Business Archives
What would happen if we decided at the beginning when a company should die?
I've had a few conversations recently about the idea of businesses with expiration dates and I thought maybe it was worth getting some thoughts down. Essentially I've been playing with the thought that instead of puttering out 8 years down the line there might be an opportunity for a company to choose its end date and put itself to rest peacefully.
Nobody wins forever. It just doesn't happen. The big company who have been successful for a century can be counted on your hands. Of course there are Harvard Business Review case studies written about them and they've been massively successful, but they are anomalies. A company like GE really shouldn't exist according to most of what we know about the world. (They are a client of mine, so take whatever I say about them with a grain of salt.) They're massive, in a ton of different businesses and have existed for over 100 years. This isn't normal.
What we see in reality are millions of corpses of businesses and ideas that have made their impact (or not) and then petered out into oblivion without leaving much more than a memory. Some of them get bought and swallowed by a bigger company, others have their ideas copied and commodotized and many just don't have the business or financial chops to make it all work for more than a few years.
So what if instead of worrying about all that you just decided at the beginning you were going to end it all six years in? I'm not sure how you'd decide the timeframe, but let's put that aside for a second and imagine what would happen if you did. One hope is that it would solve the short-term over long-term problem. Part of the long-term issue is that you have no idea how far into the future "long-term" really is. Company management doesn't know how long the company will last, so they optimize for the now (they also don't know how long their jobs will last, but I'll get to that in a minute). It may be overly hopeful, but as long as one choose a reasonable time-frame (5-10 years) I wonder if you couldn't lift the decision-making out of the immediate.
The problem here, of course, is that the employees will likely not plan on sticking around for all that time. This, I think, is actually the biggest problem in most of business at the moment. It's certainly the shortcoming of my business expiration idea, because if employees aren't in it for the full haul we'll have the same sort of misaligned incentives and general screwups (at least at the beginning). So on this one, what if we started making jobs with expiration dates? Most of the people I know go into jobs at the moment with little plans of making it beyond three years (as of 2008 the average job tenure for Americans between 25 and 34 years of age was 2.7 years). Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing isn't what I'm really interested in at the moment, instead I wonder what would happen if you just capped it. Especially in the advertising industry, where turnover seems higher than most, what if you just signed people up for 2.5 years in the first place. Companies would know what to expect out of the employees and could plan their transition far better and employees wouldn't have to stew as they got bored. Obviously you'd have to figure out a financial incentive system that worked with this sort of arrangement so that the person didn't check out at year two, but that could be figured out I suspect.
Anyhow, as usual, this is just me thinking out loud. Happy to hear any thoughts. I don't know if either of these are actually good ideas, but they at least seem theoretically intriguing.
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How Netflix pursues you use their service more not less.
Today at lunch with James I rattled off a story about Netflix that I have been telling lots of people lately for some reason. Basically the story is that even though it would seem like Netflix would rather you had a subscription and never rented anything, it's quite the opposite. After lunch I told James I would find that quote, and what do you know, I did. It's from that Napoleon Dynamite Netflix prize article from the New York Times last year. Here's the quote:
For Netflix, this is doubly important. Customers pay a flat monthly rate, generally $16.99 (although cheaper plans are available), to check out as many movies as they want. The problem with this business model is that new members often have a couple of dozen movies in mind that they want to see, but after that they're not sure what to check out next, and their requests slow. And a customer paying $17 a month for only one movie every month or two is at risk of canceling his subscription; the plan makes financial sense, from a user's point of view, only if you rent a lot of movies. (My wife and I once quit Netflix for precisely this reason.) Every time Hastings increases the quality of Cinematch even slightly, it keeps his customers active.
Even though logic would success Netflix could make more money if people rented less, the cost of it is increased turnover. At lunch we spent a bit of time thinking about other industries where you could make this case. Customer service is a really obvious one: In industries/categories where folks interact with customer service a lot (can't think of any right now), the benefit of investing there might overcome the cost of turnover.
I love this sort of business logic. It means that your best interests are aligned with your consumers best interests and everyone is happier (though, of course, Netflix would always rather you upgraded your plan and it's sort of interesting to think about how they promote the one DVD plan versus the one DVD plus streaming plan, where overall they want you to get your money's worth but they probably assume you wouldn't cancel the streaming option even if you didn't use it).
