By Will McInnes

"Don't mention the economy"

Image: frankfarm

We had a discussion about recession, downturn and the likely affects on digital agencies a while ago when the sub-prime thing kicked off.

The consensus then was that we'd all be OK :)

The real-world ramifications of those early signs of a changing economy, back then, are now starting to bite.

And I'm now thinking that a 'it won't affect us' or a 'let's not talk ourselves into a downturn' is a non-view, an irresponsible burying-head-in sand and for me personally would be an avoidance of a responsibility that I have as an employer of great people.

From today's FT: 'Dollar plunges to record low'

The dollar plummeted to record lows and the price of gold touched $1,000 on Thursday as retail sales figures confirmed that the US is in recession and concern intensified about spreading distress in the hedge fund sector.

At our board meeting in forty minutes time I am going to suggest that we as a company take a view, and plan for it.

That view will be flexible, it will evolve according to what we see and feel and hear, and we will not allow it to stifle our growth if smart growth (vs. bloat) is possible and sensible.

That view will inform our decision making around people, clients, services we offer, investments we make and whatever happens we definitely won't stop 'marketing'.

Lastly, that view will also affect my personal planning. I've been tempted in recent times by the lure of consumer credit - all friendly and fluffy and 'take it, no please take it' in good times, and somewhat darker, I'd guess, when their (the lenders) situations worsen. I plan to get my financial house in order. And if it never materialises, great. But if it does, I'll be ready.

I better go buy some tinned food and bottled water too, and maybe build an air raid shelter in me back garden.

When munter monsters make purdy sweet love

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo on Friday, a deal that could shake up the competitive and lucrative market for Internet search.

It's like the last half an hour in the local disco... the desperate and unloved grab one another, standards decay in favour of the nearest willing victim.

I always preferred the maxim 'go ugly early' myself (until I met my wife of course).

And isn't it fascinating how the old MS vs Yahoo question has come to this - a potential M&A. Back then none of us planned for Google.

Darwin all over again: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

Both MSFT and Yahoo! have so much to offer, yet without a clear strategy and at such scale they both seem to be floundering at the moment - evolution is hard, so hard. As many have written before me, both are also staffed by many wonderful, bright, committed people.

But as organisations they're kinda like outsiders that became insiders: born of the digital age and now, slow and laden, committed to yesterday - to proprietary software; to advertising eyeballs and portal strategies; losing to an unstoppable G force.

We keenly anticipate Umair's 'lulz!!!!!!!!!'.

Sorrell says 2009 is the bogey year

As talk of a recession heightens, Sir Martin Sorrell said today that this year is set to be a good one for the advertising industry and it is 2009 that is of concern.

http://www.adweek.com/aw/national/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003681315

Why the downturn is good news

Prophet Haque is being proven right and becomes the poster boy of the 'Macropocalypse'.
He called it.
(And tonight, Tom and I go to pay homage.)

Clearly, we're in a downturn.
This impending change has been on my agenda for a short while but I'm no finance maven.

So what happens now for our microclimates of digital innovation, and agency land, as the macro environment shifts and compresses?

Well I think it gets back to good old Darwinian principles:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

It's so not the end of the world.

In fact, I relish times like these.

It's a different challenge, and if you like:

• competition,
• radical change, and
• participating vs. observing,

..like I do, then I think it's going to be cool fun and seriously educational for all of us on the journey.

For agency world:

• Measurability sees digital marketing weather storm best (but not necesarily fine and dandy)
• Measuring services & products go up in value and importance
• Clients upskill in making sense of measurement data they already have
• The talent crisis levels off for some agencies as top performers bail out of 'good times' old skool agencies and look for new challenges
• The bigger bloated agencies cull dead wood staff and clients (as Ged rightly said)
• Enlightened traditional agencies use these times to reconfigure to offer better value to their clients (they 'adapt to survive')
• Major agency networks batten down the hatches and slow acquisitions (or do they speed up buying new adaptive players - dunno - comments please?)
• Everyone in marketing swaps the pithy truism about 'companies do best are ones that continue to market in downturn'

For start ups:

• The too many startups chasing too few ad dollars get weeded out
• VCs become more selective
• Startups get real again, tiny teams and real revenues over Calacanis logic
• Innovation thrives on constraints, which helps focus, vs. abundance, which distracts

For others:

• Pressure on classical print advertising (against more measurable digital forms) sees some major print brands go under, starved of all revenue streams

I'm well up for a downturn.
Personally I feel it will encourage me to be really clear in my own head and to my clients about the value that we add to their businesses. I think it provides a knife of focus to cut through the clutter of 'we should be doing this stuff...shouldn't we..?'. It boils down to a yes or a no, with our job being to prove the yes.
It will encourage all of our businesses to get sharper and smarter at how we do stuff.
It will weed out weaker competitors - particularly the bloated, less adaptive, and play directly to the strengths of Brighton's digital community of nimble smart middle- and small-sized agencies.

