The Iferia Techcast
00:06:08 · Ezekiel Iferia, Gary Pageau
[00:06:08] S0: Alright. Thank you for sharing that with us, Gary. [00:06:10] S1: I gotta jump a lot on you there. Sorry. [00:06:14] S0: Yeah. It's a great response. So, you know, what was the, you know, the hardest part about starting over, you know, after twenty five years in one place? You know, what did you have to Oh. Learn that you didn't expect?
00:06:28 · Gary Pageau
[00:06:28] S1: Oh, I learned a lot of things. So for example, one thing I wish I knew when I started was to actually, like, commit to doing what I'm doing now. I didn't really start getting serious about the publishing side of the business for a few years. I should have just started from that. And that that was was just a miscalculation. I should not have done that. Also, plus just going from working with a team of people on a project to basically working by myself. Right? I was self employed, home office, all of those kind of things. So that was a big adjustment. Also, just, you know, having to... You know, when you start out on your own, you know, you're basically spending your own money. And, you know, so if I needed to go to an industry event or something back when I worked for the nonprofit, travel we had budget. If I needed to go to a show or a conference or whatever, there's a travel budget. Well, when you're self employed, you're paying for that stuff yourself. And then you really gotta decide, do I really need to spend $1,000 to go to this event? Or do I need to spend this money to go to that event? So watching the budget, the isolation is a big deal, and just doubling down and focusing on what is gonna drive the business, I think, are the things I kind of wish I learned when I started. I kind of made that up as I went along. But I think that was really the big thing was having to go on my own without the infrastructure of a large organization, which, know, if you've been somewhere for twenty five years, you kind of get used to having... Doing an expense check from going on a trip and having the check paid for, right, that, you know, they give you a reimbursement check or a mileage check. Well, guess what? You know, when you're self employed, you're not gonna get that. Right? So so it really affects your decision making process.
00:08:30 · Ezekiel Iferia, Gary Pageau
[00:08:30] S0: Okay. So, Gary, you know, you get in the photography industry doing one of the most dramatic transitions in modern business, you know, the move from analog to digital. So what was that like from the inside? How did companies survive or feel? [00:08:54] S1: Well, there's a couple of things that are out there that are sort of like... It's [00:09:00] S0: kind of
00:09:01 · Gary Pageau
[00:09:01] S1: annoying right now because if you go on LinkedIn or places like that, they always say, Well, Kodak missed the digital revolution, and they really screwed up, and that's why they went bankrupt. That's not at all what happened. Yes, Kodak went bankrupt in 2012, and they're out of bankruptcy now, and they're doing very well as a company. And it's hard for people to understand this now because in today's world, you know, we've got camera phones, we've got webcams, we've got phone, we've got cameras in our homes, we've got cameras on our cars, we've got standalone cameras, we've got all the action cameras. There's more cameras than ever. Back in the day of film, a household might have one camera that the family shared. Not everyone had a camera. And the only way to see your pictures was to process film or to use an instant camera and see the prints. It was a completely different model, a completely different way of capturing images. Of course, was video cameras too. That's a whole another thing. But... So what people didn't know at the time was how consumers were going to behave differently. Because once the consumers could take a picture and then see the results right away, they didn't have to have it printed. And remember, in the analog world, you had to print the picture to see it, right? So it was really an industry built on waste, if you think about it. So if you shot 36 rolls of film, or 36 exposures on a roll of film, probably, you know, maybe seven or eight were really any good. The rest were kind of crap. Maybe they were out of focus or people's eyes were closed or all that kind of stuff. It was really... But people still had to pay for the prints. So the reality was is there was a lot of waste inherently in the analog process that when digital came along, took out. So instead of printing 36 pictures, people were only printing a few pictures. Then they kind of got into the mode of, Gosh, do I even need to print any of these pictures? I can just look at them on a screen. The industry was built around the model of sell a roll of film, sell the processing, and also pay for the prints. So we're getting money on the front end and the back end, and that kind of went away.
00:11:30 · Gary Pageau
And the industry as a whole, it was a shock to the system Because like I said, you know, people did different things from the analog to digital transition to try and get people to print. But no one knew how much people would print. And that was really the big question was were people not printing because it was difficult? Was people printing because they didn't want the prints? Were people not printing because they were just happy looking at them on a screen? Was there something wrong with printed pictures that the industry didn't know about? And so, you know, that was really a shock to the system. A of businesses either didn't adapt or went out of business, or they found other industries. You know, what happened And, was the business that adapted figured out, okay, you know, we can print on a four by six piece of paper, which was the traditional snapshot, or we can use advanced technology to print on a bunch of different other surfaces. And that's really what's happened with print now. People are still printing a ton. Actually, are spending more on printing now. Those households that are printing more are actually spending more on printing, but they're spending it on, let's say, one print for the wall. Instead of getting an envelope full of snapshots, they're getting one wall print. That envelope full of snapshots was $12 maybe, and maybe you did two or three of those a year. Now people are spending $50.60 bucks on a wall canvas or a wall decor, or they're making mugs or they're making photo books. There's many more products people can make, which really is what the consumer really wanted. That's what they've always wanted was different ways of doing that. But the industry, because it was driven by production, by the idea that we want to preserve this chemical process, we're going to force everyone to just have four by six inch prints. So the ability to print on many more surfaces has really created a tremendous amount of opportunity for everyone, but it's a wholesale change. A lot of the companies didn't adapt well. A lot of companies misread kind of where the customers were going to go, and a lot of new companies have popped up to address those issues. So it's really been, for me as someone who covers the industry, it's very exciting because there's all kinds of new stuff happening to reach a customer.
00:14:09 · Gary Pageau, Ezekiel Iferia
But it's really a wildly different industry than it was. It's still servicing the same market, right? Which is helping people preserve their memories and share images and tell their stories, but they're just doing it in a radically different way than they were fifteen years ago. [00:14:30] S0: Okay. Alright. So, Gary, you know, looking at, you know, the the the way things are today, you know, are there any lessons from that transition, you know, that applies to what's happening today with artificial intelligence? Are we seeing the same patterns? Are there any parallels?