Next week, Marketing and MDC Partners will host a brand new event for C-Suite business leaders called the Marketing Evolution Summit (MES). One of the presentations will be delivered by Leonard Brody, a venture capitalist and former president of innovation at AEG Live. He’s also an author and prolific speaker, and is set to release his latest thoughts on marketing and innovation in a new talk titled The Great Rewrite.
This “rewrite,” posits Brody, is a fundamental shift in the way we view business. Models for success are being rewritten by smaller players from the bottom up, and not by incumbent brands. Brody’s talk will be the follow-up to OMERS Venture CEO John Ruffolo’s keynote presentation about the disruption of billion-dollar brands. (You’ll find the full conference agenda here.)
Marketing spoke with Brody ahead of MES to get a sense of what the Great Rewrite is all about. The following interview has been edited and condensed.
What can you tell us about the Great Rewrite?
The rewrite was a realization by me that a lot of executives didn’t really have a framework or a North Star to understand what was going on in the world around them. They knew the internet was important, they knew big change was coming, they knew they had to tactically respond. The problem is history, generally speaking, takes a couple hundred years for people to understand it. So I wanted to try and figure out how we can explain it now. I realized that in 2008 the world substantially changed, and I would argue that the digital era that began in and around the late ’90s, ended in 2008 during the recession. Four or five big things occurred in a perfect storm that put us in a position where we are literally rewriting the planet from the ground up, and this is the largest era of mass institutional change in the history of humanity.
It’s a remarkable theory – what signs say to you that the digital era ended in 2008?
There are many markers, but one of the things that I look for is that digital as we knew it was very restricted before 2008. You accessed it through very few windows and points of entry – it was your computer, your phone and your tablet. One of the big markers was the rise of the Internet of Things. We get into a market where everything is connected to a network. And now the physical world starts to get brought onto the network, where tables and chairs, stoves, fridges and cars start to get connected to the network. Institutional implications are upon us. Another one is a change in the capital markets, and a lack of willingness to protect incumbent businesses anymore.
Should large corporations be afraid of the Great Rewrite?
Yes, because we have seen that large organizations are not good at responding to change, and you can take a look at that from the Kodaks of the world to the Blockbusters. Those are companies that got written out of history. If you are defensive and if you understand the structure of your company to be relevant in a world that’s being rewritten, you’re going to be okay.
The whole point of the talk is to try and give people that framework, so they can understand what’s going on around them. And then say, what are the things you can do to be defensive and actually structure your business in a way that you keep competing.
