Subtitle Synchronization: combining of two or more elements
“But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them.” -George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
The month of July, in preparation for the summer holidays, I will be sharing original content from my work and observations of the similarities to the creator economy with deep tech companies. The Writers Guild of America strike that began on May 2, 2023 continues as of the date of this blog post – 2 months and one week. The labor union representing over 11,500 screenwriters is requesting right sizing of the residuals associated to streaming services: limited usage of artificial intelligence in the writing process and other elements. While agreement on a new contract between them and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has yet to be reached, the real life scenario is an excellent backdrop to this month’s theme: The Creator Economy. The theme of the month of July at Next Act Advisors is “The Creator Economy.” The digitalization of the economy has lowered the barriers to entry for creating businesses at scale, and the creator economy is nipping off some of the value created in the “analog economy. “ This month’s blog coincides with the 15th anniversary of the launch of the App store on the iPhone on July 10, 2008 with a whopping 370 billion downloads; developers earning more than $320 billion and the App Store has facilitated more than $1.1 trillion in billings and sales last year (2022) as reported by this article by Statista “The Trillion Dollar App Economy.”
A writer’s strike turned into a novel. At the same time, I was preparing to write this blog post, I finished reading Ann Rand’s 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged.”My son read it last year and recommended it. A dystopian novel set in a United States of America, heading toward autarchy, the industrialists go on strike. Ann Rand researched the railroad industry so as to weave in a story of industrial magnates. The novel is full of interpretations including deep tech (Fictional inventions such as Galt’s motor, Rearden Metal, and Project X (a sonic weapon) , mixed with metaphysics and ethics – three characters were the chosen students of a philosopher and a physicist and a heroine, Railroad industrialist Dagny Taggart, who falls in love with a few of the characters throughout the novel. The novel has been associated with different genres including science fiction, philosophy, and romance. When asked by film producer Albert S. Ruddy if a screenplay could focus on the love story, Rand agreed and reportedly said, “That’s all it ever was.” When I was asked what I took away from the novel I too concurred with the author, it is a love story. The love between characters and the love of truth as described so eloquently in the following text. “all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from the inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes – which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification – which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before…(page 718 of the student edition) Rand’s stated goal for writing the novel was “to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them” and to portray “what happens to the world without them”.[8] The core idea for the book came to her during a 1943 telephone conversation with her friend Isabel Paterson, who asserted that Rand owed it to her readers to write fiction about her philosophy. Rand disagreed and replied, “What if I went on strike? What if all the creative minds of the world went on strike?
At Next Act Advisors, I am about creating enterprise value with company founders. The pandemic has been an accelerator to all businesses, small, medium and large, to embrace digitalization. I like to think that we are all becoming creators. By juxtaposing the “conventional” creator businesses, including screen writing or novel writing, or composition, might we all learn other ways to continue to create value?
One definition of creativity: Creativity is elusive and lies in the eyes of the beholder. I found intriguing McKinsey’s work that focused on the value creation associated with creativity. Creativity is the heart of business innovation. In the McKinsey article published in 2017 Creativity’s bottom line: How winning companies turn creativity into business value and growth, the authors created the Award Creativity Score (ACS) based upon 15 years of the annual Cannes Lions awardees for advertising and marketing excellence. The financial performance for the highest ACS scoring companies was consistently in the top quartile: -67 percent of the companies were above average organic revenues growth -70 percent of the companies were above average total return to shareholders (TRS) -74 percent of the companies were above average net enterprise value. The authors identify in the top performing companies four management practices associated with creativity and innovation:
1) Practice makes perfect: hardwiring creativity and innovation in daily practices. Examples abound senior leaders create and innovate, aka creative directors, and marketing spend is considered an investment in the capital allocation process rather than expense.
2) Customer centricity: they go beyond conventional research methods to understand customers intimately by regularly observing customers and they understand the problems customers are seeking to solve with the use of the products or services.
3) Move fast: the speed by which they make decisions; risk taking is encouraged,
4) Adapt or die: in sync with moving fast they too learn fast, fail fast and rinse repeat. Similarities between Deep Tech and the Creator Economy At Next Act Advisors, I often work with deep tech founders.
A blog post on a deep dive into revenue possibilities in deep tech, shares five characteristics:
1. The product or solution is often invisible to the human eye.
2. The product or solution combines knowledge from multiple domains of science and technology like organic chemistry, synthetic biology, energy and chemistry, computational biology, and many more.
3. The product or solution is often embedded within another product or process.
4. The process of discovery is chaotic, out of control, contained within a sandbox or at a bench, and the journey begins when scaling to a repeatable manufacturing process.
5. Market size is not a risk because the product is addressing humans’ basic needs including energy, health, and communications, and has the possibility of changing the traditional way of addressing a market need. I looked to the music industry and found that music is invisible to the human eye. But oh, doesn’t it speak to the heart, ears and to the mind. Some characteristics in the music industry: Revenue streams come from licensing of the intellectual property.
Synchronization rights are through a music license.
See an article on Linked on the sync business which consists of syncing tracks with visual media. Synchronization more specifically refers to time-perfect matching of audio, being a song, and video, such as in movies, tv series, advertisements, commercials, video games, trailers, etc Additional revenue streams from live concerts and merchandise are considerable.
Pop pickers of a more mature vintage can cast their minds back to 1964, when the Beatles came to the rescue of the British economy. The process of discovery is among many artists and coproduction rights are shared. Like Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, Joseph Schumpeter’s principle of innovation posited that creative destruction is found in the innovations of the manufacturing process that increased productivity, and revolutionized the economic structures from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.
If you are a founder, and you would like to learn how your creative work can move from work to hire to a scalable business in the pursuit of creating value, please book time with me at Next Act Advisors. Wishing you and yours a restful holiday full of music, books and creative disruption.
Brenda A. McCabe #deeptech#creativity#innovation