While we also have expertise in ecommerce and design – advertising is our foundation. So we read the trade magazines and follow trends and happenings in the internet advertising world. Last week I read this piece by AdExchanger. It’s an interview with Rob Norman of Group M (If you’ve never heard of Group M, it’s massive advertising agency holding company.)
What Rob is talking about in this interview is “fragmentation” and how he sees it disappearing. To translate this for a non advertising industry crowd – “fragmentation” is when media buyers have to purchase media from a variety of different sources to get the volume of audience they need. This is rapidly changing as media companies consolidate and buy up all of the valuable audience driving properties online.
Here’s The Proof We Are Nearing a New Golden Age of Advertising
Think about your own personal media habits. What sites do you visit regularly? What apps do you use regularly? Brands like Google, Facebook, Amazon, AOL (Huffington Post) – and now TV apps like Hulu & Netflix command the lion’s share of the audience in today’s market. So as audience and companies consolidate we could be inching towards a New Golden Age in Advertising – Rob Norman sums it up nicely in his interview with Ad Exchanger:
It’s almost like broadcast television 25 years ago. Today we have Google, Facebook, Amazon. Then we had CBS, NBC, ABC. While there were ratings for measurement, they kept a lot of data to themselves and had walled gardens around their data too. What the agency and client businesses did was build models where we took empirical evidence, used the evidence, deconstructed the evidence and affected different media types and different media owners within that media type and built models to do that.
While there are definite parallels to the “Mad Men” era here there are also many other variables that did not exist in the 60’s / 70’s. In the Mad Men era the democracy of the internet was not available for a brand like Gawker or BuzzFeed to grab such a substantial piece of this audience. So the MadMen 2.0 or New Golden Age in Advertising could also be a cut above the original.