Live from XMediaLab: Hugh Mason, Partner, Pembridge Partners LLP

From the program: Following training as a documentary TV producer-director with the BBC, Hugh Mason founded and grew a multiple-award-winning broadcast TV production company. Finding himself as interested in the business side of running a creative company as he had previously been making films, Hugh co-founded Pembridge Partners in 2001. Instead of making complex stories about science accessible to non-specialist audiences, Hugh now applies his strategy, ideas and communication skills to help Creative Industries Small-and Medium-sized Enterprises to visualize their futures, set a path for growth and plan their way to success.

Myths about creative people
Thomas Edison had over 1,000 patents, but he’s obviously hugely famous for the light bulb, which is an interesting invention, because first you have to convince people to buy it, and then you have to convince them to buy electricity. We’ve got this myth of inventors being odd, quirky: Dr Strangelove, Einstein, Stephen Hawking. People have beliefs about creative people, but the stories are part of what leads to their mystique!

Sell the sizzle, not the sausage
He showed us a picture of a pile of raw sausages with this caption:

Our beek sausage are made using lean beef and our unique seasining (the are delicious)

The sausages are uncooked and the spelling… obviously. Show a delicious picture of cooked sausage -- I don’t want to see dead meat! If I’m a consumer or investor, please don’t tell me about the code or the formula -- just tell me about the benefits! That’s how you’ll get it off the ground.

Legend of the Lab Rats
"Trust me, I’m a corporation." "You can’t stand in the way of progress." The myth of Edison is that he was a lone inventor, but in fact he had scores and scores of people working for him. Many of his inventions weren’t even invented by him -- they were invented by the people working for him.

One of the things he likes about this mythology is that it still happens today. He shows a picture of this crazy building -- like a tent in the middle of a field -- that's a research lab. Couldn't they have put the people in a regular building? No, because there's this idea that creative genius needs creative space.

Nylon came out of a huge industrial research effort. The inventor was called William Hume Carruthers. He killed himself around 10 years after inventing nylon. Nylon is all around us, but very few of us know the guy who invented it. He showed a picture of guys who invented transistor -- again, very few people knew their names.

Through the 20th century, industrial research produced some amazing stuff. It’s hard to imagine two guys in a shed sending someone to the moon.

The peak of industrialized research and development was in the 30s and 40s. In the 60s you were invited to come to the World’s Fair as a child, and there was a really disempowering flavor about technology -- this sense that large corporations will look after technology for you, you don’t need to worry about it.

Some of the technologies they predicted finally took off -- shows a woman talking on a videophone in the 60s. Now we’ve got this fantastic network of technologies we can build on. In the 60s, there was no network or infrastructure to build ideas on. However brilliant your idea may be, unless there’s some way of rolling it out on existing platforms or networks, you’re not going to make a difference.

It took an enormous extra level of investment before teleconferencing became possible.

Build a team

The idea | The team | The X factor

The team is worth around 75% of that recipe.

3 Myths of Marketing

• It will sell itself
• We own the consumer
• Build it and they will come

In the 1950s Igor Ansoff (sp?) came up with the Igor Ansoff Innovation Matrix. On the one axis, it had Existing Markets/New Markets; on the other, Existing Products/New Products. He’s not sure it works any more. The idea was you take your idea to a highly paid advertising company, they’d build some fancy presentation around it, sales would skyrocket, and you’d be very rich.

The problem is that conventional advertising doesn’t work anymore -- you can’t shout above the noise.

A lot of startups fail because they underestimate the massive marketing effort required. So his advice?

Don’t commercialize ideas, create ideas to fit commercial opportunities.

And fix someone’s headache. And persist. Back to Edison: genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

Note: Hugh and I were chatting earlier about Edison and persistence. Did you know that Edison tried over 800 different filaments before he found one that would work for the light bulb? That's amazing. Most of us would have given up after 500 or so :-)