the mother of all media: threat or opportunity

By Joe Cappo

In 1992, I wrote a column in Advertising Age that was headlined:

Agencies: Change or Die.

Huge Marketing revolution upsets old rules After having covered advertising as a journalist since the late 1960s, I realized that the business was changing in many ways. These included the shift of marketing expenditures from traditional media advertising to other forms of promotion, such as sponsorship and special events; the media-buying crisis that undermined the commission system; the fragmentation of the media, and the intrusion of outsiders into the ad business, from marketing consultants to agency search consultants. What is interesting to me, retrospectively, is that I never mentioned the one factor that has affected advertising more than any other: the Internet. Of course, 1992 was two full years before the World Wide Web was developed, and about five years before it started making its impact on the business. The TV revolution of the 1950s pales in comparison to the influence the Internet has had on the business in the past dozen years. Television allowed us to reach millions of consumers at the same time with advertising that could be entertaining, provocative and effective. Well, sometimes it was effective. More than that, agencies loved working with TV, and clients liked seeing their products promoted on television, so it reigned for 50 years. Now, the crown is being handed over to the Internet for many reasons. One is that marketing on the Internet is more accountable than television or any of the old traditional media. If you place an ad on a search engine, you can know exactly how many users clicked on that ad and how many actually bought the product. Clients like this aspect of the Internet, even though it doesn’t have all of the glamour of a TV commercial. Ad people like to say you can’t build ands without media advertising. My answer to that is: Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com and Starbucks — all global brand names built with virtually no advertising. Television did have a tremendous influence on popular culture. But does that compare with what the Internet has wrought on culture and consumer

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