Adapt or die - am I right or wrong?

Kwiqq, head of sales position

Kwiqq is a company formed by some lovely guys and doing stuff in a cool hot area (heard of online social networks?).

They're looking for a Head of Sales:

As Kwiqq is growing rather kwiqqly we are carving out new roles for individuals to join us. We are now looking for head of sales Ideally with experience in working at a web agency, Web 2.0 products (B2B) or social networking sales.

The primary responsibility of the Head of Sales is to drive revenue by selling Kwiqq solutions to Bluechips and SMEs. You’ll help to shape the next-generation of Social Networking product while building the growing our customer base. You’ll also promote and manage senior-level relationships to ensure that your customers’ needs and requirements are met.

If you're right for the role have a chat with Raj and the guys, they're executing (rather than just talking) and will make it.

Macropocalypse: head for the hills, mo fos

If you don't know Umair Haque's work, you're probably not as enlightened (and confused/intimidated) as you should be.

Suffice to say that he is a legend in my eyes.
When Tom and I walked out of Umair's talk at FOWA London 07 earlier this year we were both humbled back into our smalltown shoes. The man is a prophet.

And whilst his thinking in new school, enlightened, 2.0, 3.0, you-put-a-number-and-a-.0-on-the-end, his credentials are old school: London Business School; economics and all that brainy stuff.

Worryingly for me, you, our various families and the rest of the world, Umair's on a bit of a downer at the moment. He's calling it the Macropocalypse - the collapse and implosion of the macro climate, the financial systems, the economic models and tenets that our societies operate on.

It's scary. He says he re-read what he's been writing lately and felt sick. I feel sick by proxy.

I suggest we all bulk buy tinned beans and bottled water, create shelters in our gardens and prepare for the beginning of the end.
The Macropocalypse is coming.

I've burnt today, now for tomorrow...

I wrote about burning yesterday's IT infrastructure a while ago. It wasn't genius stuff, but I meant it.
It pained me to be developing IT bloat around our small, nimble web business. We believe in webapps ergo we use them, no?

Anyhoo. I fucking went and did it, and now I'm in all kinds of shit.

So I have a shiny new macbook pro thing.
Haven't had a Mac for about 11 years, so that's scary and new. Amazing the fear of the new and unknown. It'd be fun and curious and new if it was a plaything for home, but it's not - it's my primary business tool, my work in a box.

Switched mail to be picked up and sent out via gmail - just looking at that as my now main email account scares the bejeesus out of my comfy outlook-oriented brain.

Switched calendar to google calendar and that's the biggest concern i have. My diary is a mo fo - it's very jam packed and rules my life and so influences those that I work with most closely. Yet I've moved from a compatible solution where everyone could see and share my diary easily, being that we all used outlook, to running off on my own-ski... i hope we can find ways to make it work, which i think we probably can, but it's not certain and the last thing we need in our outrageously busy team is extra hassle from a poncy director with misplaced ideals and bad technology issues. Hmmm.

Anyway, I'm not going to stop here.
I heard on the grapevine that Graeme Sutherland has some badass voip phone and where he lays his voip hat is his home, kinda thing. so he plugs it in to the internet and landline calls are routed to him. That should be the final piece of the jigsaw.
Then I should - theoretically - be able to carry out my business from wherever, whenever.

There's something more fundamental behind all of this.
I really believe in the world is flat. I do really believe that we can be freer that we are and are indoctrinated that we should be. Steve's going to the states with his family soon and will work a couple of weeks from there, and holiday for a couple more. We have great long-term freelancers boshing work out for us in France and Czech. I want to see more of the world as my little family become ready, and I want to mobilise both locally and immediately, and globally in the longer-term.

We'll see.

Cool momentum at Future Platforms

If there's a team with real momentum, doing cool stuff in a specialist arena, it has to be Future Platforms (as Dave rightly highlighted a while ago on a comment).

It's really wicked to see the stream of good news from FP towers:

Their work on the Trutap development, one of the few UK/European representations at the TechCrunch40 in the US
The team growing with real quality players
And cool community bits like the regular coding dojo

Real positive momentum that's a pleasure to witness from afar.

