IBM researchers talked to a bunch of consumers and executives to come up with their "The End of Advertising as We Know It" report (
full report,
PR summary). Key findings:
"The report indicates by 2012, the landscape of the industry will change so profoundly that to survive, advertising industry players need to take aggressive steps to innovate in three key areas:
- Consumers: making micro-segmentation and personalization paramount in marketing;
- Business models: how and where advertising inventory is sold, the structure and forms of partnerships, revenue models and advertising formats;
- Business design and infrastructure: All players need to redesign organizational and operating capabilities across the advertising lifecycle to support consumer and business model innovation: consumer analytics, channel planning, buying/selling, creation, delivery and impact reporting."
Dunno. Anything that starts with "the end of..." reeks of too much sensationalism. "As we know it?" Who "we"? IBM? Ad agency CEOs? Consumers? Bloggers? Then you get all the usual buzzwords: accountability, fragmentation, declining TV viewership (but
here's a graph that shows TV viewing time has been steadily increasing over the past 50+ years, and steeply so after the year 2000), and
disruption. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it would've made a great report had it been written in 1995, but now it's like that consulting joke about them taking your watch and telling you what time it is.
Want to know what advertising will be like in the future? Ask someone who pays a lot of money for advertising now, like a P&G CMO. The future of advertising will be what they say it should be.
