IBM Predicts Massive Shifts In Advertising

Tech.Luver writes with news from IBM Global Business Services about its new report, The End of Advertising as We Know It (report PDF, summary PDF). It forecasts greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than has occurred over the previous 50. Among the conclusions: broadcasters will have to change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments. Distributors will need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices. Advertising agencies must become brokers of consumer insights and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices. All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.

And IBM finally noticed the obvious.

[loftwyr]

This is not new. The upheaval in the advertising industry has been causing a change for the past five years. Even the largest ad agencies have made broad changes to their operating structure and moved to a much more dynamic and multi-media format.

Media giants (NBC, CBS, ABC, BBC, CBC, ITV, etc., etc.) have embraced this change months and/or years ago and are moving their sales to much more targetted audiences, with the exception of prime time mega-shows.

Media buying agencies have stopped looking only at Nielsen data and circulation data (reach and frequency figures) and are using far more types of information to make their choices. The 10,000 digital cable channels and the explosive growth of on-line advertising forced that a long time ago.

All of these groups (perhaps except IBM, who just woke up) have been looking at how people watch and segmenting them by attitude, life stage and much more than age and income. Especially when the advertisers are using a combination of TV, Radio, Internet and maybe even print (there still is printed stuff out there, right? It's not all just bits, now?). The amount of information used to make decisions is growing.

I, for one, welcome our Google media overlords.

Re:The solution is simple

[dnixon112]

I guess you owe CowboyNeal a punch in the face for having the audacity to run an advertising driven website.

Or make people WANT to watch them.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I could point to lots of examples -- the most recent is likely the Mac/PC ads, which I went out of my way to watch. Another would have to be the Chuck Norris / Mountain Dew ads.

Most ads are utterly forgettable, except for the conditioning they do -- or they're just really annoying, like "punch the monkey". Some ads, particularly Google text ads, can be helpful without being in the way.

But the best ads are the ones that are entertaining enough that you actively seek them out. (That, and complete grassroots -- NOT astroturf -- I drink Mountain Dew mostly because of The Whiteboard [the-whiteboard.com].

I would pay less.

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the subsidies I am paying to Comcast for 100+ channels I never ever watch, I am willing to pay much, much less to watch TV with no commercials. I long for a world where every channel is a 'premium' channel so I can pay only for the ones I actually want to watch. Much better for the TV channels to be answerable to the consumer and not the advertisers.

Re:"predicts"?

[Attila Dimedici]

IBM predicted that world demand would be satisfied with five computers. They also thought there would be no harm in outsourcing operating systems. No profit there after all. Right?

If IBM told me the sun was going to rise tomorrow, I'd get a tarot reading just to be sure.

Two points. First it is Thomas J. Watson who it is claimed said that the world would never need more than five computers. The best evidence is that he never said it. It appears that this is a mis attribution of a misquote of a different computer experthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson [wikipedia.org]. Second, the reason that IBM outsourced the operating system for the first PC is because they were in the middle of a protracted and difficult antitrust lawsuit by the Justice Department. If they had developed the OS in house as an IBM proprietary product, it would have led to significant further complications of a court case where there was reason to believe that the Justice Department was going to do to them what it had done to AT&T only a couple years previously--break them up into multiple companies.

Re:Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

Advertising need to be more subtle and less abrasive. Advertisers seem to only focus on the joe-sixpack crowd. Advertising must become more intellectually engaging and entertaining. Just because you can grab the attention of a watcher with shrillness doesn't mean that (s)he will be positively influenced.

Subtle, respectful and intellectually engauging advertising is possible. The proof is here. [youtube.com]