Jeff Jarvis (who I link to far too often) has a brilliant summary of what’s happening to the broad advertising-agency industry. He even cites Rob Hof’s write-up of the Supernova workshop I organized and co-moderated last week (which attending bloggers and journalists continue to give me no credit for…I guess I’m a big fat nobody). Jeff says:
I’m seeing a lot of avoidance of the elephant that isn’t quite in the room yet but is banging at the door:
Advertising is the next big industry to suffer huge upheaval thanks to the internet. They may think they’re already there, but they’re not, not by a long shot. In fact, it is the ad industry that is holding up the progress of other industries — newspapers, TV, radio, cable — that are already getting tromped on by that elephant. Advertisers can get away with moving slowly — for now — because they are the ones with the money. Funny how that works. But this won’t last for long, as one client and then one agency discovers that the lazy, traditional, one-stop-shopping of TV upfront and the big-media lunch circuit is inefficient, wasteful, untargeted, irrelevant, and ultimately damned irritating to your customers. Once that tipping point comes, dollars will start flowing to the upstarts online — not as many dollars concentrated in a few places as before, but spread out far and wide. As Bob Garfield pointed out in Ad Age and on On the Media, the upstarts aren’t quite ready for it, but once they see money sitting on the table, they’ll get ready fast (see my Ad Age piece on an open-source ad infrastructure for the distributed world). The day of reckoning nears.
And read Jeff’s full post here. This post is exactly why I subscribe to BuzzMachine.