Last week, I attended an intimate gathering in Tribeca, called “The Coming Revolution in the Publisher/Advertiser Relationship and How to Prepare”, hosted by Derek Smith of Alcove Networks, and featuring Razorfish’s Matthew Greitzer, who has been featured in the 40 under 40 in Crain’s.
I took down some notes on my Blackberry, here are 11 themes:
1- Advertising is a $450 billion market, excluding classifieds, “push advertising” alone represents $350 billion.
2- Borrowing a term from others (including Guy Kawasaki, Jack Uldrich and Nicholas Imparato) Greitzer argued that we’re currently in a “Curve Jumping” period where a massive amount of ad dollars are shifting from analog to digital media, and even within digital media, where dollars will move from search/text to video/content integration. I am paraphrasing the second part, but it’s worth noting that Greitzer’s official title is that of VP Search Marketing, and he was talking about online video and content integration - two things that are seemingly at the other end of the spectrum relative search marketing.
3 - It was also the first time I heard the term decoupling audiences, though the concept is anything but foreign, to define it, instead of trying to paraphrase and remember, I will copy and paste this passage from Joe Mandese here: “decoupling audiences from content and are blurring the roles among publishers, networks and agencies” who in turn is quoting Havas Digital CEO Don Epperson.
4 - For 200 years, we have seen an evolution of newspapers to magazines, then to radio, on to television, and now onto the web. Nothing new there, granted, but worth noting how each subsequent media outgrew the previous one by a healthy margin. This is interesting because even I don’t think online will become larger than TV, though I’ve ran numbers suggesting it’s all possible: online surpassing TV by 2021.
5 - Another theme throughout was how content serves as a proxy for audience, and this is why I am personally bearish on social media… because quality content is what advertisers want to associate with.
6 - Trivia time: First banner ad was AT&T on Hotwire on October 24 1994. More here.
7 - Behavioral marketing made advertisers not care about content, but rather, the audience. This led to the explosion of the ad network business. Ad exchanges flourished, and for a while data overtook content.
We know the advantages of the Web, but with television being so much bigger, this poses unique challenges:
- You cannot yet apply a data centric approach to TV buying.
- Unlike online, you cannot optimize ads on the fly.
- Online, the quality of content can be measured and priced objectively.
8 - But in the end, mass reach is a commodity. I actually agree with this a lot. A marketer can pick up the phone and buy 100M uniques and pay penny CPM (if not CPC).
9 - Customization comes into play and that is where premium pricing is possible: Integrated and customized sponsorships are the big opportunity of the future.
10 - Publishers are in data business, and demographics don’t count as much as they once did. Advertisers are in data market as well, in fact, everyone is in the data business these days.
11 - All of these changes (which have already begun) will accelerate in the next12 to 24 months. In 5 years, all will be digital.
You can interpret this as all media will be digital, or all platforms will be digital. That is a post for another day.
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