An Open Letter From YCD Multimedia
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
An open letter from Barry Salzman, Chief Executive Officer in response to our post yesterday.
Reprinted below in its entirety…
Dear Adrian
Yes, we like everybody else like to be number ONE, but only in listings where the criteria are relevant.
In our business, we think of relevance as the ability to have a measurable impact on our clients’ businesses, and thereby on our own. As a long time fan of DailyDOOH’s reporting on our industry, I was disappointed to learn of some of your Top 10 criteria as I read through why YCD Multimedia and others have been excluded from the list.
As somebody who has built out a very real global organization, as ex-President of DoubleClick’s worldwide media business, with thousands of employees across 24 countries and revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars, I can tell you a thing or two about building GLOBAL organizations.
They require substantial investment, critical mass to meet the needs of local clients, local staff that understand the local market (and in our business, knowing a thing or two about local language and content may help too).
So, an office of one or a flag on a map or a loose network of people that have signed partner agreements, does not a global presence make.
We at YCD understand that to properly meet the needs of our clients, we need to establish a REAL presence in the markets we do business in, and investing the resources to meet those clients’ needs is the number one driver of our approach to opening our business in new markets.
The second issue is your assessment of the “big mistake” YCD has made playing down music. Music is an integral part of YCD’s integrated audio-video solutions and just about every one of our new clients over the last year or two use both our audio and video solution. But we are also in business to yield a return to our shareholders and even the most simplistic grasp on trends in the music business will show that the economics of a music offering alone are a one way ticket to nowhere.
So DailyDOOH, you owe yourselves and your readers better than a listing of top industry players that blatantly disregards the one thing that our industry is craving – and that’s grownup business credibility.
My sense is that we as an industry have one reason for being, and that’s to enable businesses to achieve measurable results by innovating with digital media solutions (at least that’s how we think about it at YCD).
Next time around DailyDOOH, a listing of industry players that are focused on making their customers’ businesses more successful, and have the technology and tools to do so, will go a long way to building our industry’s credibility instead of fuelling the critics that claim we are full of hype and have under delivered.
And being glib about being GLOBAL is about overhyping and under delivering.
January 23rd, 2009 at 15:30 @687
The thing we always tell customers is to ask whether the vendor is PROFITABLE. If they say anything other than YES — e.g. “oh, we’re cashflow positive” or “we’re on track to be profitable by Q2” or anything else, then that really ought to throw up some major red flags.