The Madison Avenue Shake-Up

I’ve been noticing a lot of buzz lately about on and off-line media buying being pushed down to the self-service module or into transparent markets. These stories were in the news this week.

• Ebay-like buying and selling of media space. ( see update)
• Lots of folks wanting to move to a transparent media market, something like NASDAQ, but for ad space.
• Google starting to use its auction-based approach to off-line media such as newspaper and radio ads.

But as the media buys are pushed closer to the buyer, will the buyers get it? Will the enabling of simplified media buys and self-service ad marketing generate results or just let a few amateurs get a thrill out of seeing their do-it-yourself ad get flashed on a cable network (but then brought to earth by the silence of their sales phones?) You’d think this type of waste would be short-lived, but my recent view of a two year old Google Adword campaign that had wasted tens of thousands of dollars without any significant sales tells me it might not be so simple.

Many layers of the media buying process may be removed but I think that the demand for skills will move to the analytics side, at least for the smart firms. Those who know the key performance indicators of their business and are able to directly tie each media buy to them will be in a great position to succeed.

UPDATE: 2/6: Rocketboom.com is auctioning off its video blog ad properties on Ebay, bypassing media buyers or ad networks completely. <- this is the future, folks.

del.icio.us Digg it ma.gnolia Netscape reddit StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

Leave a Reply