Dinosaurs & Alligators
An article on LinkedIn this week says Google is toast. Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital reported disappointing Q1 results with more online chatter signaling the death of the agencies.
If this wasn’t enough to make heads spin, more whiplash came with the firing of well-respected director of US Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter this week. Her ouster sadly on the heels of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden’s firing just days prior.
One can’t help but note that Ms. Perlmutter’s part three of a well-informed report on AI came out days earlier. One colleague said it’s clear this rankled the powers that be — question big tech’s unimpeachable right to gobble up copyrighted IP and you are out with the next day’s bathwater. While Mr. Musk is saying we’re at peak data there is a desire to make more and more of it available whatever the means or methods. Why license?
IP has been at the cornerstone of advanced economies forever. Copyright matters. Would Mr. Musk want the blueprints to rockets, satellites, solar batteries, and electric cars out there for any country to steal? What about the formula for drugs? I’ve always said ‘information’ is the invisible industry and there is no better proof than the constant stealing and it ‘wanting to be free.’
Do Ferrari’s want to be free? I wonder sometimes.
But movies, music, news, books, any editorial really, gated or ungated, is in the constant crosshairs of entitled tech-bros who think it’s theirs for the taking. We get to earn universal income while they make billions and fly on Air Force One. Wait, who needs Air Force One, it’s not state of the art anyway and they all have private jets! Let’s laud the work of our industry associations, lobbyists, and organizations like CCC who continue to do the meaningful work of standing up for, and doing, the honest exchange of copyrighted materials.
There are sure to be more great deals like the one CAS struck with Cleveland Clinic and IBM making for a perfect trifecta — all organizations doing what they do best for the betterment of the planet. In the interim though there will be industry mincemeat made as copyright gets assaulted and the issues move their way through the courts at a slow, lumbering, glacial pace.
The courts vs. big tech’s land grab or rather content grab? No contest. And when the damage is done, and it will be soon and quickly there will be too little left of an industry that the planet needs but will no longer recognize. Quality data and information is needed to run in AI’s pipes, but that water is viewed as an entitlement. Water is a basic universal right, but we still pay our water company, don’t we?
And so Sam Altman continues talking about the generational differences in how ChatGPT is used. There are also professional differences. Both our research and this research we did for CCC point to these differences. Market analysis? Gen AI at the core. Legal briefs? Marketing copy? What about entire marketing plans? Business plans? Financial analysis? Strategic plans? It is fabulous that all this will come at our fingertips. It also means wholesale change to our industry is on the horizon especially with the assault on copyright.
As the focus turns more and more toward answers the bottom of the industry is going to get shape-shifted and whole swaths of it will disappear. We can talk about sea-change and whether Google is a dinosaur. Maybe it’ll dramatically shrink and be reptilian, like the alligator, eons later and to this day. It really doesn’t matter.
It’ll be those with unique, proprietary, aggregated data that can’t be found in report excerpts, or anywhere on the web, and is needed to run an industry — think Circana, think Civic Science, think anyone with pricing data that isn’t outside the firewall, or things like CAS’s database that is at the foundation of just about every (and I do mean every) innovation in its field. Customers cannot operate without it.
It’s not hyperbole. There are existential threats everywhere. And whether dinosaur or alligator the industry is in big tech’s crosshairs, and will be a shadow of itself when the big continue to get bigger, small AI upstarts emerge, and entire chunks of the middle market and some sectors entirely just simply disappear.
Answer the question where is your defensible moat? If you don’t have one then your existential moment awaits.