iMedia: Do you have any predictions for the industry this year?
Gleeson: If each brand isn't asking itself how to reinvent this year, then they're kind of missing what the opportunity should be... I think the best analogy for what's about to happen to advertising and marketing... is the music industry, which lost sight of being in the music business and focused on being in the music distribution and printing business. It basically was a series of companies with massive infrastructural investment in particular memory storage -- printing and distribution. And so they looked at interactive as either something to fight off or something at the fringe, but they saw their core business, effectively, as CD sales. If they had looked at their business as music and had been willing to start upfront early with: "What does that mean to us, how can we be best at the music business, not best at CD distribution?" I think they might have had a different thing.
iMedia: What are you preparing for the Brand Summit next month?
Gleeson: When I heard the topic "Bottom line or flat line," it just seemed to me that if there's a combination that I can lay on interactivity, it's a failure of our imagination. And by that, I mean I'm tired of the conversations about when media dollars will move into interactive, because that's the wrong conversation. I think the question is: How are we going to re-adjust our business models to address the possibilities that interactive enables?
There's always going to be TV, there's always going to radio, there's always going to be print, there will always be these other things, it's the way that you use them... We're going to have to break some crockery. I'm also tired of people lecturing about things that I can't change in my organization. But I think there are fundamental things that we can do, and things we need to ask of our organizations, and things that we can do to change the organizations that we can focus on.
iMedia: Finally, correct me if I'm wrong, but after taking a look at your hobbies, I get the sense you're an adrenaline junkie of sorts. How does that play into your campaigns or the ideas that you come up with? Would you say that it gives you a higher tolerance for untested waters or are you more of a safety-first kind of guy?
Gleeson: I'd flip it around slightly and say I have a pretty high energy level, which I think you need to have to keep up with what's happening. And I think if I didn't have that, it would be enormously difficult for me to distill -- and I'm not saying that I'm doing the best job in the world. What it gives me is a healthy dose of "I don't know the answer." If you think you know the answer when you drive a motorcycle or you rock climb, you die... It comes down to whether you're able to re-adjust your mental map on the fly, or do you stick to the one that you know?
2008 was also the perfect storm of financial contraction, with clients looking to streamline services, and agencies being asked to do more than they ever did. Our maps don't work anymore, and if we try to look at 2009 as the next logical step of 2008, then we blew it.
Editor's note: Renny Gleeson will be keynoting on Feb. 10 at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Point, Fla. For more information, please visit our site.
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Matt Kapko is deputy editor for iMedia Connection.