Hrm, lots to think about.
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An old post that I never finished, but am now posting after the latest news of a Google Chrome Operating System.
[Editor's Note: Inspired by Google's announcment of a Chrome OS and this Jeff Jarvis post in response to it I decided to publish one of my half-written blog posts (I have a folder labeled that on my desktop). This particular post was actually more like 80 percent finished, I just added on a last paragraph.]
Back in October of last year, Nick Carr had a great breakdown of the different network strategies. His point was that everything is often lumped under "network effect" when the reality of the situation is that it's seldom that pure. (His network effect definition: "It exists when the value of a product or service to an individual user increases as the overall number of users increases.") He breaks the strategies down to data mining, digital sharecropping, two-sided markets, economies of scale and complements.
While the whole post is worth a read, it's the latter that I want to focus on. Google, as Carr points out, is the ultimate complement company. After all, as he points out "Google makes more money as all forms of Internet use increase." In fact, Carr expanded on this idea back in September in a post specifically about Google:
Google's protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business. Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers' needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks -- entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions -- Google's range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That's why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle.
This is a point I've been trying to make to people (and clients) for a long time. Google has a few very unique things going for itself as a business, but it also has some not so unique things that it just seems to understand better than the other businesses out there. The most important of these is the role of a market leader.
Put simply, when you've got the kind of market share that Google has (72 percent in the US as of February) its cheaper for you to acquire new internet users than it is to steal share. This works pretty much across the board, but very few companies are willing to accept it because it means that some of the money you spend on acquiring customers is actually going to the other guy.
What that means is everything Google does is about getting more people to use the internet more. Use Android as an example: It is absolutely in Google's best interest to release a mobile OS that makes it easy to browse the web because that means more people using the internet more which means more searches on Google (because of that market dominance) which means more clicks on the paid ads. Voila, you're rich.
So, turning attention back to the Chrome operating system, basically it doesn't matter to Google how things turn out with it. It's a win-win for them: If they get huge pickup on it, awesome. If this causes Microsoft to build an OS for netbooks, awesome (as that would mean more people using the web). Just look at the story of Chrome, all of a sudden Microsoft and Firefox are working harder than ever to get new and improved versions of their browser out, all of which will just mean more people using the web more and therefore using Google more which will lead to more clicks on those damn ads. Not a bad deal.
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Malcolm Gladwell brought up an interesting question about Silicon Valley's focus in his review of Chris Anderson's Free.
[Editor's Note: I didn't mean to weigh in on this Gladwell/Anderson Free debate. I swear that this isn't really about their arguments (except the first two paragraphs). But if you're sick of reading people talking about this stuff feel free to skip it, I'll understand.]
I haven't read Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price
, but I've now read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker review and Anderson's rebuttal and have three things to say.
First, Gladwell's argument is nowhere near as strong as I thought it would be. Second, Anderson's chooses what was most obviously the weakest argument in the piece ("If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can't you pay people to write?"), which seems like a little bit of a cop out. Third (though it's the first interesting point I've made), Gladwell hits on something that I've been puzzling over lately as it relates to the online advertising world: Why everyone is so focused on more cheaper things instead of fewer expensive ones.
As Gladwell puts it:
In the pharmaceutical world, what's more, companies have chosen to use the potential of new technology to do something very different from their counterparts in Silicon Valley. They've been trying to find a way to serve smaller and smaller markets--to create medicines tailored to very specific subpopulations and strains of diseases--and smaller markets often mean higher prices. The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That's the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn't a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property--information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.
This is a hugely important point and, in my mind, the ultimate promise of the web. We have other media that is excellent at being mass (TV, for instance), yet everyone is obsessed with recreating that. The reasoning is that the advertising market (which, for better or for worse, still supports the web) isn't efficient enough yet to serve up ads to small segments of the population, no matter how desirable that segment may be (that's not entirely true, but close enough that I'll let it slide for now).
