Z.E.R.O.: Zero Paid Media as the New Marketing Model

CHAPTER17

The Innovation Imperative

The world has changed more in the past 24 months than in the 24 years before it.” Those words (or something to that effect) were said by one of Madison Avenue's media visionaries, David Verklin. Verklin once ran Carat, a rather large media agency. He left to head up an interactive TV startup called Canoe Ventures, which was well funded, well backed by top-tier corporations like Comcast and executives like Comcast chairman Brian Roberts, well advised (I had the pleasure of being the guest speaker at an advisory meeting containing some of our industry's rock stars, such as global chief marketing officer [CMO] for General Electric, Beth Comstock, the Coca-Cola Company's Wendy Clark, and the Association of National Advertisers' Bob Liodice, to name drop a few) and ultimately, ill fated. Canoe capsized and sank and Verklin joined Iron Mike Tyson in Bolivia. (It has since resurfaced as a lean, mean mini-me version of its former self.) Smacks of the story of the scorpion and the frog, doesn't it? We're in 2013 and still can't or won't get behind a broad-based initiative to help save paid media through the power of digital.

Since those “24 months” that Verklin referred to, I feel like our space has been reinvented several times over. Actually I know it has. This quote comes from circa 2007, when the iPhone, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were nothing but germs of ideas and/or new products.

Innovate or Die

The original promise of digital was to level ...