And Never is Heard a Discouraging Word...

Jeff Jarvis, poking around lately in the post-modern world of advertising, has hit upon a scary thought: What if, basically, advertisers don't need media to reach audiences? What if advertising, as we know it, is irrevocably, irretrievably broken?

Jeff writes: 

So here's the real punchline: Advertising ends up having nothing to do with media. They become decoupled. Audience no longer yields advertising. Hell, advertising isn’t advertising. It’s relationships. Media only get in the way. There’s the corner we’re painted into, the chaos scenario, perhaps the doomsday scenario for media.

Doomsday scenario indeed. (Bob Garfield has presaged some of this thinking in his excellent Chaos Scenario, soon to be a book.) To put it another way: In a world where anybody–including an advertiser–can be a publisher via the Web and other digital media, why do advertisers even need to bother with the middlemen (i.e. newspapers, magazines, broadcasters–the ad-supported media) to reach audiences? Get a Web site or Twit or online campaign to go viral and you've bypassed the traditional channels. 

One might argue that you still need mass media to start the fire—that somehow, word has to get out that there's something great there, so that the virality can be stoked. Susan Boyle on YouTube, kindled by British TV and U.S. news reports (though those mostly came after YouTube), might be an extreme example. And maybe there still will be a role for media in focusing audiences for advertisers to reach. Maybe.

But I think we're going to see more examples of grassroots phenomena that spread on their own, without traditional media help, and advertisers figuring out how to take advantage of that to save themselves huge amounts of money in getting the word out. It's still a crude system (hell, so is advertising as we know it—remember, Wanamaker was an optimist!), but it's not hard to envision a world somewhere down the road in which advertisers are, well, no longer advertisers anymore, and decide they don't need the media middlemen. 

Uh-oh.

Comments

[Rocky]

This is absolutely the case. It was one of the reasons I wrote about in my list of profound changes in the media business:

http://blog.agrawals.org/2009/04/05/newspaper-companies-cant-unring-the-bell/

With the rise of information technology, businesses can get to know their customers much better due to advances in computer technology. The airlines, banks, hotels, department stores and grocery stores I do business with know my buying habits. They can use that data to create targeted offers that will appeal to me. Harris Teeter, a regional grocery store chain, sends out an e-circular that highlights the items customers have bought in the past. These personalized offers can be delivered for little cost.

Not only can they reach people more cheaply, they can reach people with messages that are more likely to resonate than what traditional media has allowed.

It's fascinating to see how quickly the hotel and airline companies have adopted twitter, with some running daily, hourly or two hour fares.

I doubt an advertiser could call a newspaper, TV station or radio station and have a message delivered within minutes or even hours.

[Paul]

Mark, this is something I have written about also, and as I noted in Jeff's comments:

Sorry to toot my own horn but you are coming around to something I started get at with my story on Yelp:

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/0s-1s-and-s/2009/05/04/rebel-yelp

"But Yelp's founders have invented a Web site that cleaves local online advertising from journalism, right when journalism needs it most. Yelp is the evolution and replacement for the actually quite useful local advertising that used to appear in newspapers, only without the pesky journalism breaking up the ad pages."
and:

http://trueslant.com/paulsmalera/2009/05/08/have-newspaper-executives-heard-of-yelp/

"While newspapers and the AP are fighting with Google and getting excited about the Kindle DX, a site that is driving 25 million uniques a month of local arts, culture, dining, and business traffic is turning into their competition."

The point being not so much that the concept of advertising is a failure, but rather that the advertising as practiced by the newspaper industry is-- here the web is giving us all these incredibly community tools and the best newspapers (and to be fair, most websites) have done is to come up with new sizes of banner ads. Innovate.

[Mark Potts]

Thanks, Paul. I've been saying exactly the same thing for the past few months: that Yelp is very quietly eating newspapers' lunch in the entertainment field in pretty much exactly the same way craigslist destroyed classifieds. See my Charm City post from a couple days ago, where I parenthetically made that point. It's a big problem, and newspapers, with their generally lousy local entertainment and calendaring tools, are pretty much oblivious to it, unfortunately. And I've long been a champion of innovating beyond the banner ad, as well. Great minds...

[Walter Abbott]

Something from earlier this year.

http://weblog.blogads.com/1756/the-end-of-advertising

The end of advertising?
by henrycopeland
Monday, February 2nd, 2009

The key graf:

"With supply doubling and demand stagnant or down, advertising prices are headed to zero for any property that doesn’t deliver VERY compelling value to advertisers."

[James daSilva]

I've been wondering this for months.
It's not about banner ads, though.
It's about eliminating anything that intrudes upon the reader. That, for some, can even include ad links on text within a story, listing, review, etc. On a broader level, it means any effective advertising.
Not all advertisers are going to love this, though. Sure, they can distribute their message themselves, but they'll reach fewer people and have a harder time reaching outside their loyal customer base.
And media? Well, online media is going to wish they had the ad problem of newspapers during this decade.
Forget declining ad revenue. How about none.
Maybe people are right to believe in the great flow of citizen journalism (not the good people running hyperlocal sites -- I mean this wave of volunteerism from the populace that's supposed to augment that).
But maybe most people will say, "All this work and no revenue anywhere? No, thanks."

[Mark Potts]

Janes: Thanks for the comment. To your last point: One of the great secrets of user-generated content--and this disturbs professional journalists no end--is that many "citizen journalists" write about their communities and their interests for reasons other than money. They want to share their knowledge, they want to be seen as experts, they want to reach out to their community, etc. That drives an enormous amount of content, already, and will continue to in the future. So a revenue model may not be as much as a factor as some people would like to think.

Having said that, I think we should be trying to support all of these efforts with revenue in any way we can. But that's not necessarily the participants' main motivation.

[Liz]

As reading this, I checked with Jeff's blog and thechaosscenario.net of Bob's new book. I know that the topic "advertising age is over" is quite argued among people now. But is it really dying? It's true that all the tradition media is losing their effects, but will they be abandoned by marketers at all? I wonder...