With so much hype around the recent downturn in the advertising
business, many people, myself included, have questioned Madison
Avenue's continued focus on TV and other traditional media (some of my
articles that have touched on this include TiVo Users Have Advertisers Thinking, Dynamic digital signage drives sales, improves brand recognition, says research firm and Digital Signage Statistics Suggest Digital Signs Better for Recall than TV).
While this view continues to perpetuate itself (mostly through Internet
channels and other "non-traditional" media outlets), industry research
and a bunch of smart people seem to think that TV advertising will
continue to get along just fine... it's the format that will change.
More specifically, according to Tim Manners and Karen Post at Fast Company, "It's not that television advertising is dead. It's that advertisers no longer understand television."
Their argument is essentially that the traditional notion of TV as the
box in the living room that gets passively consumed by viewers is no
longer sufficient. Instead, the term "television" now encompasses
anything that can carry a moving image to a consumer, including things
like in-store kiosk networks rich email, and dynamic display networks.
So now, the real culprit isn't the television, who can't compete with
cool interactive technologies for eyeballs, it's the advertisers
themselves, who haven't adapted to the notion that there might be more
than one way to make contact with prospective customers. As they
sum it up, "[the o]dd part is, many of the very talented people who
create the very best advertising can't seem to break free of the notion
that television is something we watch only passively, normally at home
-- and that advertising is something that varies mostly only in terms
of length."
Meanwhile, back over on the information side of TV
content production, the quality, validity and even authenticity of
traditional news outlets have come under fire from the new media
front-line: bloggers. By now, everybody has heard about how Dan
Rathers and CBS News got taken down by those scrappy upstarts after
they aired a controversial (and in retrospect, contrived) piece on
George W. Bush's record in the National Guard. And while many
hailed the work of these cyber-sleuths who exposed and then publicized
the problems with the mighty TV news outlet, others started to wonder
whether the blogsphere -- the collective intelligence created by the
interlinked blog network -- will become (or already has become) a
suitable replacement for TV and printed news. Bernard Moon from Always On Network has written an interesting piece
about this very notion, and comes to the conclusion that while the
increased transparency and accountability of blogging makes it well
suited to reporting up-to-the-second news, individual blogs will always
be subject to the beliefs and ideologies of their principle authors and
editors.
The potential benefit for those of us in the digital
retailing space is first and foremost the validation of our
medium. Along with the prospect of better information content
becoming available to digital media network owners, advertisers and
viewers will all benefit from the new authenticity that our medium will
enjoy. Likewise, as others (read: advertising and marketing
firms) also begin to understand this new definition of "television",
they may become more open to treating out-of-home media networks as
valuable commodities and a source of new revenues, instead of fearing
them as new competition.