Business is not going well, the move to Milan
Vermentino flows well. And it amplifies the paths of conversation, making a person who has little of the curial role abandoned the managerial role. The knots of the ties come loose. And it becomes easier to talk about yourself. When it’s her turn in the family business, business is no longer good. Furthermore, Massimo also lives in a particular place in Italy: the Riviera and the Cote d’Azur, Alassio and Montecarlo, being twenty years old and having grown up in a well-to-do family and getting to know the entertainment and pleasures of evenings and nights, friends and the girls, the gambling and the bottles of champagne. «After two years of life like this – says Beduschi without complacency or shame – my father came to me and said to me:“ Look, what was due to you you have burned everything in these two years. Now get a job. I’ll put you out of the house “. So, at 29, I moved to Milan and started working. I say this without rhetoric: it was my luck.
The transition to the advertising sector
I got an interview with Gianmario Roveraro, the Catholic financier of Opus Dei who was also from Albenga and whom my family knew because he too attended the parish of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Roveraro offered me a paid internship at Akros Merchant Bank. At first my father helped me by lending me money to pay the rent in Milan. Money that I later gave him back. Then, I managed to move into the advertising sector. ”Bread with tomato and anchovies and vegetables in tempura arrive on the table. We pass in a short time from prosperity and wealth to aging and obsolescence because technological breakdowns and remodeling of social structures emerge, radical changes in consumer tastes and quantum leaps in organizational models. It happened to the ancient nobility that fell between the hills and the sea of the Cinque Terre: the ancestors of Massimo. It happened to the 20th-century Fordist company like Olivetti: Massimo’s father.
Same perimeter, but major changes
It happened to Italian advertising, which has become something completely different from thirty years ago. The only element of continuity: the perimeter, with a lower propensity to expand than elsewhere. The advertising market, consistent with an Italian society and economy that have experienced modest growth rates, has always remained a Mar Piccolo. “In the last twenty years, the advertising market has not grown particularly well, unlike in other countries: its value has remained between 7.5 and 8.5 billion euros per year. Its composition, on the other hand, has completely changed. In 2000, television absorbed 50% of resources and print media 35%. In 2010, TV remained at 50%, print media dropped to 20%, and the internet began to be a major factor at 15%. Today with the hegemony of Google, the explosion of social media and the now irreversible phenomenon ofe-commerce the shares have drastically changed: internet is at 50%, TV is at 40% and print media is below 10%. The only factor of stability of these twenty years has been the radio, which has kept its share of 5 per cent ».
The waiters bring delicious paccheri with sea bass, olives and capers. Talking with Beduschi is interesting because, from his point of observation, he is able to grasp – in the concreteness of the budget financial and power relations, the Italian and international dynamics and the new formal and informal hierarchies – the new asymmetries and new balances that have changed the structure of reality: “A few years ago in the United States, which still remain the source code for our world, the prevailing companies were General Motors, General Electric, the oil and steel groups, the major consumer goods brands. Their predominance also concerned the advertising market. Now, however, to have a real hegemony are Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. And all of them have a real power of intelligence on the world. This is the first time this has happened. The Detroit auto industry and the Great Lakes steel industry have never been so pervasive. Today’s Big Tech know who we are, where we are, what we want, what we buy. This changes for the business world, because they have become essential and very influential interlocutors: just look at the centrality that Google has assumed in the collection and orientation of advertising and in the definition of what is information. But it also changes in everyday life, especially in the lives of our children, who are living more and more interconnected and multi-dimensional lives “, says not without concern Massimo who, with his wife Elena, has two children, Andrea aged thirteen and Sara from twelve.
The fruit salads arrive at the table first and then the coffees. Beduschi concludes the lunch by expressing a positive tone on the remodeling underway between advertising and information, old media and new media: «This is a fundamental step. There is a very consistent demand for authoritative and credible information. And advertising investors know this, above all because there is an ever greater coincidence between the consumer and the citizen. The wave is high. It is only a question of finding a way to ride it. “