is now much more focused upon strategic change – the profile of our membership has broadened. Yes, we still have lots of the well-known and established players. But I think what’s quite striking has been companies coming into the media space out of the broader IT sector, who want to build contacts and understanding in media and entertainment. We’re seen as a way of helping them do that. What’s also been interesting has been the content organisations themselves. When we first began, we reached out to broadcasters on the continent of Europe, for instance, and said, “Would you be interested in joining the DPP?” They almost all said no, and were completely focused on their own needs within their own national boundaries. But then, three or four years ago, that changed dramatically, and now one of our strongest growth areas for membership is the European broadcaster community. That’s because those companies now know that the fact most of them operate within national boundaries means they don’t compete with each other. They can benefit hugely from learning from their counterparts in other countries. They also can no longer afford to have departments full of people who go out and look at media strategy – they instead need to outsource some of that expertise. And that’s where we come in. Doesn ΄ t the speed of change, and the intensely competitive market, make it impossible to think of communities of interest and strategic insight? Operating against the existence of something like an industry organisation – the industry is now moving so fast and is so highly competitive – you may think that the sense of community would have diminished. But actually, again, I think the opposite has taken place. What’s happened is it’s meant that people now need openness. They need sharing because they cannot pretend to themselves that they can either
ON STAGE Mark Harrison taking questions at a DPP event in London last year
» It΄s quite rare that a technology does change everything – and when it has, it has always been in the consumer realm «
operate across the whole supply chain, or have knowledge across the whole supply chain. When the DPP started ten years ago, one of our biggest barriers was that a lot of vendors would say to me quite openly: “We love complexity. We love things going wrong because we make money from it.” The fact that production companies and broadcasters didn’t understand the tech as well as they did was brilliant in their eyes. They didn’t want that to change because they profited from it. Equally, we’d find major broadcasters who would say they didn’t want to share anything because they thought their means of production was a competitive advantage. That has now completely inverted. Any vendor that wants to make a living out of complexity is going to go bust pretty fast. Nowadays, customers simply will not accept it. And, meanwhile, any customer organisation that wants to try and compete on the basis of having some highly bespoke, individualised
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