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March 19th, 2008

Creative business in the digital era

As I’ve been very good lately (although not at post­ing as often as I should), I was let out to attend the Open Rights Group’s event Cre­ative busi­ness in the dig­i­tal era. Over the space of a few hours, I got a good overview of the cur­rent state of play on open intel­lec­tual prop­erty (the whole Cre­ative Com­mons thing) and was treated to exam­ples from some very inter­est­ing peo­ple using CC in anger.

Suw Char­man took us through the var­i­ous types of CC license and some of the main mod­els cre­ative busi­nesses are using to dis­trib­ute their work using them.

One of the things that really got me think­ing was when we got into talk­ing about exactly what the prod­uct is (and what are its com­ple­ments and substitutes).

To give a (prob­a­bly poor) exam­ple: music sales. Tra­di­tion­ally, the phys­i­cal CD is the prod­uct. Its com­ple­ments might include band t-shirts and a sub­sti­tute might be an MP3 down­load. But what if you begin redefin­ing the prod­uct? What if the real prod­uct is a live gig or a range of mer­chan­dise? Then the notion of giv­ing away the tra­di­tional stuff doesn’t seem so crazy. It can also take you into a dif­fer­ent (less crowded, less com­modi­tised) space.

It’s easy to see how con­fu­sion (or dis­agree­ment) about the prod­uct often messes up client : agency rela­tion­ships. You get the sit­u­a­tion where clients think they are buy­ing out­put (ads, sites etc) and agen­cies think they are sell­ing cre­ativ­ity. In real­ity, both are right to a degree. Of course the real value lies some­where else entirely: mar­ket transformation.

Open IP is going to become increas­ingly impor­tant as brands col­lab­o­rate ever more closely with cus­tomers to cre­ate com­pelling sto­ries and expe­ri­ences. Check out the event’s wiki, there’s some pretty good stuff on there.

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  • Brent Kay

    I won­der if your blog entry may have become inad­ver­tently frag­mented. It seems to me there are two sep­a­rate ideas:

    1. Redefin­ing the prod­uct; and
    2. Intel­lec­tual prop­erty matters

    (There is pos­si­bly a third issue deal­ing with agency/client rela­tion­ships and/or expectations).

    While I am happy to embrace the con­cept of rede­f­i­n­i­tion, I am not con­vinced that the future ‘open intel­lec­tual prop­erty’ is viable. Just to play the devil’s advo­cate, the cruel irony of these mus­ings is that it cre­ates more work and requires more resources from an admin­is­tra­tive per­spec­tive (i.e., mon­i­tor­ing and com­pli­ance) than it is worth. I think I under­stand the sen­ti­ment behind the CC model. I just don’t think clients will buy it.

  • http://b1blog.wordpress.com/ Jay Ball

    True, I can be a bit frag­mented ;-)

    For me the two ideas are linked – intel­lec­tual prop­erty mat­ters (and CC in par­tic­u­lar) can enable you to rede­fine the prod­uct. It may also pave the way to depo­si­tion­ing competitors.

    I agree that a future of 100% open intel­lec­tual prop­erty isn’t viable but, as a part or a wider pic­ture which has strong revenue-generating com­po­nents, I think it has dis­tinct possibilities.

    And you’re absolutely right on the admin bur­den. We see this when com­pa­nies want to explore all the Web 2.0 oppor­tu­ni­ties in the belief that there is lit­tle or no cost attached. All it does is shift cost elsewhere.