There seems little doubt that, more and more, advertising-bombarded consumers reject traditional advertising. Not only are they more informed, but they are harder to catch. Remember when 90 percent of the prime-time TV audience watched the top three U.S. television networks? Now the audience is scattered, time-shifted, Internetted. What's an advertiser to do?
This story from the Economist.com gives us the 50,000 foot view on the future of marketing, pointing out that advertising spending in general is again on the rise—ZenithOptimedia predicts 2004 spending worldwide on major media will increase 4.7 percent to $343 billion—and Internet advertising is above pre-bubble levels. Still, "the advertising industry is passing through one of the most disorienting periods in its history. This is due to a combination of longer-term changes, such as the growing diversity of the media, and the arrival of new technologies, notably the Internet. Consumers have become better informed than ever before, with the result that some of the traditional methods of advertising and marketing simply no longer work."
Death to the advertising industry? Hardly, says Rupert Howell, chairman of the London branch of McCann Erickson, noting the effective argument that TV advertising didn't kill radio advertising, and radio advertising didn't kill newspaper advertising. It just posed new challenges for a very creative industry to tackle.