Engineers Are From Mars, Media Moguls Are From Venus
And can they ever get along?
At the SIIA Information Summit yesterday, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, who recently did a piece on Google, noted:
We’re in an engineering culture. You couldn’t put a [Rupert] Murdoch or a [Michael] Eisner in charge of a company like that. It’s been tried. Terry Semel led Yahoo. I just spent some time with Google engineers. I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying. I don’t think [Semel] understood the engineers’ language, so he couldn’t challenge them. I suspect that’s one reason he didn’t last.”
Auletta is right, and it is an increasingly interesting issue as we move forward with the hyper-digitization of content.
While, for example, the use of online video increases exponentially, how big an audience can be created for any one property without the kind of intense programming and marketing that the entertainment industry is famous for?
On the other hand, is an increasingly massive reliance on e-metrics–the ability to minutely tell and even predict what an online audience wants by their clicking and being perfected by engineers at widget companies like Slide–the right direction?
I have no idea, but the delta is one that needs bridging.
Comments
Excellent point about the clash of operating cultures, Kara, but an interesting “hole-in-the-doughnut” angle is where this gap is being bridged by a handful of business leaders.
Consider Bill Harris, a super-successful senior media exec at TIME Inc. (and for Mort Zuckerman) who then goes on to lead Intuit and help start PayPal and many other startups…(full disclosure: Bill was on the board of my startup and is on the board of EarthLink, where I am an exec.) Or consider Jake Weinbaum, who deeply understands these worlds.
No doubt about the cultures being very different, but there is an emerging cadre of fellow travelers who now have been in the trenches of media/internet/technology/telecom convergence for a decade or more and successfully have developed skills to bridge this still-large divide.
Excellent overall post, though. All too true.
Posted by craig forman at January 31st, 2008 at 10:35 amYou know where this philosophy isn’t applied, but should be? Advertising agencies.
Historically, “creatives” run creative agencies. Media execs run media agencies.
The problem is, the new world order is demanding that those agencies be one in the same. The reason? Technology. The “d” in allthingsd.
That’s why the agency of the future must be run by individuals that are technologists. Future innovation depends on that.
It used to be that agencies got to determine what the (TV) media landscape looked like, because they controlled the spending.
With the web, it feels that agencies are not only not in control, they are practically helpless. The entire industry would be better off if agencies and publishers/web properties could communicate at the same level. That’s when real innovation will happen, and it’s when the real revenue potential will be realized.
Posted by Ian Schafer at January 31st, 2008 at 7:53 pm