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Messing With Myth And Legend. Just the other day I had to talk to a bunch of business folks and somebody brought me on with the phrase "Madison Avenue Legend." The minute I heard it, something inside me cringed. I thought about setting the record straight right then and there. But then I remembered how much people enjoyed thinking they were dealing with a "legend" ( bonifide or not) so I let it slide. But it did set me to thinking about the nature of myths and legends. Not on Madison Avenue, because how mythic and legendary can you be pushing a Magic Marker around all day? |
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My mind started wandering to those Titans of Enterprise who have garnered the garlands of being regarded as larger than life on the battlegrounds of Business. Strangely enough, when you meet these folks they generally seem to be fairly down to earth. I met Mr. Gates at a COMDEX show a few years back. He's a train nut ( as am I) but of course he owns his own private railroad train. Other than that, he was just like any other "foamer" talking about the classic styling of General Motors diesel locomotives from the 50's and 60s. |
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Hey. Adrants just turned 2 years old this week. You should give them a free plug, with all the space they've given you over the past year. It's the least you can do. HW-LA When you're right, you're right. -HW |
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Well,Steve Jobs, on the other hand, can light up a room just by walking into it. Especially a room full of hard core Apple Users. Why? Because they threw him out of his own company and replaced him with a Pepsi pusher and a long succession of money losers and finally had to bring him back to clean up the mess. Even though Mr. Gates had to ride in on his white horse to save Apple's bacon, that still doesn't give him any mythology cred. Gaining mythic status is hard won in America. That's why you don't want to mess around with it. Certainly not with something as trivial as an advertising campaign. For example, one of the bonified myths in America was brought into being when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard toiled in their garage to give birth to the Silicon Valley powerhouse that is today's Hewlett-Packard. These two guys did something that was monumental in the pantheon of global enterprise. Heroic without a doubt. And those first ten, fifty, two hundred, two thousand H-P employees felt that they were a part and parcel of that heroic effort. Damn straight, Sparky. And when "outsider" Carly Fiorina ( a sales and marketing person) was brought in as CEO of HP, the first thing she did was lock horns with William Hewlett, the son of HP founder Bill Hewlett over the acquisition of Compaq Computer. Well it was downhill from there as the two oil and water entities refused to meld into one viable business organization. So
what does Ms. Fiorina do in her struggle to rise to the occasion?
She throws napalm on the oil and water in the form of a massive
advertising campaign. And what was the theme of the campaign? "The
Original Start-Up Will Act Like One Again. Watch." And the
visual. A "replica" of Bill and Dave's excellent garage.
What the fuck was she thinking? After going toe to toe with the
cofounder's son and a stadium full of Hewlett loyalist stockholders,
she wraps herself in THEIR MYTHOLOGY! Thousands of HP and Compaq employees were laid off. Millions of dollars in shareholder equity went up in smoke. HP stock is worth a lot less today than it was when she started in 1999, And Dell and IBM stock is worth a lot more. "The Original Start-Up Will Act Like One Again. Watch." We're watching Carly. Watching as "The Original Start-Up" just paid you $21,000,000 ( I just had to type out all the zeros) to take a walk. Meanwhile Steve Jobs was taking Apple through the mine fields of the tech-slump too. But while Carly was spending millions on her splashy "Invent" campaign, Steve Jobs was inventing a whole new business for Apple. The iPod business. Legends make legends. Did I mention HP licenses an iPod clone from Apple? But
this is a rant about messing with Myths and Legends. Carly got it
exactly wrong. Enter legend number two. Terry Semel. While Carly and Steve were scuffling through the tech slump in 1999,Terry was ramping Warner Bros. up from $1 billion in revenue in 1980 to $11 billion in revenue in 1999. And then he went to Yahoo. So now Yahoo has set its sites on being in the Music bidness, just like Apple, but different. What Terry knows that Steve doesn't know is SHOW BUSINESS IS TWO WORDS. Terry is driving Yahoo Music not to be a tune SELLER but a tune RENTER. Much more friendly to the Music Bidness. Which will ultimately give Yahoo much more clout with the Music bidness. Kiss your iTunes Music Store business good-bye Steve-o. Yahoo Music understands the market doesn't really cares if they OWN a song or RENT a song. The shelf life of a hit song these days is two weeks. For $6.99 a month Yahoo Music lets me download as much music as I can stand from a one million tune library. Can you say end game Steve? Yahoo
Legend meets Apple Legend on the field of battle. Yahoo Legend takes
it all. Time for the Apple legend to scan the horizon for the next field of engagement. That's what Legends do. Let's help Steve out HEY STEVE! FUCK THE MUSIC BIDNESS. SCREW THE 500,000,000,000 TUNE THING. GET IN THE VOICE BIDNESS! Do you think he heard us? Of course not. Let's try it again. O.K. One. Two. Three. VOICE!!! What was the big hurdle with file sharing? Copyright violation! What was the big turn-on? PEER-TO-PEER interaction. What's the dif between Music and Voice. YOU OWN WHAT YOU SAY. Steve. Read my lips. Not iTunes...iTALK. I'm going to Milano on Thursday. Damn, wish I knew where I could pick up about five or six Stefano Ricci shirts while I'm there. At a good price. Let me check iTalk. Hmmm. "The Stefano Ricci Walking Tour of Milan as told by Giancarlo Battaglia. Logline: "For deals and steals forget the wheels," Bingo. Steve. Everybody has A.D.D. Nobody wants to read shit. 8-bit 44oomz voice files. Five Minutes 99 cents. Update subscriptions $6.99 a month. What's that you say Steve? You already have thousands of podcasts for download. You're calling it "Radio Reborn." Steve, Steve, Steve. You still don't get it. This isn't about "Radio." This isn't about one-to-many broadcasting paradigms. This is about EVERYBODY listening to EVERYBODY. Exponential distribution of the human voice. Nope. Steve can't hear me. He's listening to Al Franken and he thinks it's the future talking. Does this mean I'm gonna have to podcast this damn column, to get Steve to hear me? Naaaa. Where did I put Terry Semel's number?
Stay tuned...For the VOICE of MadisonAveNew.com...By subscription only.
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