Stealing fuel from the tank
(Originally published in Creative Social Blog, 30.sep.2013)
There’s a lot of buzz about the recent phenomenon of the launch of Grand Theft Auto V, a game that has raised more than 1 Billion bucks in its first 72 hours of life, breaking many records for the entertainment industry (please, let’s stop setting up separated categories and subgroups, anything that entertain us comes into this industry: movies, video games, books, music, etcetera)
In a particular article, I read how certain members of the “officially recognized economy” such as journalists, financial advisers, decision makers, entrepreneurs from different sectors and politicians, all of them pretty old-skool, remained blind and indifferent to phenomena like the launching of GTA V and its implications.
Imho, I think part of the problem is that we’re still surrounded by old-fashioned business men (in any industry) born, raised and trained in the old economy, wanting everything to continue as it was back 15 or 20 years ago, in order to maintain their status quo unchanged. To make things worse, these characters give lessons to young generations in universities and business schools, creating both parallel and manipulated visions of the present, which is clearly different.
In December, 2007, I had the pleasure of meeting Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future, part of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, in the context of a seminar held by Microsoft in Buenos Aires. Jeff is also a consultant for several global technology, automotive and consumer packaged goods companies. He told us a story: once he met the board of directors of several sub-brands belonging to a renowned entertainment and technology brand increasingly linked to digital platforms. Then he asked some managers who were less open to digital culture why not embrace change and think about how to seize the opportunities of the new economy. The answer he got was devastating: “we still have fuel in the tank”.
In other words, those guys, thrown in their armchairs, were just waiting to finish their careers, retire with luxury pensions and pass on those issues to future generations. Kicking the ball forward, trying not to attract too much attention, not risking anything and not wanting to learn anything new. Exciting, isn’t it?
Let’s look at these other three examples. A couple of years ago, working in an advertising agency for a recognized global brand, a guy with a high position and responsibility in the Marketing department, referred to the Angry Birds phenomena as “those little mobile games” in a quite derogative way. People like that one should probably try to understand the scope and reach of these colorful birds and green pigs, which generated $ 152 million in revenues for Rovio last year…
A more recent example: without going any further, just a couple of days ago we saw how “House of Cards”, after receiving nine Emmy Awards nominations won three statuettes of the mentioned prize, confirming once again that the way to distribute content and entertainment as we knew is not the only way and may no longer be the best one to ensure appropriate quality, relevance and formats for the present times. A few years ago, hardly any executive or director at HBO would have imagined hearing the word Netflix so often when calling someone to pick up some Emmy prizes.
Last but not least, another example, widely known already. Last year, in April 2012, while Instagram announced their 30 million accounts milestone and the newly launched Android version passed the one million downloads in just 12 hours, Kodak, a company with its own history lost in part focus of their business (the goal of the pics is to be shared, not to printed on paper) and were preparing for his bankruptcy. They may probably thought “we still have gas in the tank” more than once…
Anyway, we can speculate and build hundreds of theories, but in the end the facts are those who speak for themselves, and they are concrete and conclusive. We can ignore them, or we can try to understand them and see how we adapt to the present times and to the new rules of the game (and I speak not only of GTA V).
