Danwei: Socialistic anarchists eating our own babies

Sir Martin ponders the threat of socialist anarchists

The previous post about the South China Morning Post’s clueless Internet stategy referred, for balance, to some comments by Martin Sorrell, advertising Borg WPP’s chief, warning media executives against free content.

It seems that Sorrell is on the warpath against free content. The Financial Times also quoted him on June 20, using rather strong language:

The head of the UK advertising group also acknowledged the difficulty of competing against websites that destroyed business models. “How do you deal with socialistic anarchists?” he asked, referring to Craigslist, the popular, free classified advertising site that has been threatening revenues at US city newspapers.

“The internet is the most socialistic force you’ve ever seen,” he added, noting that the response from some media groups had been to offer their content for free in traditional and digital form.

“They have decided – ‘if I don’t eat my children, somebody else will’,” he told executives from UK regional newspapers attending an industry conference, adding that he disapproved of giving away content for free. “You should charge for it if the consumer values the content,” he said.

He also took the chance to complain about young people and their attitude to working for huge coporations:

Sir Martin believes that the shortage in human capital would be one of the main challenges facing companies in the future, and successful companies were those that could “find, retain, and incentivise good people”.

Young people, accustomed to quick response on the internet, were shunning hierarchical organisations where decision-making took a long time.

“You saw this in the first web boom and you’re seeing it now . . . There are significant changes in the attitudes of young people. They would rather work in smaller, less bureaucratic companies.”

If free content is socialism, you’re currently reading the online journal of the workers paradise! 社会主义好！

To quote Mao Zedong again, 天下大乱,形势大好 — Everything is chaos, the situation is excellent. At least for smaller, less bureaucratic companies that are used to dealing with socialism and chaos.