The advantage of starting new.

This is from an article in the New York Times. It talks about how hard big agencies are finding it to change to the new reality of our world. I got me thinking. One of the reasons why it's sometimes an advantage to start a new company is that in doing so you force yourself to create a model that suits the reality of today. Most agencies were created to work well in another reality dominated by traditional media. So it's their DNA. It's tough to suddenly your change your DNA. Which is why the dinosaurs dies out. If they could have changed their DNA, they would have survived on.

Lee Clow thinks the answer is to hire young people. We don't think so. What good is hiring young people if you stick them into a model designed for another time?

Which is why we think we have an advantage in today's digitally dominated media world. Our company has started there. And so we're creating a model that suit the new reality.

Here's a bit from the article:

LIKE Cher in the movie “Moonstruck” ordering Nicolas Cage to “Snap out of it!” — and slapping him across the face to emphasize her point — speakers at an advertising conference urged the industry to stop wallowing in self-pity and get on with the challenges ahead.

“We should just stop talking about what was,” Tom Carroll, president and chief executive at TBWA Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, said here on Tuesday at the start of the leadership conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

“It’s like driving in the fog,” said Mr. Carroll, who is also the chairman of the association, known as the Four A’s. “You’re not sure what’s ahead of you, but you have to keep driving.”

Mr. Carroll acknowledged that it would be hard work to “change the way we do our business,” but called it a necessary response to the profound shifts in media, consumer behavior and technology that are remaking the advertising landscape.

“All industries recalibrate themselves,” Mr. Carroll said, illustrating his point with a rhetorical question, “How’d you like to be in the CD business?”

Mr. Carroll’s tough-love talk was echoed by a colleague, Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative at TBWA, who in wearing onstage his trademark garb of a T-shirt, jeans and sandals was perhaps the most casually dressed speaker in the 90-year history of the conference.

“Stop whining,” Mr. Clow told the estimated 380 attendees. The new realities “shouldn’t be scary,” he said, because they offer “a huge opportunity for us” to become far more useful to marketer clients as they seek more effective ways to sell products.

“If you want to participate, you’ve got to start hiring young people,” Mr. Clow said, “and don’t tell them what to do — ask them what to do.”