The best way to understand any industry is to read its history
💡 The best way to understand any industry is to read its history. spoiler alert: the second-best way is to curate its present.
Building great things takes time and often requires lengthy cycles of feedback. While we're often incentivised to focus on the short term, innovation cycles typically span 10-25 years.
Consider how the marketing industry has evolved (ballpark decades):
📺 1980s: Advertising agencies reigned supreme on Madison Avenue (a leading position they built from the '50s, as seen in Mad Men's Don Draper). Yet, they failed to foresee the rise of management consultants as corporate America needed a productivity shock.
💰 1990s: Finance and procurement took centre stage, leaving agencies bleeding and forcing consolidation in the market to save costs. This shift coincided with WPP's introduction on NASDAQ in '88, right before they scooped up Ogilvy through M&A.
💻 2000s: Value creation concentrated almost exclusively in tech companies, fuelled by the emergence of VCs investing corporate money desperate for growth from the 90s consolidation era and the rise of the internet.
📲 2010s: With the rise of social media and the attention economy, Capex shifted massively towards performance marketing. This created dominance for tech companies (the rise of so-called GAFAs) and their backers.
The rest, as they say, is history. And while it may not repeat itself exactly, we are social animals who learn from our mistakes.
What insights can we highlight from our past to understand the 2020s? We're in the thick of it, and zooming out seems impossible, yet necessary.