Loving your work Mr Hume.
(Yet another internationally recognised specialist firm, based in Brighton.)

O2 iPhone deal is right at any cost

All the indicators remain that O2 will be appointed the UK network for the Apple iPhone.

The obvious but unusual bit is that Apple's ascendancy means that they are bossing the deals being brokered with mobile network operators around the globe, with O2 expected to pay a very decent 10% of handset REVENUES (that is from rentals and calls, not hardware) to win the deal. Unprecedented, and therefore v. interesting.

Mobile is increasingly a very competitive market, especially here in the UK where the consumer has a 'free handset' expectation.

Peter Erskine, O2 CEO, says in The Times:

The revenue-sharing model will play an increasingly important role in the future of converged communications.”

Losers in the converged world, he said, would be “the network operators, service providers and device manufacturers who don’t pay particular attention to understanding and reacting to what customers value”.

Mr Erskine also praised the iPhone as an “iconic device with unique features that have proven to have tremendous appeal to large numbers of customers in the US”.

Why does O2 have to do this deal?

Because it fits with the brand perfectly IMHO, because Apple has the relationship with consumers in a way that network operators never have, and probably never will.

This kind of partnership is really interesting from a brand point of view.
The challenge tossed at branding often is: 'how can i measure the value of brand?'.
An extra sweetener of 10% of call revenues, apparently.

Mahalo and the big Q: Can you iterate your way to success?

Mahalo is Jason Calacanis' latest venture.

A bit of background on Jason first.

I read Jason's blog because it's funny - he's clearly very very driven, comes across as egotistical and cocksure, is certainly not afraid to tell it how he sees it, and it's a combination that makes for a good blog at least! As a Brit like me, you'd say Jason was 'very American' - and that would be half with admiration and half with a touch of European scorn, and many articles about him refer to the fact that he grew up in the Bronx, I get the feeling that he's perceived as a full on guy even for his home countrymen.

I first came across Jason through his Weblogs Inc venture.
I had the same business idea, as I'm sure very many of us did, but never followed it through. Jason did, through to a trade sale exit to AOL, and I respected that.

So Mahalo is his next big thing.

The concept is a human-based search engine - zigging with a wikpedian model of human editors ('guides') to Google's machine-based search engine zag.

And I'm not thrilled about the idea.
It has legs, absolutely.
But it doesn't blow my mind (which is neither here nor there, really).

- photo by Cmicblog

So that's the interesting part about Mahalo for me.

(Not whether or not someone like Robert Scoble thinks it's the future or not. Another hormonal kick up in the blogosphere...)

But really what's interesting is whether Jason, who *has* proved himself, can - with his impeccable VC backing, and with his incredible contacts list, and with his knowledge, drive and handpicked team - ITERATE his way to success.

When I say iterate, I mean incrementally improve, bit by bit - every improvement near-invisible to the outside world, but every nudge, every day and every week, closer to perfect.

Amazon is the case study in this.
Masters of iterative design, the guys at Amazon heavily test new features out, trying a different colour or positioning of a button on every thousandth visitor, measuring the incremental difference it made to conversion rates, or average purchase values or whatever other metrics are relevant. You know how when you got to Amazon, or a Google service, and there's a new feature innocently peeking back at you, quietly winking 'click me, big boy - find out what i can do for you today'. That's iterative design.

And iterative design and its suite of relatives like rapid prototyping (get something out there quick and dirty, measure it's impact, either ditch it or fully implement it and move on to the next thing), agile software development, are also business models.

Umair talks about DNA. Google's DNA, its very organisational fibre, is entirely in harmony with these concepts, but as a mode of business, as a company culture, as a 'this is how we get shit done' inner core.
And when clients I work with say 'love this stuff, but we can't move that fast' I have to encourage them to try to change that, because this is a steamrolling, irresistable force now in business. Business at internet speed, on or off the 'net...

So we know that the answer to my questions is: 'yes, you can interate your way to success'. Absolutely, it's a better way than ever.

The question is can Mahalo? Can Jason? Will the VC money and size of expectations thwart them or propel them? Can they create a Google-beating DNA, can they out-Google Google in both mode of development and market space?

Because I think Mahalo is in an interesting space, certainly where a competitor is needed to the big G.
But because I also think Mahalo is starting from a fairly pedestrian position - they 'need' every iterative inch they can get, I feel.

I'd be really interested in your perpectives on this.