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The Year 2007: Media man: I have see the future and it scares me. "people are always afraid of what they don't know". Oh I know, and that's what scares me said the media man.

We have to change how we view advertising, branding and the channels we use. Consumers are using the Internet


Brand advertising online has taken off -- and it's shaking up Madison Ave.
Article from businessweek.com

In the golden age of TV, they called them roadblocks. Advertisers mounted such visual barricades by placing the same spot at the same minute on the three big networks. That way, the ad would blanket the entire medium, collaring viewers whether they were tuned to Lawrence Welk, Dragnet, or Uncle Miltie. The roadblock was a simple but powerful approach -- and near impossible to pull off in today's fractured TV market.

But who said a roadblock had to be on TV? A year ago, Ford Motor Co. executives unveiled a roadblock on the Internet to promote their F-150 truck. On the day of the launch, Ford placed bold banner ads for 24 hours on the three leading portals -- AOL , MSN , and Yahoo! .

Some 50 million Web surfers saw Ford's banner. And millions of them clicked on it, pouring onto Ford's Web site at a rate that reached 3,000 per second. The company says the traffic led to a 6% jump in sales over the first three months of the campaign. Naturally, more Internet roadblocks have followed, most recently with the Oct. 25 launch of the F-500 sedan. Says Rich Stoddart, Ford's marketing communications manager: "We've proved we can leverage the Web for the mass market."

Ford and everyone else. Advertisers are seeing that the top few Web properties now reach true mass audiences. Each of the three biggest portals attracts 70% of the Americans online to its properties monthly, according to comScore Networks, a traffic-tracking organization.

Demand for this prime real estate is so strong that there isn't enough to go around, and prices to advertise are soaring.

A year ago, media buyers could land discounted space on the home pages of major portals for between $100,000 and $180,000 per 24 hours, say buyers. Now, the cost is reaching $300,000. Forget about discounts. If advertisers are lucky enough to land the space, they often must agree to spend an equal amount elsewhere on the portal.

Facing this traffic jam at the top sites, advertisers are jostling for spots throughout the Net. "A few years ago, it was kids with green hair selling ads," says Gary Stein, an analyst at Jupiter Research. "Now Internet ads are mainstream, and part of every company's media buy."



From an article on Fortune.com

Julie Roehm has more than $2 billion to spend this year, and the way she's been spending it worries executives at News Corp., the Washington Post Co., and virtually every other media company on the planet.

As Chrysler's director of marketing communications, Roehm, 34, oversees a budget that Advertising Age ranks as the sixth-largest pool of ad dollars in the nation. She decides how many minutes of the carmaker's commercials appear on networks and cable channels nationwide and how many pages of its ads turn up in magazines like this one and newspapers such as USA Today.

Here's the scary part: Roehm rarely misses a chance to talk about how delighted she is with online advertising. Last year she spent 10% of the budget online; this year she is allotting closer to 18%; next year, she says, she will allocate more than 20%.

Do the math: In 2006 roughly $400 million of Chrysler's money that used to go into TV, newspaper, and magazine ads will be spent on the Internet. Says Roehm: "I hate to sound like such a marketing geek, but we like to fish where the fish are."

No wonder media executives are concerned.

Big money from big companies and it is being spent on the Internet.

So how does this affect New Zealand businesses: whether they like it or not, they will have to go where their customers are, and increasingly, their customers are on the Internet.

If you are a business owner or manager, think, consider where you spend your advertising dollars, are you reaching the customers who use the Internet.

The above was written many years ago, people and companies change, on-line is where more and more advertising money is spent, no wonder the advertise offline media man was worried.


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