Media & Advertising themes for 2025: #4: Collaboration (or, why swimming together is needed for survival)

As we reflect on 2024 and look ahead to 2025, there have been four themes that have been identified that relate to the sustainable and high opportunity future of media and advertising companies.

We’ve covered:

1: Realisation: the media sector is facing an existential crisis

2: Positive provocation: the tactics and behaviours demonstrated in the past will only ensure this crisis accelerated?

3: Rejuvenation: by focusing on the buyer and understanding their place and outcomes at the core of your business, there are adequate paths for reinvention.

The last are is the most important, collaboration.

A good way to look at the collaboration required for media and advertising companies is to take inspiration from fish that swim together in schools.

Fish swim together for many reasons. They swim together for protection. They swim together for energy and resource efficiency. They swim together to hold and protect their territory. They swim together as one hundred fish pooling their eyes and noses gives them collectively a better chance of finding food and sustenance. Swimming together gives the collective a better chance of spawning offspring, purely due to reducing the chance that their eggs will be eaten by a predator.

Small fish are more likely to swim in schools than large fish. And small fish need the protection and collective energy a school creates. In an ocean full of large predators, swimming together is mandatory for survival for many of the ocean's inhabitants. Yes, it is a good defensive tactic. But collectively it also provides an opportunity for sustainability.

For the past twenty years media companies have generally preferred to swim alone and make themselves easily accessible to predators. Initially many of these companies thought they were the predators. Then when they realised they weren’t the predators, they thought they were immune and safe as the new platform predators ate the contents of the ocean.?

But there is no denying that right now they are the small fish/ And they are more vulnerable than ever. And the predators are at a scale no one has ever seen before. These large platform predator fish have no interest in swimming in schools. They are indiscriminate in their appetite to eat the competition.

Media and advertising businesses I believe have acknowledged the need to collaborate and take inspiration from the way fish swim in schools. Collectively they are more powerful and as collaborators they are formidable. Media and advertising businesses need to protect their territory and a collective and collaborative approach provides a better way of doing this. The one up-man ship of media and advertising businesses has weakened the entire market for all participants.

Collaboration between organisations is a better use of resources and has a higher chance of success of finding sustainable new growth pathways. This isn’t just due to a lack of resources (relative) for these businesses, but also in terms of the skills and perspectives to see where their customer (the marketer) is heading and how consumers are functioning in this environment.?

And a collaborative approach to new product development will create an environment where more of these new initiatives succeed. It is better (in my view) to have a 30% stake in a highly successful new venture than a 100% stake in a product that failed to launch.

There’s one thing that I haven’t explained about fish swimming in schools. And that is how they swim so close together without bumping into each other and in the process turning a protection mechanism into a dangerous form of chaos. Fish can move together due to biological advantages (smell, anatomy) but they are also constantly using their varied senses to establish and amend their placement. They adapt to one another’s movements by being aware and accepting of the fact that movements and changes are needed. At one time it was believed that one fish controlled the movements - a dominant member of the group - but this has turned out not to be true. It requires collaboration between all participants.

By swimming together we have a better chance of fending off the predators.

What’s more, we have a better chance of finding collective opportunity and delivering on it. But it will require businesses that have historically preferred to fight each other rather than productively work together to rapidly find ways to swim together, be comfortable with swimming together, and collectively be prepared to share opportunities for the benefit of the group.