Update – EML Wildfire

I’ve been pretty quiet on here over the last few months. This is due to a number of reasons including the merger between Wildfire and EML which was announced this week. You can read the press release, the blog post from new MD Richard Parker and the coverage in PR Week.

It’s a very exciting development and makes the newly formed EML Wildfire one of the top ten tech PR agencies in the UK. Watch this space!

Hopefully with the merger now complete, I’ll be able to spend a bit more time sharing thoughts and views on here and also on the new EML Wildfire blog.

The experience economy: do we crave experience rather than wealth?

An article in the New York Times this week by David Brooks draws on learnings from Tyler Cowen’s e-book “The Great Stagnation”.

In it, Cowen argues that in the US in recent years (and much of it can be transposed to Western Europe too), we are increasingly craving a better quality of life through experiences rather than the materialism of the past:

“It could be that the nature of technological change isn’t causing the slowdown but a shift in values. It could be that in an industrial economy people develop a materialist mind-set and believe that improving their income is the same thing as improving their quality of life. But in an affluent information-driven world, people embrace the postmaterialist mind-set. They realize they can improve their quality of life without actually producing more wealth.”

Rotten at the core?

The argument goes that we have spent so much of the last century making money out of ‘low hanging fruit’ – new ideas, educational gains and technological developments – and that much of this has now stagnated.

Whereas countries like India and China are happy to take existing ideas and create value out of them by altering things like production processes, in the west, we are more obsessed by creating new ideas, but there is often little economic value in them.

These new ideas aren’t generating the wealth they once used to. For example, take education. With more and more people going to University, it makes ‘easy gains’ difficult to come by.

And, after the second world war, technology changed dramatically with for example, homes transforming themselves with a whole range of gadgets and gizmos. But since the 70s or 80s, this rate of advancement has changed. Our homes look remarkably similar today.

The “free world”

And the great technological development of our age – the internet – is built on a different ‘experience’ economy, where much is free and experiential:

“Most of the products are produced by people working for free. They cost nothing to consume. They don’t even create many jobs. As Cowen notes in his book, the automobile industry produced millions of jobs, but Facebook employs about 2,000, Twitter 300 and eBay about 17,000. It takes only 14,000 employees to make and sell iPods, but that device also eliminates jobs for those people who make and distribute CDs, potentially leading to net job losses.”

So we are all much happier in our post-material world where we can have new experiences online (for example) reading blogs and communicating on Facebook and Twitter for nothing, but our economy suffers as we shun the materialism that made the Western world.

The underlying questions in all of this are whether it can continue and if it is a change for good or bad…

picture credit

Something to talk about?

A new blog is born. Lots of blank space to fill.

Blogging has undergone something of a rocky patch recently with many feeling blogs are not what they used to be. But that’s surely a good thing? Nothing should stand still. Especially something as young and evolving as blogging.

So here goes with another evolution.

And it’ll be something of an experiment I think. I’m still involved in ‘blogging’ elsewhere – at work (where obviously the purpose and audience is probably, but not exclusively, different) and in my work with clients. And I’ve been involved in blogs in the past too.

But, there is scope to explore other, less traditional (if you can use that term in digital yet!) ideas, concepts and creations. And also new ways of blogging, of writing and of expressing ideas and thoughts.

So what will you find here?

Probably a bit of technology, some PR and marketing, all things digital and online, not to mention some random bits and pieces.

I’ve picked a Dave Winer quote to adorn the top of the blog. I think it sums up what is great about blogging and the internet.

It’s why we come back to places online, because they send us away again – either in the way Winer originally meant – through links. But also in other more abstract ways.

Hopefully something will grab your attention. Enjoy :)

About

This is my story. I've always been fascinated by the internet. My first passion was music and I studied a music degree at Birmingham University. But once graduated I quickly went back to the web working as a digital marketer. I also ran a web startup for a few years. In the need of a new challenge, I turned to the world of PR and now work as an Account Director at EML Wildfire. My interest is primarily looking at how PR professionals can make the most of the web and digital marketing. This blog contains my thoughts and things I find inspirational.

© 2012 Danny Whatmough - Made by me