Who is your real competition?

In the last two-and-a-half years at Made By Many we’ve often been asked, “So who would you consider your competition to be then?”

The question always bugs us, because we’re uncomfortable with everything it assumes, but we know people are trying to work out who we are and what we do when they’re asking us this – and so we usually mention some names of people who seem a bit like us in one way or another: in terms of structure, world-view, beliefs and opinion about what is effective online. These are the people most likely to answer a brief in a similar way to us, whose work we respect and often wish we had done.

The problem is that these awesomeists are not our competition at all

Our real competition comes from ‘old new media’ thinking, from people who instinctively reach for a “viral” (sorry @bud_caddell, and the little kittens), or want to “do a social because it’s like the new SEO”, or people for whom complex engineering equates to a jerk-off Flash interactive TV-ad. We compete against bloated process, ‘waterfools’, Big Design Up Front (BDUF), proprietary software and people who’ve got the social media badge by checking in with all their former school-friends on Facebook. The competition can take on many forms – ranging from large old-school above-the-line agencies to two-man band digital shops.

The people like us are allies

Like us, they’re trying to reach beyond traditional marketing communications, to create real value exchange, new services, emotional and practical utility, community and earned media value – what Undercurrent’s Mike Arauz calls “designing for networks” – with users and executing at the highest possible levels – these people are allies. We have so much more in common with them – not least, a common enemy. While we’re still in this great transition, and while we’re all experimenting with the same new models, we should all celebrate each and every great, effective piece of work any of us produce. Every time any of us do anything awesome it works for all of us, to open up the possibilities of doing more awesome work, by giving clients confidence for example – or by showing them how brilliantly this stuff works when you get it right. And so, weirdly, the people you might immediately think of as being our closest competitors are actually working with us – we’re all still at the stage where we’re raising the bar and helping make the market bigger and more exciting for all of us.

We are not alone in thinking like this

While we SXSW, I participated in a meeting organised by Tim and his brother Ben Malbon of BBH Labs with some of the brightest thinkers in the online agency space. Edward Boches has a write-up of this meeting over at AdWeek in “The Digital Exchange. How collaborating with competitors could make us all smarter”.

That meeting was very exciting, and the antithesis of old-school closed-shop, creative control thinking. Brought together in the first instance by the Web, through blogging and Twitter, here was a whole room of people you might have thought were rivals and competitors, meeting in real life to discuss how they can work more openly. These weren’t competitors, but allies against an axis-of-evil of mediocrity, broadcast thinking, future-deniers and the status-quo defenders.

So in the future, here on the Made By Many blog, we are going to celebrate our allies and their work.