It's interesting to imagine what the web would look like if it could manage that efficiency. The laws of advertising work something like this (apologies to all those who are already comfortable with this): The more targeted your audience, the more you pay. Now there is certainly a premium charged for scale (tons of people), but outside that the fundamentals operate roughly according to plan. As I mentioned before, this doesn't work on the web because there are too many players and an outdated system of purchasing that, more or less, carries costs with each additional site. Basically it's incredibly inefficient.
None of this is to dispute Gladwell's point, though, rather to try to understand why Silicon Valley has generally moved against the logic of more targeted and expensive content.
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Volume 3 of a conversation between myself and Johnny Vulkan about business, data and the future of the universe.
[Editor's Note: As I explained yesterday in volume 2 and the day before in volume 1, this is an email exchange between myself and Johnny Vulkan. This is the third and final installment of a conversation that could have easily gone on for about 40 more. It started on March 10, 2009 and ended last week. This is an experiment, let me know if you like it.]
From: Johnny
To: Noah
Date: March 30, 2009
Ahhh... the Google public offering... that takes me back. I wonder how history will record the last two decades from 1990-2010. They witnessed the dot com boom, a dot com crash and now the worst recession most of us have ever experienced. Luckily we'll have lots of tweets to look back on for the latter part so that will help clear things up for future generations....hmmm.
The apprentice anarchist in me feels that Jack Welch, while belatedly coming to the defence of the 'long term view' when it comes to results, doesn't go far enough. We maybe need a more radical reappraisal of business and the 'rules'.
We've collectively created business as a game with its own scoring system of highs and lows. Games get played, and games need winners and losers. That is what business has become. Someone wins. Someone has to lose. We have dehumanized business into a televised sporting franchise with a scoreboard. But lets look at what a business really is. It's simply a group of people organized to make a good or service that those people would like to be paid for delivering. They are you and me, the guy next door. People with families, dogs, cats and occasionally a collection of Swarovski crystal ornaments. They're just people.
If you stop playing the game of business and let go of the notion that you have to win and your competitor has to lose then you stop fixating on scoring systems and start thinking about the people and communities involved. This was easy when 'business' meant the baker and butcher in your town who knew you and your family. You'd care about them and you felt that they cared about you. The only games being played involved the weekend and a ball (of varying diameters and materials depending on your continent).
I don't think we'll return to having a swathe of high street bakers anytime soon - and a nostalgic longing for a falsely remembered past shouldn't be our our aim - but we may get to a point where business redefines its role away from delivering a focus on "shareholder" value and towards the wider concept of "stakeholder" value. "Shareholder" is a increasingly bankrupt term (pun intended) as it encompasses the guy who founded the company, to the tea lady who has worked there twenty years but more omniously the fund that shorted your stock last week, will pump and dump a week later and buy low again the week after that. These volume players have all the information and abused it to play on the margins while the tea lady had her stock locked into her 401K/pension. It's simply a shambles.
If we can get businesses to truly think in terms of stakeholders you start including customers (remember them?), the local town and community you work in, your employees and yes... people that genuinely invested in your business because they believed in it. A romantic notion maybe, but one I'd like to aim for.
So, how do we do it? Simple really. Legal reform. Financial reform. A new market that allows businesses to get funding for development - not one designed on lose 'principles' of gambling. Oh yeah, we may need to reinvent the concept of capitalism too. Shouldn't take long, we just need to decided to begin.
JV
Read all three: Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3.
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Volume 2 of a conversation between myself and Johnny Vulkan about business, data and the future of the universe.
[Editor's Note: As I explained yesterday in volume 1, this is an email exchange between myself and Johnny Vulkan. Tomorrow I will post volume 3 (the last). It started on March 10, 2009 and ended last week (it didn't have to end, but for the sake of this series of posts it did). This is an experiment, let me know if you like it.]
From: Noah
To: Johnny
Date: March 25, 2009
Wowza, that was an awesome reply and I'm not quite sure I can top it ... I also don't think it's worth cutting it up at all and am thinking the best way to swing this is to maybe do one more volley and then a post.
So ...
