Digital media has twisted our language into a new hip lexicon. We google something, friend someone or LOL at a joke. If it’s really funny, we might ROFLMAO.
And now advertisers are speaking a different language – different at least than traditional media companies.
At the Radio Forecast Summit this week in New York, ad buyers and agency folks seemed to be speaking different languages speaking a foreign language to people who have been laboring for decades under a simple model where great programming brings massive audiences that fetch big bucks from advertisers. It’s a model that newspapers and TV managers operate under as well.
Don’t get me wrong — the summit was great. Lots of forecasting information and debate about the future and value of media and how some companies are meeting those challenges. But what agency and advertisers were describing was an example of the disconnect between traditional media folks and Madison Avenue.
The message from the radio executives could best be summed up like this: We have a megaphone that reaches 250 million people.
The message from the marketers went like this: We need more creative solutions to help us collect and analyze more data about our advertising and our customers.
I visualized little comic-book bubbles floating above everyone’s heads. Huh?
Let me offer the 40,000-foot view. Businesses will spend about $680 billion this year to market their products and services. One-third of that goes toward traditional media advertising; the rest goes to things like coupons, rebates, Web site development, contests, trade shows, and public relations. Over the next five years, the amount spent on advertising is forecast to decline 7.5%. The amount spent on everything else is expected to increase 24%.
Traditional media advertising has entered the era of perpetual decline. Perpetual decline, my friends. No more riding the annual tide.
The advertisers were actually saying something very simple, and I think local media companies have a great opportunity to meet their needs. All they really want is to drive store traffic or make the phone ring. What they need from local media companies is a little help getting and managing bits and pieces of information that quantifies the success of those campaigns. They need pageviews, clickthroughs, email addresses, abandon rates, demographics, time spent on pages, etc., etc. etc.
It’s not a foreign language at all. It just takes a little more brainpower and creativity (and tools) to reach into the “non-advertising” side of the equation. The days of order-taking are clearly over. As the COO of ad agency Neo@Oglivy said, “There is huge potential to go beyond advertising. There’s a big opportunity here.”
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