Digital ad buying - precursor to an all-new communication platform?

Back in the pre-dotcom bust days, when I was VP of marketing for a dotcom, nearly everyone in the ad world was waiting to cash in on banner ads and skyscraper click-throughs. This was, of course, in the days of pre-Google ad words.

Online advertising boasted about every superior metric there was -- you could track just about damned near everything. I remember ad execs waking up with cold sweats as predictions of Internet dominance mounted up in the pre-Bush, pre-9-11 days. Unfortunately, the big digital breakthrough never happened. What ad agencies were generally good at in the late 1990s and early 2000s were designing high-res over-done memory hogs -- both in online ads and Web sites -- that would choke the electrons right out of the then-ever present 24.4K dial-up modem. Today, of course, major advances in Flash production, online video and other animated products have changed all that, just in time for real fiber broadband (not the DSL twisted-pair rubbish that masquerades as broadband and will soon be extinct) to penetrate major markets nearly everywhere.

The Internet today is an ever-evolving hybrid beast that probably doesn't resemble what we'll be looking at some five years from now. Part-TV, part-print, part 3D experience. What we have produced is a new generation that won't tolerate anything less than RIGHT NOW in the digital world.

To that end, I read (online of course) with more than a little interest the new report from the Kelsey Group on the future of interactive advertising. Like every forecast, Kelsey makes certain assumptions, some of them -- particularly after having been bloodied in the dotcom debacle -- I like. One of them is that ad budgets are finite, even though there are lots more vehicles to spend ad dollars on.

Given that, Kelsey's analysis reslices the media pie. That reworked pie is good news for kids graduating today from design school who've never heard of waxers or proof sheets, but it's bad news, real bad news, for traditional media like yellow page advertising and newspaper ads. Newspapers in particular are forecast to be the biggest losers, with -- what a surprise -- Internet-based advertising being the big winner. No wonder newspapers are migrating to the Internet with consumer-driven content. Why bust your head up against what obviously is a declining market? A quick view of the Kelsey graphs above tells the tale, at least from their analysis.

My bet is that we don't even know what media in 2012 will look like yet. The Boomers -- like me -- may increasingly be heavy Internet users, but we still like print and we still have money. (Well, at least some Boomers do, present company excepted.) As big pipe fiber broadband levels out the high speed connectivity playing field, I'd wager that media will change right along with it. I'm not used to watching TV on my laptop yet, but my 11-year-old son has no problem with that at all.

Ironically, the now-universally popular Green movement may well be the push that converts everyone to digital and evolves the online platform far more rapidly than anyone ever envisioned. After all, if we can't use reams of paper to print every e-mail of importance, we'll have to get adept at managing files in Outlook so we can actually find the damned things when we need them. If that happens, and the hackers don't take over, then the 2001 expectations for online activity may well get fulfilled and more.

Buckley and Galbraith

With the recent passing of the conservative sage of the ages, the world -- liberals and conservatives alike -- mourn. Like many, I had the opportunity to meet William Buckley on a number of occasions, never failing to be challenged by his wit and sharp discourse. Shockingly, he even briefly answered a formal letter of inquiry I once posed, signing in his trademark ball point pen lest I confuse it with a signature machine. A Southern California journalistic colleague once expressed disgust when the National Review printed my entry in their infamous 1985 "oxymoron" contest.

Perhaps the most interesting comments I heard about Buckley where from his good friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the prolific liberal economist. The two men shared a lifelong friendship, even though they were poles apart in ideology, both political and economic.

Once while Galbraith was visiting Los Angeles, I had an opportunity to ask him about his relationship with Buckley, which by all accounts should have been stormy.

Listening to my question, Galbraith (who certainly had to be one of the tallest economists to ever walk the earth) smiled and said that while Buckley's views "were certainly in error" and their disagreements "intense," their exchanges were always "civil, and as a matter of fact, memorable."

Perhaps the most interesting bit that Galbraith said was the fact that human beings use upwards of 100% of their intellectual capacity learning and assimilating culture, mores and language until they are about five years of age. Then, Galbraith said, "we spend the rest of our years nurturing mental decline."

The sole exception, he noted with some vigor, "is William F. Buckley." Galbraith asserted that "Buckley is the only living human who can lay claim to using more of his brains -- however much in error -- than any of his fellows."

Rest in peace, Mr. Right. You made us think.