Avoid Becoming a Commodity

One of the things Erik has tried hard to avoid here at Array Digital is for us or any of our offerings to become a commodity. A commodity is something you could buy pretty much from anywhere and the customer doesn’t care where they buy it from.

There are services that we could offer here that a lot of other TV stations, radio stations, digital marketing agencies, etc. will offer their clients that are straight up commodities. For example, display advertising which is where you go on the Internet and see a pop-up ad. You can buy this from literally any company and granted they’ll all give you reasons why you should buy it from them but it’ll pretty much always be the same.

If the client could just buy it from the original source that we’d be getting it from, why wouldn’t they just buy it themselves? We have to bring something else to the table.

If you are a commodity, then your customers or clients could get this thing from anywhere. Why would you want to build a business around an offering that you don’t add any value to? You want to build your business on things that you have specialized, that they can’t just get from someone else.