5:00 am, cleared customs at Rio; sleepy, excited to be here for the first
time, I follow a well-dressed man who wants to be my taxi ... until, in the
empty lot, I think I should probably not be getting into an unmarked, unmetered
limo. I say: "Sorry. I want an official taxi." "I am official", he protests,
showing me a plastified card saying: "Taxi Especial." Well, I don't tell him
that "Especial" was not top of my list of priorities this morning.
Paula, young, professional, Australian, who has been following another well-dressed man,
catches my eye and says to me: ``Oh! That's what I want too. I think I'll
stick with you." We've wasted 5 precious minutes of these guys' time - just
the time when other passengers, less paranoid than us, might have followed
through with the transaction. I apologise again, and he grudgingly points me
to the rank.
Anything to do with iCommons?
A bit. The "grey economy" taxi driver has a real problem of trust to
overcome. The official, regulated, oligopolised taxis offer me, the neophyte
here, the great advantage of a sense of quality control, of recourse, of being
able to go after someone if things go wrong. In a way, this is what
branded - usually copyright - material does too: "it won't waste your time,
offend your sensibilities, take you off limits, because the brand, like the
taxi medallion, was expensive to establish and could be quickly revoked."
(That is also what is wrong with it: quality "control" will also restrict,
level, stifle, etc. The standard product is made worse just for being
standard).
The taxi medallion has its use - although I'm all for the cartel-buster in
theory if not in this particular case in practice - and the media brand will
always have one too. Can we reproduce the function of the brand - the
shorthand for the content, the believable signal - without strong (copyright)
ownership of the product? Yes, we will -- there are digital communities that create permanent value without strong ownership (my own fav - slashdot). But there aren't that many examples, especially outside the tech space.
The link between brand and ownership is investment: there is no reputation
if it has not been hard or costly to acquire; and who invests if they cannot
enjoy the returns? The secret, I think, is that many cultural creators will create even without the distant promise of a royalty stream.
I am not a pessimist about how we make "quasi-brands" in a world of weaker ownership. But my pragmatism keeps me asking: what are the 3, or 5 or 8 things we need to do to operationalise this idea. I will be keeping my ear to the
ground over these next few days at iCommons 2006 for this sort of insight.
I'll let you know how I get on.
Oh, by the way, Paula - very nice person. She was here working on assuring
the production rights for next year's American Games to be held in Rio. We
may have agreed on taxis, but we found plenty to disagree about on the drive
down to Copacabana.
