Roger Abramson: Who Will Disrupt The Next Industry?

Image courtesy of 1shots at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Just What The HELL Is Going On Right Now?

A profound groundswell is now in progress, knocking established experts off their solid foundations. Here’s why today’s most disruptive revolutionaries are getting a toe-hold.

In the 1970s movie studio biz, a narrow window of opportunity spawned the new breed of fresh-blood filmmakers like Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese

The last time such an opening occurred in our business, at the advent of Google Adwords and more importantly, its content network, the floodgates produced guys like Frank Kern, Ryan Deiss, and Jeff Walker, who’ve shaped our industry.

Television ushered in frustrated fiction writers like Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry. The Twilight Zone and Star Trek could only be born in the Golden Age of Television.

Cable television gave a wide latitude to today’s great television writers, laying the groundwork for controversial, violent and adult story-lines like Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad.

Cable television also made room for experiments such as The Daily Show and the Chappelle Show, music television and round-the-clock news, worship, and shopping stations.

The late 90s internet boom spawned Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PayPal’s Elon Musk and Peter Theil… just as surely as the computer age had ushered in Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

In every era, talented people are chomping at the bit to get in. Every few years, a door cracks open and a few sneak through.

The times were ripe for new marketing talents. Fellas like James Wedmore and Gideon Shalwick and perpetual dynamos like Marie Forleo caught a wave when YouTube went from toy to business tool.

Many of YouTube’s early stars have now turned pro. Dominating a media they helped create.

Of course. That was YouTube. What’s today’s trend?

How about Facebook? It hasn’t been this cheap or easy to target, attract, and bond with an audience since the early days of Google, when the last batch found their way in.

For fledgling boot-strappers, this latest wave’s almost over, just as Gary Vaynerchuk has been saying for years.

A crowd of also-rans is rushing in for a quick buck. A relatively free ride of cheap and easy traffic has started turning into yet another a muddy slog against cut-throat competition.

In other words, you’ll soon need to actually know what you’re doing. (If you do, then nearly any media can work.)

The good news… It’s always been easy to beat the slow-moving zombie hordes… especially if you’ve cracked open any worthwhile book or home-study product in the past decade.

In case you were wondering, here’s where the bar for success is set these days: Kim Kardashian reportedly made $200 million from a video game endorsement and $65 million from a reality TV show spin-off of her sex tapes and other endorsement deals.

Did you catch her success formula? She’s riding the reality TV boom and the wave of game apps.

Here, in this new, more personal medium, a new kind of media titan is already rising, and riding on the technology coat-tails of a 30 year old man worth $33.3 billion dollars… all from riding the social media trend.

Up-and-coming trends like Tumblr, Vine, and Instagram are built on a slight increase in consumer bandwidth and a trend toward sticking your face in your phone around the clock.

Other profitable media in 2014 includes newspapers, phone books, voicemail blasts, and fax machines. Only if you know what you’re doing.

Here’s the lesson as I see it: Either find a trend and get in front of it, or learn a rare and valuable set of skills, knowledge, and connections that allow you to dominate any medium.