On V-J Day, 1945, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt ran down the street in Times Square as thousands cheered the end of conflict in the Second World War. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw a sailor grab a woman in white, spun, and clicked his Leica shutter.
The New Yorker's Anthony Lane recounts the history of Leica, a little camera that invented 35mm photography and which was derided by serious photographers when it debuted in 1925. (One said at the time "it looked like a toy designed for a lady's handbag.") The Leica made candid photography possible, filled the columns of newspapers and magazines such as Life, and undocked artists from heavy boxes and 13 x 18 plates.
Leica was a disruptive technology -- a brilliant, brief lift to the next level. Think of it: After Leica, the art of film plateaued for nearly 75 years. The mistake marketers make today, in our $600-Google-stock-Web 2.0-hyperbloggism, is believing that the current pace of change will go on forever. Yes, the web is becoming untethered, Apple iPhones and Verizon Voyagers will put Google in our pockets, and we'll all have GPS tracking telling us where to find the remote control. But once mobile flat screens and fast wireless links are ubiquitous, technology will level.
We've already seen this with the slowing rate of software adoption (do you have Vista yet?). At a certain point, the transaction utility of buying the next new thing is outweighed by the comfort that your current versions of Word, Excel and Quark work pretty well already.
Today's disruption is serious for advertisers. Print results are declining as most communications go digital. Internet advertising (interactive) and outdoor (can't miss it) are the fastest growing ad formats, with everything else in the middle -- cable, radio, magazines, newspapers -- getting squeezed. Advertisers need to adjust to the new platform. Your old media plan will not work any longer. The good news is if you embrace the change, you may like it -- and the new communications platform may be here for another 75 years.
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