Setting up a media business during the global financial crisis might sound like a recipe for disaster but Mindfood is this year marking its 10th anniversary. To learn how it’s evolved over the years, we sit down with editor-in-chief Michael McHugh who reflects on the past, the present and the future of the celebrity endowed local and global content-machine.
At Previously Unavailable’s breakfast event this week, Air New Zealand’s head of innovation Scott Bishop spoke about the difference between companies with an offensive mindset (like, unsurprisingly, Air New Zealand, or Tesla, which took its patents open-source and backed itself to stay ahead of the competition) and companies with a defensive mindset. The defensive companies generally fail because they’re trying to protect a legacy and tend to force customers to adapt to their business model, rather than looking at what their customers actually want and solving their problems. While we’re not deluded enough to place ourselves in the same category as Air New Zealand or Tesla, the same binary choice applies to us: try to create the new, or try to maintain the old. So, after much chin-stroking, spreadsheet-staring, brow-furrowing and distance-gazing over the past few months, we’ve decided to take the offensive.
If you believe the headlines, humanity is going to hell in a handcart. Over-population, climate change, ISIS, Ebola, race riots … the list goes on. But for all the negativity seen in the news, the data tends to tell a different story over the long term. This also applies to marketing. And, as the annual period of reflection arrives and StopPress heads off on holiday, that’s worth remembering.