What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [28]
If we end up with more independent agents able to do what they do best—making jewelry or providing computer advice or writing—I hope we will start to see a reversal of the malling of the world that big manufacturing and retail have brought: the sameness of scale. Before the Berlin Wall fell, I was amazed to find a Benetton store even in communist East Berlin. They were everywhere. Starbucks cafés and Pret A Manger sandwich shops (which are one-third owned by McDonald’s) have replaced pubs all around London. Hip Soho in New York is filled no longer with artists and boutiques making singular merchandise but with Banana Republics. Everything’s the same; nothing’s unique; and that takes the fun out of making, buying, and owning. The small-is-the-new-big world could bring variety back. The craftsman lives again on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and hip T-shirt company Threadless (where the buyers and wearers make the designs).
In 2005, I read two posts by marketing visionary, author, and blogger Seth Godin about companies that just didn’t care. He inspired me to blog that we could now create new competitors. “Small is the new big,” I wrote. At the same moment, Godin, similarly inspired, wrote the same line on his blog (and he beat me to using it as the title of a book). “Get small,” Godin blogged. “Think big.”
The post-scarcity economy
We are entering a post-scarcity economy in which Google is teaching us to manage abundance, challenging the bedrock rule of economics, first written in 1767: the law of supply and demand.
Many industries built their value on scarcity. Airlines, Broadway theaters, and universities had only so many seats, which meant they could charge what they wanted for them. They were scarce and thus more valuable. Newspapers owned the only printing press in town and you didn’t, so they could charge you a fortune to reach their audience. Shelf space in grocery stores was limited, so manufacturers paid for the privilege of selling their boxes there. Television networks had a finite number of minutes in the day with only so many eyeballs watching, so advertisers competed to buy their commercial time. Scarcity was about control: Those who controlled a scarce resource could set the price for it.
Not anymore. Want to sell your product to a targeted market? You don’t need to fight for a spot on the shelf in 1,000 stores; you can now sell to anyone in the world online. Looking for a dress everyone else doesn’t have when everyone else shops in the same mall? Today you can find no end of choice only a click and a UPS delivery away. Don’t want to buy The New York Times on the newsstand or pay for access to WSJ.com for news on your industry? Now there are countless sources of the same information. Even if The Journal reports a scoop behind its pay wall, once that knowledge is out—quoted, linked, blogged, aggregated, remixed, and emailed all over—it’s no longer exclusive and rare. It’s no longer possible to maintain that scarcity of information.
Advertising agencies act as if ad inventory were still scarce, though online there is a virtually unlimited supply of advertising opportunities now. Agencies have always liked one-stop shopping. Every fall, they go to network upfront parties, where shows are previewed, wine is poured, and much of the entire season’s ad inventory is sold off. Prime slots such as Thursday nights—when studios advertise weekend movie premieres—sell out at ever-higher prices even though the audience watching broadcast TV is getting ever-smaller (and, goes the reasoning, scarcer). Just as nobody