Think Multicultural

eMarketer has a post today predicting that online advertising will be 10% of all US ad spending by next year. The truly remarkable thing about that is how cost-efficient online advertising is relative to other media, such as TV and radio. For example, a recent table in the print version of Portada (I can’t find it in the online version) showed the relative costs of advertising in the Hispanic market. Online media costs are between half and one-tenth as much as TV, radio, and print. Similar economics apply in the general market as well.

All of this means that for online to be 10% of the total US ad spend, marketers are going be buying a lot of online media.

To continue my previous post on how the future of advertising is digital, I would argue that digital is changing traditional advertising.

Let’s start on the creative side. Have you noticed how TV spots are starting to look a lot more like banner and rich media ads? Similar styles, animation and aesthetics. When was the last time you thought to yourself - “wow, that banner ad looks a lot like a .30 second spot?” Not to mention all the user generated content finding its way onto TV (think Dorito’s Super Bowl ads). It’s pretty clear where things are going.

From a media perspective, the migration to digital-centric planning and ad management platforms is already happening. From Google’s entrance into radio (and recent move into TV) to Clear Channel’s Digital Outdoor Network all media is moving to trafficking and management platforms similar to those used for online ad serving (DoubleClick, AtlasDMT, 24/7 Real Media). Digital media is about digital delivery, the ability to generate real-time metrics (lots of them) and most importantly the ability to optimize mid-stream… this capability is quickly migrating to traditional media.

When you factor in the disruptive effect of new media technology on traditional media (think DVRs for TV, iPods/iTunes for radio, the Web for newspapers) with the massive growth of digital media, a new media eco-system is quickly taking shape.

And digital is at the center of it all….

More to come on this topic next week.

I wanted to give everyone an update on our recent posts regarding the HispanicAd.com 2007 Media Planning & Media Executive of the Year Award process.

In case you didn’t read them, we posted our initial concerns on

3/12/08
and a follow-up post on 3/17/08

I received a phone call from HispanicAd.com CEO Gene Bryan in response to our posts. Gene explained to me that the nomination process is complicated, since they receive so many different nominations. In fact, he mentioned that the volume of nominations is so large that the cut-off for making the short-list (as announced on their emails) was 400 nominations.

There you go… if you want your favorite media planner or media executive nominated, you better get a significant movement going (or have 399 friends in the industry)!