A Spiraling Vortex of Ruin
by Michael HoffmanMonday, December 18th, 2006
The end of the year is a time for reflection. For the media it means lists - The Top Ten this or that, Best of the Year this or that… Man of the Year, Woman of the Year, Pet of the Year… as well as predictions for the year ahead.
There is a lot of reflection going on in the advertising industry this year. 2006 will come to be seen as a watershed year, a year of disruption and change. The old media model is disintegrating before our eyes. Advertisers are learning that a lot of their advertising just doesn’t work any more.
Here’s a quote on the subject of The Year in Advertising from the NY Times advertising writer Stuart Eliot.
Time flies, it seems, when you are frantically remaking an industry to stave off irrelevance and obsolescence.
The big story of the year has been the willingness of mainstream marketers to forgo a decades-long reliance on the traditional media and to embrace new technologies like podcasts, video-on-demand, blogs, social networking and video sharing.
Sometimes, those efforts were compelling and successful. In other instances, attempts to change old habits went over about as well as Grandma demonstrating how hip she is by leading the wedding party in the macarena.
My favorite recent article on this subject comes from Wired Magazine. Called “YouTube vs. Boob Tube“, the article explains the business model of online video developing as the old TV model disappears. Read the whole article, but here are my favorite quotes:
Until about five minutes ago, remember, almost all video-entertainment content was produced and distributed by Hollywood. Period. That time is over. There was a time when advertisers could count on mass audiences for what Hollywood thought we should be watching on TV. That time is all but over. There was a time when broadband penetration was too slight and bandwidth costs too prohibitive for video to be watched online. That time is sooooo over.
And, my most favorite one:
Without being overly simplistic or melodramatic, the state of the Old Commercial Broadcasting Model can be summarized like this: a spiraling vortex of ruin. Fragmentation has decimated audiences, viewers who do watch are skipping commercials, advertisers are therefore fleeing, the revenue for underwriting new content is therefore flatlining, program quality is therefore suffering (Dancing With the Stars. QED), which will lead to ever more viewer defection, which will lead to ever more advertiser defection, and so on.
What do you care? For nonprofits, this is a HUGE opportunity. For the first time in history your message can be on an equal playing field as commercial messages. You can’t do the Super Bowl ad, or even a 15-second spot on a re-run of Get Smart. But you can put your video on YouTube and on DoGooderTV and a lot of other places where it can compete in the marketplace of ideas for attention. If you are doing something important — and I am sure you are — and can tell your story, you can grow your support and educate the masses in ways nonprofit professionals have never dreamed possible.
January 28th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
[…] As I mentioned in a previous post, Wired Magazine had an article that called the $65 billion television advertising industry “a spiraling vortex of ruin.” What they were referring to is the lack of impact that traditional top-down advertising has. The New York Times recently had an article about the proliferation of advertising in non-traditional places, such as the tray tables and barf bags on airplanes, and coffee cup sleeves. My view of this is that it is the death throws of an industry that wants to seem relevant to their clients, when in fact they have no idea what they are doing. […]