Image by malias via Flickr
A little food talk to end the week. There was a great article in the Times’ Dining section this week about how technology changes everything. The dining section? You bet, and it wasn’t the obvious changes many of us foodies have seen in things such as reservations (Open Table) or reviews (Yelp and way too many others) or discounts (Living Social, GroupOn et. al.). No, this one was about disintermediation and the business point it made was something we should all keep in the back of our minds.
The piece was about fluke but the change is anything but flukey, as you’ll see.
The article described what a group of fisherman are doing in Rhode Island to let chefs know what they’ve caught and to cut out the processors and distributors that add time to table and costs to the price restaurants pay. The way it works is this:
Steve Arnold took out his Droid Incredible and photographed the best of that day’s catch of fluke. He e-mailed the photograph to a number of chefs and sent them a note saying what he had hauled in, what he would be fishing for in the coming days, and when he could deliver his catch that afternoon.
The chefs fired back requests for squid, fluke, striped bass and a dozen or so other species. In iced containers, the orders would be rushed to restaurants in Providence and towns nearby in Massachusetts in a refrigerated van that Mr. Arnold recently bought.
Better products and lower costs. What’s not to love? Well, if you’re a middleman – in this case a fish processor or distributor – there’s a huge threat on the horizon as your end-users and your suppliers remove you from the equations.
Now compare our food example with Media Post’s report on the results of the PIVOT conference research about use of social media to engage consumers. This point:
Digital advertising, such as banners and keyword buys, has long provided businesses with products to generate opportunities for clickthroughs, but these products are proving ineffective in social networks. In a phenomenon dubbed “banner blindness,” consumers are learning to ignore many forms of digital advertising in favor of the desired content within their area of focus.
isn’t all that different in my mind from the fishing example. Ads are middlemen to a certain extent. Social media are cutting them out. If your business is ad-based or a medium that counts on those ads to survive, how are you rethinking that as consumers rethink how they spend their attention?
And trust me – that isn’t a fluke!
Consult Keith 