Indications of Advertising's Internet Revolution

Jeff Jarvis over at Buzz Machine has a terrific compendium of articles today claiming that advertising is the next business to be restructured and reinvented by the Internet. Regular readers of Blackfriars know that this is one of our regular soap box issues, but it is always nice to see major players in the industry start wondering whether that light at the end of the tunnel is actually a train heading toward them. He quotes Maurice Saatchi at Cannes with a particularly great story about how marketing suffers from the tyranny of too much:

Research by M&C Saatchi showed that 80% of marketing directors agree strongest brands can be described in one word. But only 10% of the marketing directors could describe their brands in one word.

Nowadays only brutally simply ideas get through. Reducing the complex to the simple requires the painful necessity of thought. The ruthless paring down of paragraph to sentence and sentence to word.

“It is said that Charles Dickens was paid by the word. Times change. Now marketing directors’ pay should be inversely proportional to the number of words in their strategy statemment.”

Less is more. . . .

And lest anyone think that this is idle blather, he also notes that Ad Age just today is predicting that the upfront TV season will fall about $600 million short of last year. That would be one of the largest upfront shortfalls in recent history. Six hundred million here, six hundred million there, pretty soon that starts to add up to real money. And while the article didn't lay the shortfall entirely at the feet of the Internet, it did note that advertisers were looking at more cross-media strategies including Web advertising.

Technorati Tags: Ad networks, Advertising, Buzz Machine, Marketing, Saatchi, TV, Tyranny of too much