OPEN

Rough week for advertising. After the global business elite’s favourite read The Economist described it as "struggling" to reach consumers (just in time for the leaders of the world to read it on their flight to Davos), we’re seeing some interesting stories around the disintermediation of media buying.

Advertising is an industry which was founded as an intermediary between business and brands first
and communicator / creative second. Until recent times, the middle-man
part part of the operation was where the money was  made (buying ad
space and taking a commission).

First there’s Spotrunner‘s buzz on the rise. Spotrunner’s an online service that helps US businesses buy cheap ad-spots on local TV and even gives them ad "templates" that they can cut and paste their product or business details into. Bubblegeneration (the digital thinking elite’s favourite read) described Spotrunner as "just a mote in a storm that’s about to strip advertising to it’s core".

Where’s the rest of that storm? Well you can see evidence of it in big US advertisers inviting eBay to build them an "open" trading system for buying media space / airtime (see this article on Online Media Daily – via Lloyd Shepherd):

The presentation and the committee’s meeting were the latest step in an
initiative proposed by DaimlerChrysler Director of Marketing
Communications Julie Roehm during the ANA’s March 2005 Television
Advertising Forum in New York. Roehm made headlines when she proposed
the creation of a "Nasdaq-like" system that would create an open and
transparent marketplace for trading advertising inventory, and outlined
her proposal in a subsequent article in the ANA’s The Advertiser magazine.

With services like Spotrunner beginning to open up the media buying market at the bottom end and demand for open trading at the top end these are interesting times for the advertising industry, to say the least.

But ads are still massively important as the primary form of communication with most people aren’t they? What I hear from the front line of consumer research in recent times is that TV, radio and print ads are still the first reference points for most people when they talk about any major brand, but the importance of word of mouth and Internet on the rise.