Shock Horror – Online Spend Passes TV

So what does this do for me?

I have a very good friend who is a media maven. Having worked in Advertising world in the 1970s and 1980s, we often get together to discuss how Media has changed with the onset of the Web as the pervasive method of human interaction – entertainment, information and communication. So it was inevitable that Online spend would one day overtake the traditional media stronghold of TV. However none of us could have predicted the speed. In the UK – one of the largest TV markets in the world – it has already happened. Full Article

So my friend and I were discussing the way we used to do things and comparing it with the validity of the methodology of ad spending today. Frankly I am glad that I am not in that game fully any more. I have been unhappy with what to me has become in effect a derivative market possibly as sleazy as the financial instruments that got us into the GFC. We both lamented that the manipulation of scant pieces of data into business cases for ad spends has now reached – I would personally say – fraud proportions.

It seems that the “hucksters” didn’t die out when the era of “Mad Money” passed, they have reincarnated themselves as SEO, SEM or tool specialists. Now I am not saying that everyone is bad, but I am saying the ability for an objective evaluation of how to spend ones scarce Ad and Marketing budget is getting harder. The tools are suspect and the results still quite abstract in a large number of cases that purport otherwise.

As an aside – it would seem that the honest approach of brands to delivery of the promise is also something that seems to have been lost. So – while this is a bit of a stretch – I found Gerry McGovern’s article a few weeks back on the delivery against the brand promise quite interesting in the same context as the Ad spend debate above. Either we are all drinking a lot of Cool Aid or we need to have our heads examined.

I remain perplexed as to what to do about this. I don’t want to suspend my beliefs for a flawed metric. And I really don’t want to keep shoveling cash (mine and clients) into the Google machine.

Cheers