The Newsonomics of Eight Per Cent Reach | Newsonomics

The Newsonomics of Eight Per Cent Reach | Newsonomics

"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."