It’s Silicon Valley’s world. Madison Avenue is just living in it.
| January 6, 2012
In September 2010, a nineteen year old college student from Stanford built and launched YouTube Instant in his dorm room. YouTube Instant is just a novelty search engine for navigating video content on YouTube in real time, but it garnered interest from global media outlets and got this relatively unknown college student a seat at the cool kids table in Silicon Valley. Why? Speed to market. It started with a challenge from one software engineer to another and three hours later a new search engine was born. Concept to completion in three hours! Can you imagine how that situation would have transpired if the nineteen year old student was the agency and his college buddy was the client? Don’t answer that. Let me show you in an incredibly hyperbolic way; solely for the self-serving purpose of hammering home my ultimate point.
Silicon Valley Approach
Madison Avenue Approach
Okay, snap back to reality. Most marketing clients work on businesses that answer to shareholders so it’s in no way realistic they could be as cavalier as our college student. They have bosses, IT partners, agency partners, budget limitations, etc. All these guard rails make speed to market a difficult proposition. So what can Madison Avenue learn from Silicon Valley that could realistically be applied within the structure of a traditional client/agency model. Ready, Fire, Aim. Avoid analysis paralysis. Minimize the number of decision-making stakeholders. Trust your gut. Ship half a product in a month instead a complete product in six months. Iterate post-launch. Be bold.