Rich media - poor media, advertising crosses the line

Way back in 1995 when I first encountered the net my immediate reaction was "goodbye traditional media" - given that I was working in radio at the time, it meant I had to make some adjustments to my "career path".

Still, its taken 15 years to cross the line, but it looks like we are there. Ad Spending: Internet Tops TV in UK

In the United Kingdom, however, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is reporting that online advertising has overtaken television. According to Reuters, advertising spend on the Internet grew 4.6% to a total of 23.5% of the total market.

On the flip side, television advertising spend plummeted 17% and dropped to second place, accounting for 21.9% of the total. That means, for the first time ever, the web is the leading medium for advertising in the UK.

Haven't seen the comparison yet for NZ, but in the current economy, TV here is taking a real hiding - TVNZ profits plunge 90pc to $2.1m

IAB chief executive, Guy Phillipson says, “This is a significant milestone…This is the first major market where online has overtaken television to become the biggest single medium.” The IAB report, conducted twice a year, found that online ad spend now accounts for 1.75 billion pounds, which is roughly $2.7 billion. Reuters reports that the increase in online ad spend is a result of economic conditions that are forcing advertisers to move to the web

That last bit is perhap the most interesting part of all. The days of scattershot advertising where is someone is in the room they are deemed to have "received" the message, are over. Now we can track exactly who has clicked on the link attached to the ad and whether they became a client and the role of the marketing people has been made orders of magnitude harder.

But there's a meta here, Internet access and regular use is for those with discretionary income, the number of poor people with Internet access is still way behind; in NZ we have 100,000 families with school aged kids who don't have home access and that doesn't count the poor elderly, the poor disabled and the poor who don't have school-aged kids.

But they all have TV because once you have the device, the content is essentially free. But when advertisers realise that TV is mostly reaching those people who don't have any money, what exactly do we think they are going to do?

Exactly. Next question, have we reached the moment when the power laws governing media viability really kick in? Stay logged in, because staying tuned may not be available much longer.