It’s the end of the ad as we know it (and I feel fine)
November 16th, 2007 by Hugh Kennedy
Any time a book or article predicts the end of something (the end of history, for example), people take notice. So it’s hard to ignore the new IBM report called The End of Advertising as We Know It.
You’ll note that the title hedges a bit: it’s not the end of advertising per se, just as we know it, so that in five years the ad environment will be virtually unrecognizable, and that things will change more by 2012 than they did between 1957 and 2007.
I have to say I have my doubts. Just as people sometimes like to knock analyst predictions by saying a new sub-niche of a sub-niche IT solutions offering will be “a $0 billion market by 2010,” pushing the accelerator all the way to an even split between user-generated and agency-generated ads seems a bit much. Sure, you can look at trend lines and CAGR rates and tell me that the TV and computer will meld (portable eBook reader, anyone?), but I have a hard time believing that mobile, interactive, in-game and Web will completely dominate and erase the newspaper, magazine and outdoor industries. Yes, Sao Paolo may have outlawed billboards (God bless them), but there’s simply too much skin in the game to replace what we’ve known and do it so quickly. I see it more as additive: more choices, more possibilites, more potential integration points.
Call me a dinosaur, but take off the Prada glasses first. The future may not be so far away after all. In the meantime, read the report. It’s good.
