quite frankly, a total slut. And so should we be.