“People come to me for radical, innovative transformation,” says Cindy Gallop, with a gleeful smile on her face. “I don’t do status quo. I like to blow shit up!”
Gallop is hoping to blow up a storm at MIPCube when she addresses the topic of how the TV and advertising worlds must change if they want to survive, let alone prosper. The former BBH executive now works as a consultant and business coach, while also running two startups: IfWeRanTheWorld and MakeLoveNotPorn.
Her March 30 keynote message will be that media and entertainment executives should not fear change, but should fear fear itself. “Fear is the single most paralysing factor you can have in business, but every single industry sector I work with is riddled with it,” she says. “Decisions made out of fear are always very bad decisions. You have to lose the fear, which is easier said than done.”
Gallop’s view is that the TV sector, like the other creative industries, has gotten so big and entrenched that it is now conventional, and resistant to truly disruptive ideas. “There are norms and rules and conventions, and players in the marketplace fall prey to that collaborative competition syndrome, where they compete with everyone else in the sector by doing exactly the same thing that everyone else is doing,” she says. “In all these sectors, old-world business models are broken, destroyed and tanking! And this all applies to music, publishing, advertising and porn too.”
Gallop’s MIPCube message will focus on the need for the TV industry to “completely reinvent and restructure” itself, in order to move from the old-world order to the new. She’s not just a rabble-rouser though: her speech will, she says, contain plenty of practical advice for attendees to actually make this happen.
“It doesn’t matter how brilliant the inspiration or fantastic the ideas I give you are, if you plug them into the same old-world order business process,” she says. “You’ll just get the same old-world order crap out!”
Who is doing business the way Gallop is advising? Nobody, she says. In fact, Gallop says even the most high-profile startups in the media and entertainment worlds tend to be populated by people with a big, established reputation in their industry. “They are hidebound because they care too much about what the old-world order in the space thinks of them,” she says. “It’s very rare to see a well-funded startup from a big-reputation industry that’s prepared to say ‘I don’t give a f*** what the industry thinks of me!’ It’s a massively inhibiting factor.”
Gallop will also be using her own startup experiences in her talk, with IfWeRanTheWorld an attempt to “make anything happen” through crowdsourcing, while MakeLoveNotPorn is her attempt to disrupt the adult entertainment industry.
“Every dynamic I’ve talked about applies to porn, which is so big, it’s conventional and totally prey to collaborative competition,” she says. “And it’s tanking: the business model has been destroyed by the advent of free porn online. I want to show them they can invent a different future for themselves.”
> This is the full version of the interview that appears in the MIPCube Preview magazine: out now! & read all the interviews with our future-shaping speakers here.
> Entertainment technology blogger Stuart Dredge (The Guardian, The Appside, Music Ally) will be liveblogging for MIPBlog during MIPCube and MIPTV. Watch this space…
