"it’s important to recognize that a lot of advertising numbers have historically been crap, with pricing based on promises of “reach” and other fuzzy math extrapolated from circulation numbers and Nielsen ratings.
Advertising will find its place in new media, but it may be a necessarily smaller chunk of its former self because accountability will only continue to improve online." (NewTeeVee)
"Marketers need to start thinking about how we do business and how, in a world where reproduction, distribution and categorization is becoming ubiquitous, where we're going to add value and differentiate" (Twist Image)
"long-term thinking entails the confluence of the linear and the exponential. ... Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what long-term thinking should be about"(Kevin Kelly)
So - media as we know it (newspapers and television, radio and online) mainly relies on ads to support the business. And as it has been stated and quoted a lot over the years, a lot of it is hit and miss (or miss, miss, miss and maybe hit). You have no good way of actually knowing if someone sees your ad, if the react to it or if it is something else that makes them pick up your cereal in the grocery store the next week.
Which is why a lot of ads are more focused on "branding" than actual purchasing. But with online ads the metrics are (almost) all there. Do the click through, sign up, engage or even buy? You can measure it, compare and contrast on the spot. Run six different ads on the same site - and then scrap the bottom four performers the same night.
And as that kind of information, insight and understanding spreads - how much mass advertising is really needed to help support the sales of product X? Only the 50% that isn't wasted right now? Or perhaps only 20% because the message is even better suited to the audience.
Then the big question and the long term view becomes; will it be sustainable - and for whom?
YouTube is filled with "professional" content - but also with a huge amount of user generated "free content". Made by the users for the users. Ditto for most of the newsgroups and forums out there. With 24hr news channels and talk radio producing more content in a day than you can consume in a month or year - is the glut of content needed? Will we be able to achieve a balance, with some professional content (or sorting, or prioritizing) being valueable enough to attract ads?
Or is it the HBO and NPR models that will win out? Subscriptions and donations - since the time to sift is more valuable than the cost of getting the content? Convenience or lazyness. How often do you go around actively looking for new blogs, podcasts or websites? Or do you wait until someone somehow reccomends them? When you hear a promo or see a link in a post?
Consumption often trumps discovery in terms of time - but there is also hoarding or gathering, chances are that quite a bit of p2p content is never consumed. Becuase it is easier to pull it down and think that someday I'll want to watch four seasons of it. When in fact it is all to easy to just turn on the tv and surf the channels for 20 minutes rather than starting that first season.
Yes, no, both, neither? One thing is for sure. Media consumption is changing rapidly, while advertising is (still) changing relatively slowly. So - when do we reach the intersection?
