April 12, 2004
the future:
This cartoon is about the film biz. But it could apply to a lot of industries, including my chosen profession.
A lot of us advertising hacks often wonder if Madison Avenue is just going through a period of readjustment, or is it in permanent meltdown, a-la the record industry?
The answer, of course, is both. People will always have stuff to sell, and there will always be a market for finding cheaper and better ways to empty the warehouse. That area of the business interests me.
But advertising as a commercially exploitable "cult of creativity" has been (quite rightly) in meltdown for over a decade, just few people spotted it.
The film industry is somewhat smarter than the music industry, at least on the consumer distribution side. When napster hit, they just would put up 500 bad files (the same size and title as the movie) for every pirated movie out there. Its not that it stopped pirating, it just made it hard enough that most people went out and bought the $10 DVD instead.
With DMCA they just send out annoying letters by the millions to ISP to tell the user to knock it off. Since most ISPs don't allow file sharing (even legal files), the ISPs help kick off file sharers. Of course this is annoying for those of us trying to use bittorrent to download linux distributions (cause now ISPs will cut off a connection for any high bandwidth traffic).
Posted by: Derek at April 14, 2004 1:02 AM