Through The Chaos...

When AdAge’s maverick journalist Bob Garfield rang me in 2005 to say he had been reading the manifesto I had written that February and wanted me to help him out with an article, I was both flattered and impressed. (He could easily have pinched everything without attribution). Garfield had created quite a storm that year on Madison Avenue with his polemic entitled: 'Chaos Scenario - A Look at the Marketing Industry's Coming Disaster'. It was a vision of media meltdown that at the time seemed more like doom-mongering than prescience, as the world’s credit markets continued to pump out a never-ending supply of cash. However, looking back in the context of today’s bleaker times, it isn't nearly as outrageous. Google’s annual revenues have gone from $3bn to $20bn since Garfield’s warning note. Meaning the company’s grip over the newspaper industry has become a stranglehold. When a group of German publishers tried to challenge the Googleplex last week, the response from Mountain View was to the point: 'If you don't want to show up in Google search results, it doesn't require more than one or two lines of code,' blogged a Google executive in response. Going on to add the chilling reminder for those tempted to actually add the innocuous script that: 'Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper web sites each month.' This unenviable pinch between Google’s rock and the hard place of Craig’s List has of course left many famous US newspapers reeling. And now the pain is being felt in the UK too. Most notably in TV where analysts are no longer mincing their words: 'This is horrible, a worrying sign that we didn’t want that perhaps the issue is structural and not just cyclical due to the recession.' Garfield’s doomsday scenario did in fact end on a high: 'What emerges from the ruins will be superior in every way to what it replaced. Better for marketers, better for the economy'. And the follow-up essay (the one I helped out with): 'Inside the New World of Listenomics - How the Open Source Revolution Impacts Your Brands,' was an upbeat assessment of what lay beyond the chaos, including many forecasts that have come to fruition. Fast forward to today and Garfield’s ongoing assessment of the emerging media world can be found on his new blog, 'The Chaos Scenario' - to which he has asked me to contribute. The aim of the blog is to move the conversation on beyond the doom and gloom that everyone is feeling today - as well as help sell his book! 'The question for business – as well as government, religion, science, politics, academia and every other institution hitherto operated from the top down – is what to do now,' Garfield writes. Don't you agree...?