Clusterluck. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Business thrives in clusters.
• Promiscuity.
• Most industries operate like groups of stray cats in an alley: they might sound like they are fighting but they are in fact mating.
• A ckusterf*ck in the very best sense of the word.
• Let’s call it “clusterluck” (wink wink nudge nudge) or the sake of coining a catchy corporate jargon-friendly neologism.
• Forgive me for stating the obvious and using some off-color clichés (ironically of course).
• I’m doing so with a rhetorical purpose.
• It is funny how we must remind ourselves of these truths (or truisms) once and again.
• Particularly if an industry that badly needs innovation.
• Cuz, let’s face it, you hardly will get any disruptive new thinking from the WPPs, Omnicoms or Publicis of this world.
• They are not in the business of innovating, as much as they claim otherwise.
• They are legacy brands with legacy biz models.
• They will never admit it but they regard innovation as friction.
• If anything, their innovation boils down to cutting costs behind their clients’ backs.
• A race to the bottom to inoculate themselves -only temporarily in most cases- against the nasty law of diminishing returns that dangles over the head of pretty much all business models based on hourly fees.
• Madison Avenue needs little startups to scoop them up and absorb their rejuvenating blood.
• Because here’s a dirty little secret (conveniently protected by ironclad NDAs and NonCompete agreements)
• An awful lot of the work your big international agency is pitching you as its own actually comes white-labelled from little boutiques like López Martí Miami.
• It is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
• They have the access, we have the ideas.
• The proverbial win-win.
• They are just middlemen, essentially buying it from us and selling it to you with a substantial mark up.
• Until one day, they decide to buy us altogether.
• It is a natural part of the cycle.
• Eventually, clusters undergo consolidation waves.
• A big dog usually buys up the smaller ones.
• Or a big cat, if you will
• Until it collapses under its own weight and becomes the fertilizer that’ll allow the process to begin again in full atomized mode.
• In short: build it and they will come.
• “They” being clients and colleagues slash competitors big & small trying to feed off of you.
• Or even buy you out.