This is from February 14th
Do you remember Ray Harryhausen? He's the guy that did all those early stop-motion animated monsters, like the skeletons in Jason And The Argonauts. Watching Microsoft circling Yahoo!, with Google waiting in the wings, reminds me of one of his famous creature battles. We're fascinated by these huge beasts tearing lumps of plasticine flesh from each other - we can't look away - until we remember that one of them is going to win, and when they do they're going to come bellowing and snorting at us, the puny humans at the edge of the battlefield and they'll probably devour us whole. Because what they're fighting over, mostly, is advertising revenue. And that's really what's frightening, because that shouldn't be their money, it should be ours. The world should be watching huge ad groups and media businesses squaring off over the advertising pie, not a bunch of coders and geeks. How come they stole our lunch? What went wrong?
Well, a lot of it comes down to two little letters; R and D. Microsoft said they'd spend about $7.5 billion on research in 2007. Yahoo! Research has locations all over the world and has found smart ways to learn from the communities around them. Google give their engineers a day a week to pursue their own projects in the hope that they'll invent the future of the company. And advertising agencies? Does any agency have a genuine research and development budget? Technology companies typically spend about 20% of revenues on R&D, is there an agency anywhere that spends even 1%? Media companies aren't much better; most TV producers think of R&D as inventing a shinier floor for celebrities to dance on. No wonder advertising occasionally finds itself outflanked. Even when agencies do commit to spending money on something forward-looking it's almost always just to garner some headlines or persuade a wobbly client that the agency is still vibrant and exciting. And, if most agencies spend money on new skills or development they normally just buy someone in; to bag some knowledge that someone else already has, not to create something genuinely new.
All of which makes complete short-term sense, but in the long-term means we've surrendered thought-leadership of the industry to the West Coast of America. I'm not suggesting that agencies need to put money into string theory or gene-splicing but it'd be nice to think that a media or communications business was committed to getting ahead of the technology businesses in some small aspect of what we do. Wouldn't it be great to have an influence on the battling monsters, to chuck a spear in there and bring one of them down. Not to be just sitting here waiting to be eaten.
Hear, hear!
Posted by: ADF | February 16, 2008 at 01:43 PM