Good flint knappers are hard to find. Probably close to impossible, actually. Knappers were the people who made spear and arrow points for cavemen. Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if at least a few of those mysterious paintings on all those cave walls were ads for knapping services. Maybe there was a knapping upfront.
My point is, every distribution channel upended by transformative technology is accompanied by a job category made obsolete by change, and has been since the first knapper struck flint to stone.
The printing press, for example, must have put an awful lot of scribes out of business. How about the small businessmen and women who ran all those TV repair shops when I and my fellow digital immigrants were kids?
And one of the most underrated challenges of technological change, to my mind, is figuring out what new jobs will replace the old ones, and where to find people who can do them. Sure, we have outplacement and retraining and a lot of pondering what the jobs of the future will require. But companies still struggle to stay on top of this fast-moving game.
Clients are increasingly coming to us for counsel in this area. In fact, I joined top executives of our client Microsoft this week at two events where meeting the organizational challenges of the modern media ecosystem were part of the discussion, even if only implicitly. First up was a Marketing Society gathering in London and a Q&A with Microsoft Senior Vice President of Marketing Mich Matthews and Microsoft U.K. Managing Director and Vice President Ashley Highfield before an audience of CMOs. The next day, I moderated a Microsoft-sponsored CMO panel at Cannes.
To better understand the challenge, I reached out to Medialink Director of Executive Search Christopher Nutile, who has spent much of his career grappling with this crucial issue as an HR and executive search leader for Google and Razorfish, among others. He thinks the future jobs that will be most in demand within the media ecosystem in the coming years are media sales, media strategy specialists and social marketing managers.
The new sales executives, Chris says, "can effectively sell advertising technology such as ad networks and exchanges to top brand marketers. Media sales professionals with experience and relationships within the branded advertising world are becoming highly critical in changing the reputation of the ad technology world from a way to sell class 2, remnant inventory to a new way for brands to narrowcast and effectively target those consumers to whom their products are most relevant."
In the media strategy sphere, specialists who are focused on hyper localized marketing will be the ones everybody wants to hire. With the success of Foursquare, Gowalla, Mytown, Whrrl and other location-based social networks, marketers are looking for unique ways to tie in to this rapidly growing space.
All over the social media landscape, in fact, companies are looking for a few good men and women to help them move smartly and smoothly into the digital future. Marketers, agencies and publishers are all rapidly building their resources in the social media area and social media managers are red-hot right now. Chris says this skill set, not surprisingly, is characterized by people who can think quickly under the real time pressures presented by social media, as well as understand how to demonstrate and communicate ROI from social media initiatives.
I would add that a new kind of content creator may also soon be in vogue, writers and visual specialists who are equally at home telling entertaining, brand-supported stories on any platform, and who create with that in mind from the beginning.
Technology doesn't just change business. It changes businesspeople as well. Identifying emerging jobs and job categories is a pressing concern that is only going to get more pressing.
Because there isn't a marketer in the world who doesn't need a really sharp spear.
Michael E. Kassan is Chairman and CEO of MediaLink, LLC, a leading Los Angeles and New York City-based advisory and business development firm that provides critical counsel and direction on issues of marketing, advertising, media, entertainment and digital technology. Michael can be reached at michael@medialinkllc.com
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