Talent Wins

Recently, I was asked to provide the keynote at the Iowa Broadcasters Association annual meeting. As broadcasters and agencies share the ability and responsibility to communicate a broad spectrum of subjects for brands, promotions, news and entertainment; I found myself focused on the importance of talent to both industries.

As the broadcast industry and ours have experienced dramatic changes, the one constant that continues to attract and retain audiences and advertisers is talent:

• Talent to craft and design a message.
• Talent to deliver it in creative, relevant, memorable ways.
• Talent to solve problems and create new opportunities.
• Talent to affect and drive better ways of doing things.
• Talent with the ability to project a future opportunity into a present state.
• Talent to build businesses.

We can get all tied up in what may be the next technology, the new shiny object, or the buzzwords of the moment, but nothing ever really replaces talent. It’s the uniquely gifted, human perspective of wisdom, insight, creativity and power to communicate…to make things happen.

When viewed in this lens, talent could now offer the next golden age of our industries. The age when talent equipped with technology makes the customer experience so much better than it could have been imagined even a decade ago.

Now, advertising has no franchise right to talent. Talent flows to where openness and accessibility value it and allow it to flourish – pretty much the way it’s always been, whether technology, the public square or private industry.

So the real challenge may be how can we cultivate the talent platform within our businesses so our work is an incredibly rewarding application of one’s self and the team — the combination of rational, emotional, collaborative and experiential benefits — whether it’s broadcasting or advertising.

If we respond to this question properly, we have the answer for whatever our future encounters. Because talent always finds a way to win.