TXT 'N TWEETS: July 2011

The Newsonomics of online marketing » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

Online advertising is where the game has been played. Now it’s moving to digital marketing. The new definition targets two big shifts:

Online is increasingly a passe term. We think online and we think desktop and laptop, if not the old AOL. Not so long ago, it seemed like a miracle to be — and stay (always on) — online. Now our Internet connections are increasingly embedded with us. Smartphones are the leading edge of the mobile Internet, with tablet proliferation fast on its heels. New TVs are being built with the Internet inside, completing the blur between screen and monitor, and promising much more news — and commercial — interactivity.
Advertising is increasingly a passe term. Coming out of this Great Recession, advertising is flat all around. Part of that is the uncertainty and ungainliness of the recovery. Bigger, though, is the fact that companies, especially big ones, are moving their money from traditional advertising to direct marketing of all kinds.

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"For old-fashioned sellers of newspaper space and broadcast time, it’s been a fitful education, and a reminder that merchants don’t want to buy advertising — they want to find customers, as cheaply and efficiently as possible. The First Amendment didn’t tie merchants to media in a constitutional permanence; it just seemed that way.

As we enter 2011, this new battle for local ad dollars is growing in strength, as merchants aim to make sense of the chaos of marketing choice. This exercise in chaos — and how sellers of marketing services do or don’t take advantage of it — affects more than just newspapers, of course. Locally, commercial broadcasters and Yellow Pages companies — the two other local media with substantial feet-on-the-street sales forces — are sensing the same opportunity to get to smaller businesses, as they, too, lose some of the bigger-business advertising they’ve long held.

Advertising agencies are in the midst of their own identity crises, as their value proposition to businesses is thrown into question, with the advances of pay-for-performance advertising and self-service overall."