I generally am with you in everything you said. I was realizing recently what a mistake it seems like that the New York Times didn't charge for it's iPhone app. What would $5 be for an app that delivers the news to you daily/hourly/secondly (is that last one actually a word). And, as I may or may not have said to you when we had breakfast which actually started this whole conversation, I think there's something funny about the newspaper industry crying about their product being undervalued when they've been the one undervaluing it for years (ahem 12 issues of a $5 magazine for $12). With all that said, I'll leave your comments alone other than to say that the big issue seems to sit in this phase of the equation you laid out: "has eyeballs and advertisers love eyeballs" ... I'm certainly not the first person to lament the media industry's addiction to ads, but it's a sad state of affairs.
Now, onto the other piece. I had actually run across this a few weeks ago and loved it. As someone without a ton of knowledge about finance, I'd always wondered how we got to a place where quarterly profits became more important than long-term strategy. How can anyone ever be successful if all that matters is whether you show year-on-year growth (I like to remind people that success is actually a relative, not absolute measure, most often calculated by looking at how much you put into something and how much you got out). Now my big question for Welch (and I guess you'll have to stand in for him) is how do you fix this problem? He's coming out and saying, "Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy," but I don't see the prevailing mindset of the market changing overnight. So what needs to happen? Do a whole lot more companies chose not to go public in the future? What does fundraising look like in that case?
I'm also not surprisingly reminded of the Google prospectus:
As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same. In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to "make their quarter." In Warren Buffett's words, "We won't 'smooth' quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short term results but are in the best long term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities. We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long term view.
Many companies are under pressure to keep their earnings in line with analysts' forecasts. Therefore, they often accept smaller, but predictable, earnings rather than larger and more unpredictable returns. Sergey and I feel this is harmful, and we intend to steer in the opposite direction.
Those dudes were smart, but I even feel like they're cracking a bit ...
Thanks for playing along.
- Noah
Read all three: Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3.
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A conversation between myself and Johnny Vulkan about business, data and the future of the universe.
[Editor's Note: Okay, so I've been working on this idea for awhile where I would post a back-and-forth conversation on the blog, but hadn't really found any takers. Then a few weeks ago I was having breakfast with Johnny Vulkan from Anomaly and we were talking about lots of interesting stuff. Afterwards I wrote Johnny an email, asking him if he'd be down for doing something like this and he said yes. So basically, over the next three days I am going to post our back and forth. It started on March 10, 2009 and ended last week (it didn't have to end, but for the sake of this series of posts it did). This is an experiment, let me know if you like it.]
From: Noah
To: Johnny
Date: March 10, 2009
Hey dude, so I've been playing around with this idea for awhile to do a post (or series of posts) where I just email back and forth with interesting folks about whatever. So I was about to send you links to the Guardian Open Platform announcement to see what you thought and I figured maybe we could give it a try?
Guardian Open Platform
Guardian Datablog
Guardian Data Store
Either way, really curious to know what you think. And if you're down for the post, just respond and then I'll respond back and at whatever point the conversation begins to peter out we'll cut it and I'll post it.
Thanks dude,
Noah
From: Johnny
To: Noah
Date: March 19, 2009
Hi Noah - belatedly...yes, I'd love to play... :)
So... to The Guardian and the Open Platform... My instant response is great! At this moment in time 'open' is the defining qualifier for popular success. Few things are launched in a closed environment and while there are some restrictions there is nothing surprising about those. Now we have to sit back and see what people will do with it.
In particular I'm in love with the Data Blog and have lost a reasonably obscene amount of time over the past few days getting lost in chart lust. I fear I've gained a new addiction and suspect the 127 people following their posts on twitter as I'm writing this will be a fair bit more before too long (http://twitter.com/datastore)
But there is something that has me conflicted (and excited in equal measure) and by voicing it I fear I'll open a huge can of virtual worms, but it's a can of worms worth opening.
It's free.
And 'free' is a business model that isn't working for a lot of people right now. Free, of course isn't really free because it's based on an equation that says 'free' brings an audience, an audience has eyeballs and advertisers love eyeballs.
The social media technology media boom was and still is based on this equation but a couple of things are getting clearer. Firstly, advertisers - some may be surprised to hear - also read blogs and increasingly buy into 'free' as well. Why should they pay for media space when if they've got a great product or service it's going to get talked about anyway. Secondly as they reduce their expenditure it means there's simply less to go round. The equation doesn't work.
Now, if you're The Guardian that isn't a problem - the publication is run at a loss and has been for years, supported by other publications in their publishing family (a bit like Google funding YouTube) and until very recently support from a foundation.
