Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book
Elsewhere in Manhattan, Julie Bauer has been at the forefront of another profession which has embraced digital change, somewhat more than accounting. Bauer is cofounder of the digital advertising agency, Grok. She cut her teeth at large agencies like Ogilvy & Mather and Saatchi & Saatchi, but is a geek at heart. She holds on to her Commodore 64, the 8-bit home computer that she helped launch in 1982. She calls the “1984” Apple commercial the most memorable one she has seen in her long career: “One commercial and one airing changed everything.” About her fi rm’s name, she says, “Grok is a term that only scientists, engineers, and sci-fi freaks use, but we love the word and what it stands for.
“But you can tell the difference. See how much TV today is low-production-value reality TV. It’s dirt cheap to produce. Then you see something like House of Cards come along and people flock to it because people appreciate the production value. I think there’s a balance. There’s a time and place for everything. You would hate to see the artistry of true creative talent go unappreciated in the future. Think of the latest episode of Star Wars. Without J.J. Abrams having some kind of a vision on how to make that story, tell that story, it could have been an awful movie. Now, granted, he’s got a lot more machines at his disposal and he’s got a lot more ways of producing stuff, but that vision and that creativity will hopefully never go away.”
“We also have to accept that business models have changed dramatically. Clients don’t want to pay for usage. A photographer can’t go to my client and say I want you to spend $50,000 or $100,000 to do a shoot but you can’t put it on your website. In the past, photographers made all their money on royalty. Today you can’t stop where the images are used. If I shoot a commercial for them, they will want to put the video on their website and they will want to have it on YouTube. There’s no way they want to pay talent usage fees. They buy the images outright, and that’s just a totally different mentality where people need to rethink the way they make money. At the end of the day what technology is doing is forcing our industry to rethink its business model.”
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