What would a restaurant run according to Googlethink look like—other than being decorated in garish primary colors with a neon sign, big balls for seats, and Fruit Loops and M&Ms on every table?
Imagine instead a restaurant—any restaurant—run on openness and data. Say we pick up the menu and see exactly how many people had ordered each dish. Would that influence our choice? It would help us discover the restaurant’s true specialties (the reason people come here must be the crab cakes) and perhaps make new discoveries (the 400 people who ordered the Hawaiian pizza last month can’t all be wrong.. can they?).
If a restaurateur were true to Googlethink, she would hunger for more data. Why not survey diners at the end of the meal? Th at sounds frightening—what if they hate the calamari?—but there’s little to fear. If the squid is bad and the chef can hear her customers say so, she’ll 86 it off the menu and make something better. Everybody wins. She’ll also impress customers with her eagerness to hear their opinions. This beats wandering around the tables, randomly asking how things are (as a diner, I find it awkward and ungracious to complain; it’s like carping about Grandmother’s cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving). Why not just ask the question and give everyone the means to answer? Your worst diner could be your best friend.
The more layers of data you have, the more you learn, the more useful your advice can be: People who like this also like that. Or here are the popu lar dishes among runners (a proxy for the health-minded) or people who order expensive wines (a proxy for good taste, perhaps).
Networks force specialization. In a linked world, you don’t want to be all things to all people. You want to stand out for what you do best. Th at’s why chef Gordon Ramsey focuses the menus of the restaurants he fixes on his show, Kitchen Nightmares, so they know the business they’re in. Serve your niche instead of the mass. Do what you do best.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Advertising- A word from Google’s sponsors
The agency and advertising need to get out of the way in the relationship between companies and customers. Agencies may help solve problems—teaching companies how to build networks with customers, assisting them with product launches—but once the consultation is done, the good consultant leaves town.
Tobaccowala suggested agencies remake themselves as networks. He quoted University of Chicago economist Ronald Coase in his seminal 1937 essay, “The Nature of the Firm”—which is also quoted in Wikinomics, Here Comes Everybody, and, it would seem, half the business books published lately. Coase reasoned that firms exist and grow when internal friction is less than external friction, when it is easier and cheaper to deal with insiders than with outsiders. “In a networked world, it’s easier for us to work with outside people than inside people,” Tobaccowala said. “Google, even in its grandiosity, still is a company that believes in forms of partnering.” Agencies and other companies, he said, will look more like Hollywood studios, where 80 percent of what goes into a movie comes from outsiders. Google even provides technology to make such collaboration possible. So Google doesn’t change just the essence of advertising. It changes the essence of the company. The network is becoming more efficient than the corporation.
Google is an avalanche and it has only just begun to tumble down the mountain. Media was closest to what Google does and so Google’s impact on media has been profound and permanent—and it’s not over yet. Next in Google’s path is advertising. Even though it, too, is close to Google—they are in the same industry—the rumble is only beginning to be heard. Agencies are about to be buried, and they still don’t see it coming. Th e industries we examine next may think they are safe, far away in the valley, under a bright sun. But the Googlanche will hit them, too.
Tobaccowala suggested agencies remake themselves as networks. He quoted University of Chicago economist Ronald Coase in his seminal 1937 essay, “The Nature of the Firm”—which is also quoted in Wikinomics, Here Comes Everybody, and, it would seem, half the business books published lately. Coase reasoned that firms exist and grow when internal friction is less than external friction, when it is easier and cheaper to deal with insiders than with outsiders. “In a networked world, it’s easier for us to work with outside people than inside people,” Tobaccowala said. “Google, even in its grandiosity, still is a company that believes in forms of partnering.” Agencies and other companies, he said, will look more like Hollywood studios, where 80 percent of what goes into a movie comes from outsiders. Google even provides technology to make such collaboration possible. So Google doesn’t change just the essence of advertising. It changes the essence of the company. The network is becoming more efficient than the corporation.
Google is an avalanche and it has only just begun to tumble down the mountain. Media was closest to what Google does and so Google’s impact on media has been profound and permanent—and it’s not over yet. Next in Google’s path is advertising. Even though it, too, is close to Google—they are in the same industry—the rumble is only beginning to be heard. Agencies are about to be buried, and they still don’t see it coming. Th e industries we examine next may think they are safe, far away in the valley, under a bright sun. But the Googlanche will hit them, too.
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