From a personal individual level I absolutely love what The Guardian has done with this experiment into Open Platform but we must realize that very few can follow and the bar has just been raised that much higher for everyone else. Media publications are folding at a daily rate. Some may call it natural selection, but it does mean we're losing many great local and regional voices in the fallout.
But, lets back track. I said I'm excited as well as conflicted. The conflict comes from my desire to see businesses work. If they do then it means people keep their jobs, their kids get fed and educated and have a chance to grow up to write long emails about social media. Most of that is a very good thing. My excitement comes from the impetus that 'failure' creates. We are at huge inflection point for the classic capitalist model, the next great evolution in our personal equation on what we need to live and thrive as a society. I hope (and think) that what emerges is not a rebuilding of what was and is not a 'return' to the good old days but rather it's something new, shiny and maybe very little to do with what business was in the past... but lets save that for another email... maybe one which starts with this gentle shift in opinion as a talking point....
JV
Read all three: Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3.
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Maybe we're not seeing a radical shift, but rather a simple adjustment.
While I've been in California I've been spending a lot of time reading the newspaper (that's right, like the printed one). I don't read the paper often at home, maybe once or twice a week at most, but I always enjoy myself. What's amazing to me every time I sit down with a paper (or a good magazine for that matter) is how I always end up reading and enjoying things I never thought I would. Online we're so selective, scanning and choosing carefully what to read and what not to. With the paper in hand I find the process completely different, I read almost everything. Maybe it's because I've actually invested in it (all $1.25) or maybe it's just because reading the paper is much more of a leisure activity for me (I usually am just hanging out somewhere with plenty of time).
Now I would never say one is better than the other, however, I think it's safe to say that I read a lot in the newspaper that I'd never think about spending time reading online (and vice versa, much of what I read on the web wouldn't ever make it into the paper). Now I'm not really sure where to go with all this, but I find it to be an interesting phenomena.
With that out of the way, this entry was actually supposed to be about some themes from today's New York Times business section. As I was reading through I was struck by the strings that seemed to run through all the articles (of course it's entirely possible that I am imagining their existence). Anyway, bear with me as I try and run through some thoughts I had ...
My thinking got rolling with this quote:
In truth, Wall Street is in for a radical makeover. Fewer people, lower margins, lower risk, lower compensation — and ultimately, fewer talented people. It is likely to change the culture of an industry that for nearly a century has been the money center of the world.
That is an almost perfect explanation of what's happening all over the business world at the moment: You could use the same words to describe the music business or the advertising world. Maybe what we're seeing at the moment isn't some sort of radical shift, but rather a market correction. I've written before that I believe success is a relative, not absolute, measure. Unfortunately, we've gotten so used to things like year-on-year growth and, in the case of the media/entertainment industries, mass audiences that we've forgotten that success is about how much you put in as well as how much you get out.
Continuing the theme of market adjustments is this quote from an article about cable's recent success.
“The natural shift of dollars to cable will continue,” said Jason Kanefsky, a senior vice president and account director at the media buying agency MPG. “It just makes sense. Why pay more for eyeballs on CBS when you can go out and buy eyeballs on Turner for half the price?”
Now I'm no economist, but if you have two things of equal value and one costs less than the other it's only a matter of time before the prices equalize. Cable beating network TV isn't revolutionary, it just a market doing what a market does. Ultimately the only reason we're surprised (whether "we" are the advertising industry or television executives) is because we've gotten comfortable with the incredible profits. Once again, it doesn't mean that network TV is going anywhere, just that it will see lower margins. The sky isn't falling, it's just lowering slightly.
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What those behind the camera think about when they create their brand
Is this my brand?
On Valentine's Day, a former student opened fire in a Northern Illinois University classroom, killing five students, injuring sixteen and eventually taking his own life. I was on campus when it happened. This was my lightning strike, my Eddie Adams moment, albeit on a much smaller stage. My paper, the Daily Chronicle in DeKalb, Ill., was inundated with entreaties from media outlets wanting to feed off of our coverage. I kept on working for the next few days posting pictures and contemplating how my coverage of one tragic event would be more well known than the combined popularity of a thousand county fairs. It appeared that my brand was tending toward the tragic (I'd almost been crushed by a monster truck in August).
