Why innovating when your back is against the wall is innovating too late
I just found out that a print client I’m pitching saw one of the worst year-on-year downturns in ad volume of any pub in the U.S. And that was a year ago. Internally, they seem pretty healthy, but that could just be on account of natural attrition taking care of any staff reductions they might otherwise have been forced to enact.
So here’s the dilemma: how does that shape what I’m pitching them? In other words, should they be more or less ambitious in terms of engaging me to help them build new online businesses?
I’m thinking more. Here’s why:
Having a digital business, however tiny, with a dedicated audience and something approaching breakeven on the P&L, is like having an embryonic alternate business model in your back pocket. It’s sitting there in its growth medium, slowly expanding, slowly building your institutional knowledge, slowly building your identity as a provider of that sort of content.
And some day, if you start getting desperate — if you sense that you are at one of those inflection points where revenue from your usual sources is about to take a dive rather than continue its gentle decline — you have other businesses you can activate.
You can start pumping money into this digital business; you can finally put down for some marketing, for an expanded staff, even if it’s just freelancers — for some sales people who actually know how to sell this product.
Because the most important key to the success of an editorial property is having traction in the first place. An audience, even if it’s small. Some revenue, even if it’s not that great. Some technology, even if it’s a pile of hacks. A production workflow, even if it’s half-broken.
The bottom line is that it’s easier to scale an online content play / revenue stream than it is to synthesize one out of thin air, in a great big hurry.
There are just too many steps you can’t skip over. Too many mistakes that are better to make when your online content play is tiny and you can screw up in a consequence-free environment. This isn’t like a magazine launch (not that those are anything to emulate, these days) — you can’t just waive the magic money wand and automatically have your editorial on every newsstand in America: Youtube, Digg, iTunes, word-of-mouth — online, these can hardly be bought; or at least we don’t know how to yet.
So the most important thing is to start. And the second most important thing is to sustain. To be patient. Growing an online adjunct to your old media empire is like nurturing a child — and really, your audience, in aggregate, is going to act like one. Be nice to them, be consistent, and they will grow. Flake out and suddenly you’re the parent who left, and that audience will be hard to regain.
Slow and steady, that’s the key. That means the best time to have started is years ago. All the more reason to get on it now.
