Cheapertising

In another sign the good old days are now just plain old, one of the pillars of advertising is going with the flow. Check this out from Mitch Joel’s blog Six Pixels of Separation: When GM Shifts 1.5 Billion From Traditional Advertising To Digital Marketing… As Joel asks near the end of his post, “Is this the Perfect Digital Marketing Storm?”

From comScore via TechCrunch, some of the latest web trends in chart form. Examine at your own risk: The Web in Charts—Google vs. Microsoft-Yahoo vs. China 

If you, like me, ponder the future of advertising, I’d like you to reconsider one of the industry’s high-water marks. It routinely ranks in the highest echelon of TV spots – Apple Computer’s “1984,” which heralded the coming of the Macintosh. Looking at it almost 25 years later, the Mac now appears to have not only liberated users from the drudgery of a PC-topia, but also (along with the Internet) has freed consumers from having to sit back and take whatever advertisers and their agencies want them to watch. Maybe we should have seen it as the beginning of the end….

In another sign of the changing ad times, major advertisers are challenging the “Big Three” commercial networks (remember when there were only three –ABC, CBS and NBC?) over network integration fees. What used to be some of the accepted costs of running commercials are about to go the way of the dinosaur. Call it collateral damage in the drive for marketing ROI. Combine this with the recent study showing that advertisers see declining effectiveness in their TV advertising, and I start to wonder if anyone will notice when the switch from analog takes place next year.

For those who have been watching the painful demise of the daily newspaper (I notice it every day when I pick up my copy at the end of the driveway), what about the magazine? A Gawker post from earlier today gives us a hint: 

“…Is the magazine industry actually changing as quickly and perilously as business types seem to think? In one sense, yes; the latest circulation figures showed almost no big gains among the top 25 magazines, and Time and Playboy even took double-digit dives. The biggest winners were AARP’s in-house publications, which is not a good sign for the youthful vitality of the industry.”

Check out the rest here….  

Long-time tech watcher Esther Dyson examines the influence of social networks on the effectiveness of “traditional” (?!) online advertising in this WSJ article: The Coming Ad Revolution. As a new generation exerts control over their own personal information, it will change how companies cater to them. 

Ran across this parody of a new ad pitch for “Kiddy Care.” As I believe they say across the pond, it’s “spot on.” Enjoy at your own risk….

A couple of days ago, I received a press release for my “review and approval.” Aside from the atrocious grammar (does anybody know what, a comma, does, anymore?), reading it brought back a word I hadn’t thought of in some time: bloviate. Join me in the fight against it. I think I’ll shut up now….

This is the New York Times stock price for the past five years. Does your local newspaper seem to be experiencing a similar falloff? For more on this and how some people propose to solve this problem, go to this fascinating post. 

Used to be everybody knew the price of a first-class stamp? Do you? As a corollary, when’s the last time you heard about an actual post-office worker going postal? Maybe they’re not quite so busy anymore….