Advertisers embracing the post-mass media world

Today's Wall Street Journal Morning Brief argues that mainstream advertisers are now embracing non-traditional marketing techniques. Blackfriars has been noting this trend for a while in our research reports. In our most recent survey, we saw some companies -- specifically those who don't measure their marketing results -- dedicating nearly 18% of marketing budgets to non-traditional marketing.

So what? Well for one thing, much of this investment is at the expense of traditional advertising budgets. So if you trying to sell 30-second spots on TV or running a Madison Avenue advertising agency, this trend bodes poorly for your business. But more significantly, advertising agencies are finding themselves having to reinvent themselves in significant ways. As Bob Greenberg, CEO and chief creative director of Interpublic Group's interactive ad agency R/GA, notes in the article:

Ad agencies now have to be conversant with information architecture, he says, and they also have to be able to design e-commerce, play in the world of personalized media, and create retail environments. In other words, this boils down to an agency that creates marketing -- or a marketing experience -- that blends the strictly functional with gamelike gewgaws to draw consumers on entertainment value alone. Says Jerri DeVard, senior vice president of R/GA client Verizon: "It's not just about putting something cool out there but looking at all the metrics first."

So ad agencies have to become more technology savvy, clients need to get better metrics for how their programs are doing, and both of these groups are looking for completely new ways to reach their markets. Given that we project US companies will spend $267 billion on advertising this year -- a quarter of the $1.074 trillion being spent on marketing -- this change is going to affect a lot of companies and jobs beyond Madison Avenue.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Marketing, Marketing Measurement, TV