Last week we hosted an invitation-only dinner in New York City attended by members of the media, publishers, analysts and technology partners. The purpose was to get some smart people in a room and pick their brains about the changes happening all around us. Here is some of what we heard:
1. You can throw out the ground rules established almost 10 years ago about who does what.
The comfortable notion that Company A does this, Company B does that, and Company C does what no else wants to do is dissolving. Search engines are buying a footprint in display. Publishers are acquiring technology. Analytics companies are buying targeting companies. Agencies used to just buy other agencies, but now anything tangentially related to advertising is fair game. There is a perception that control will beget success, and whoever has the most toys wins. History undeniably proves that some of this consolidation will prove genius and some will fail miserably.
2. The chaos is going to get worse before it gets better.
The media industry has been notoriously resistant to change. Until smart, hungry entrepreneurs brought to market viable alternatives to print, direct and broadcast, no one had any incentive to upset the apple cart. Now that the Internet is undeniably here to stay, and the pole position has been taken by companies like Google and Microsoft, the big guns are coming out and the fun is only just beginning.
3. Spectators are becoming combatants.
There is a new horse in the race that isn’t there because they’re losing ad revenue to Google or Facebook. Until now, many companies involved in the delivery of the Internet experience have stood on the sidelines and watched, quietly content to sell hardware, software or even bandwidth. Since the recovery from 2001, however, there has been phenomenal growth among content providers, ad networks and search engines just to name a few. This has not been lost on these passive players, and they’re not going to take it anymore. Getting a piece of the action in the bits and bytes has become a strategic imperative for them. All of us can expect some interesting and novel entries during 2008.
Perhaps you have already come to some or all of these conclusions. I take stock in the fact these were not the comments of observers, but from those people working every day on the issues being discussed. We would like to hear what you think…
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