Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Smart PR
I can be accused of dredging up odd examples of public relations, and the accusation would be true. Oddities surface that I can't resist mentioning and here is one. The story is about poker- playing robots that have just completed the World Poker Robot Championship. The first thing that strikes one is that this is a wonderful publicity gimmick along the lines of IBM's chess-playing computer, but it is more than that.
A spokesman for the casino where the competition took place said that people would use the robots eventually, so rather than fight them, the company was allowing them into the casino where it could study how well they work. (Poker playing robots are illegal in human games.)
That's smart PR, a heck of lot smarter than the music industry fighting online technology because people can swap music. The casino is embracing the future and learning how to adapt to it. The music industry has finally done the same, but not until it fought a losing battle.
In spite of talk about the need to change and to keep up with competition, most industry leaders don't like change. They want to freeze competition around a set of rules and play by those rules far into the future. The telephone industry worked exactly like until deregulation.
Rapid technological change upsets economic models and injects mortal risk into the game of business. No wonder most industries would rather fight than switch. Poker robots, however, are a technology that at least Las Vegas casino has welcomed. That's smart PR.
A spokesman for the casino where the competition took place said that people would use the robots eventually, so rather than fight them, the company was allowing them into the casino where it could study how well they work. (Poker playing robots are illegal in human games.)
That's smart PR, a heck of lot smarter than the music industry fighting online technology because people can swap music. The casino is embracing the future and learning how to adapt to it. The music industry has finally done the same, but not until it fought a losing battle.
In spite of talk about the need to change and to keep up with competition, most industry leaders don't like change. They want to freeze competition around a set of rules and play by those rules far into the future. The telephone industry worked exactly like until deregulation.
Rapid technological change upsets economic models and injects mortal risk into the game of business. No wonder most industries would rather fight than switch. Poker robots, however, are a technology that at least Las Vegas casino has welcomed. That's smart PR.
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