Sometimes it feels like the future takes a long time to arrive. While most of you reading this blog have likely been focused on digital marketing as the “hot spot” in marketing for a while, it’s always been surprising to me how long it’s taken legacy marketing institutions — the classic big agencies of Madison Avenue — to truly embrace that opportunity.
I know, change is hard. Disruptive innovation works this way. But still, in the future… any agency that wants to remain great, must surely embrace digital with genuine creative love. How far off could that future be?
Indeed, the future may finally be here now. The above chart was produced by Strata Marketing, a media data processing giant that services approximately half of all ad agencies in the U.S. A few years ago, they started a survey where they asked agency executives what was their number one medium of choice.
TV had always been in the lead. Real creative was 30-second spots.
But in this quarters’ results, the gap between TV and digital narrowed to a single percentage point: 35% still identified TV as the most important medium, but 34% chose digital instead. Maybe that’s not earth shattering to us in marketing technology, but in the culture of ad land, that’s a revolution.
As a related point on the battleline between TV and digital — at least until the two become one — a story in AdAge earlier this month revealed that growth in jobs in Internet media businesses were skyrocketing (even in the recession), in contrast to shrinking jobs in traditional media:
Again, probably not a huge surprise here. But this is more evidence that the future we’ve seen coming has truly arrived.
Cool.