Photographers at newspapers this size are generalists--meant to cover anything and everything and do it quickly and well. But as a photographer and a writer in today's multimedia-crazed newspaper business, being good at everything sometimes means that you're good for nothing. As the furor died down from the NIU shootings, I confronted the fact that perhaps my brush with exposure had not furthered my journalism brand as much as I had imagined.
For all intents and purposes, a photographer's portfolio Web site is their brand. These sites run the gamut (In a relative sense as most photographers are not programmers as well) from accomplished shooters who worked their way to the world's hotspots largely without help from a major newspaper such as Chris Hondros to my former colleague Adam Gerik's proto-confessional photo blog. But if our brand is our Web site only, then it would seem to follow that the top 10 results for "war photographer" or "freelance photographer LA" could essentially corner the market. Metadata trumps hard work and killer documentary skills.
But that would be a fallacy. For all the change that the Internet has brought to photography, it has not changed certain universal truths. Scott Strazzante is a staff photographer at the Chicago Tribune. A past winner of the Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2000, Strazzante has worked his way up the ladder by being a hard worker and a good marketer. Though he has been shooting since 1987, he does not yet have a portfolio Web site of his own. Despite this, his recently-published series on the encroachment of sprawl into rural Illinois took off via a convergence of buzz on listserves such as APAD and webzines such as PDN with the physical pages of the Trib and National Geographic.
"The one thing that the Web has done is devalued photographers. Now magazines go into Flickr and steal photos. Even though there are more outlets, it has really handicapped photographers because there's much more supply than demand," Strazzante said. "The top one percent will be fine. The kind of middle-tier photographers who haven't quite found their voice yet, they're the ones who are really going to suffer. It's almost become like society in general where it's going to be a greater divide between the rich and the poor. It's going to either be the super-talented or the people who are willing to give away their work for free."
Strazzante cites Vincent Laforet as an example of a photographer who has branded himself successfully. "He started out basically a sports photographer," Strazzante said. "Now, if anyone at a huge publication in America wants an aerial style, Vincent is it. He's made his name with creative aerial photography. He's now created a niche where he is the guy to go to for aerial photography. He's done that by being a great businessman in addition to being a great shooter."
In today's newspaper market, it sometimes feels as if the chances are better that you'll be laid off than receive a decent-sized raise. David Zentz is a 29-year-old photojournalist at the Peoria Journal Star with an impressive track record of high-profile internships and clip-contest wins under his belt. In a good to fair market, he would likely be at a major metropolitan daily at this stage of his career. But as it is, he has been bought out by the new owners of his newspaper, GateHouse Media, who have been slashing expenses through voluntary buyouts across its properties since purchasing nine Copley properties last year.
Don't cry for Zentz, he has a plan. Los Angeles beckons and a career in freelance commercial and editorial photography awaits. The only problem? How to create the DZ brand.
"No one should ever market themselves as a generalist because it devalues your voice," Zentz said. "I can shoot everything, but I want clients to know what my interests are so I promote myself and market as more of a specialist in documentary and hard news. I'm trying to figure out how to create multiple brands."
"You can look at photo magazines and you'll see Paolo Pellgrin, Alex Webb. You can see their stuff and recognize it right away or at least say it looks like something he would have shot. People do work over years to consolidate their style and concentrate their portfolio to a specific thing and that will bring them more work."
Style then, is brand. Chris Bartlett knows that first hand. Bartlett has been shooting still life in the fashion and beauty world for 20 years, primarily editorial and some commercial work.
"There was a much wider middle ground in which to swim and there was a greater array of photographers who were not particularly hugely distinguishable from each other who were all capable professional photographers," Bartlett said. "To take a nice picture took more skill than it does now. What has happened is that the bottom has risen up because it's easier to come up with a competent photograph. The middle area, where people branded themselves but not really distinctly, that marketplace is sort of eroding and people with a combination of very clear style and brand plus a good business sense are carving out a little niche for themselves."
The practical applications of this hits right where it hurts. Bartlett recently did an estimate for a job he is shooting next week based on previous work he had done for the client 10 years ago. They came back and said they wanted his price to be about 60 percent less than his bid. His competition? The in-house digital studio.
