The million-dollar gap
To make an album of music good enough to make it to the Top 40, it used to cost a million dollars. Now you can do it in your bedroom.
To make a commercial for network TV, a minute of footage cost about a million dollars…
And that same million was what it would cost to create an email engine for permission-based marketing in 1996.
And you needed a million dollars to build a website that could hold up under a lot of traffic, or to build a social media presence that would reach a million people.
All of these things are now incredibly cheap.
A veteran marketer’s first reaction is relief at how inexpensive so many tools now are.
But the reality is that the reduction in cost means that price is not a barrier, and when it comes to producing your message, your movie, your song, your site, your book–everyone else is now doing it as well.
And yet, more than a decade into this dramatic compression of the gap, big-time marketers and industry players are still acting as if the gap is still there, as if their ‘professional’ creations are only competing with each other for attention.
Abundance creates new kinds of scarcity.