"The rub here is that the art director wants me to do it because he likes the way I treat the subject matter but the money people are saying this is what we're going to be," he said. "It's up to me to compromise my rate to get the job or stand my ground and say 'I won't do it for less than that.' It won't be done to the level it would be done with my original estimate because I have to cover more ground in less amount of time to make money. That is a pretty familiar scenario."
The irony is that there is a lot more potential for money because of the wider audience, but everyone is expecting that work to be done for free. In order to compete for the jobs that pay good money, strong work is key. When you mention a photographer's name, Annie Lebowitz or Robert Capa to use two examples, an image has to pop into your head. People need to know that if they're spending the money, they're getting a certain treatment.
So, then, is my one picture that made it around the world my brand? I tend to believe that it's not. For one, few if any photojournalists have been hired based on one picture. Iconic images can catapult careers, but being good in today's newspaper, and commercial, markets doesn't always mean that you'll get the job. Thus the paradox of being a more attractive job candidate when you're cheaper and younger than when you're better and more seasoned. Bottom line concerns aren't making brands less relevant, but they are making most photographers' stake less valuable.
Eric Sumberg is a visual journalist and writer (For one more day) in DeKalb, Ill. On Saturday, he will pack his life into his car and head to New York to transition into the next phase of his life.
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Tags: Brands
Some thoughts on the changes the digital revolution is bringing on.
I've been doing a lot of reading (and thus thinking) lately. What follows will hopefully hang together, but it may very well turn into a bunch of random ideas. So goest the dangers of blogging.
Okay . . . let's begin with something Adrian wrote a few days ago about the digital divide: "I now often get the sense that the real digital divide is not so much around fluency or access to technology. Instead it is around ways of thinking and ways of seeing the world." This is something I've been trying to articulate (hopefully effectively) for some time. Digital is not just the underpinnings of new technology, it is also a change in how the world operates.
Two simple examples: Scarcity goes away with losslessness and complete control goes away with the multiple entrances and exits digital technology can provide (think fast-forward and rewind on the tape player versus skip on the cd . . . or even better, just choosing a song in iTunes). What comes out of these is a shift (that I would call postmodern). Here's some more from Adrian's post (who I hope won't mind me reposting this graphic without permission).
What these leaves us with is a world where we need to reassess how things work. Traditional business and economic drivers (such as scarcity) don't really work any more. Or, as Terry Heaton wrote, (quoting Ian Rogers), "Losers wish for scarcity, winners leverage scale." I love Pixel Qi as an example of this. As I wrote last week, "Pixel Qi ... is a spinoff from OLPC that hopes to sell the technology developed for the OLPC in a for-profit way, thereby helping the OLPC (and other firms) get the scale they need to lower the prices on the laptops. Basically: The more customers Pixel Qi gets, the cheaper kids around the world can get their hands on this technology."
It's almost laughable to think about that strategy in the face of OLPC's whining about competition (yes, I know, much of it is fair complaints about unfair competition). Another great example of this is Google's killing of domain tasting. I think Umair's words about Google also work for the OLPC (although they haven't chosen this path): By selling the technology and allowing more competition the ecosystem flourishes and "everyone is better off in the long run." In other words, openness leads to higher returns for everyone and better products for the people.
Now for a slight diversion (since I'm not quite sure how it ties together yet).
In this new landscape everyone is competing with everyone. We see this in the media environment now, where "there are lots and lots of non-commercial alternatives that are free and quite good." Just take the advertising landscape. As Terry Heaton wrote in his latest essay, what's so interesting about this new media world is that advertisers are now competition (and that competition will only increase). Advertisers everywhere are creating sites with content and games that rival what you can find on the rest of the web because they realize that's what they have to do. This is dangerous for media companies because advertisers have a completely different revenue stream than they do and is once again a case of fighting the crazy guy in the room who has nothing to lose (at least not in the media space). Throw in bloggers and the rest of the layfolks who are media owners with an entirely non-monetary revenue stream and you've got a recipe who knows what.
The question I have then, is what happens next. If we play this out to its conclusion and assume that what we are seeing in the media world will manifest itself everywhere what happens?
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