From Marketing Pilgrim -

"There’s a new study by the Kelsey Group talking about online auto advertising. Budgets are rising from 5% this year to 13% in 2011. Money spent for TV advertising is slowing down. Like newspapers, the auto industry is suffering and looking for ways to revive sales, and channeling more into the Internet and less into traditional advertising. ”

Kelsey Group estimates automakers’ 2008 U.S. ad spending will be flat or down slightly. CEO Neal Polachek said carmakers will shift more dollars online and to out-of-home, with declines in TV, magazines, newspapers and direct mail.

Read the entire article here.

I was fishing with a good friend a few years ago.  We were pummeling the east bank of a small inlet at Skiatook Lake near evening on a beautiful fall day, but catching nada.  We heard some noise and looked across the water to the west to see a rather large school of fish thrashing the surface in a feeding frenzy.  For some reason we smiled and continued our mindless ritual of casting into the still waters on our side of the inlet.  Then after a few more minutes of being disturbed by all of the feeding fifty yards astern, our eyes met and we both had the same revelatory thought - "Let's go over where the fish are feeding."  And sure enough, our luck changed. 

I mean, it's all luck you know.

Forecast: Spending will triple in 2008, to $1.3B

From Media Life Magazine - "Local online advertising will once again be hot in 2008; that hasn’t changed. What is changing, however, is how this advertising is delivered, compared to past years when banners and pop-ups dominated, and who is selling it. "

Some other points from the article:

• A shift out of banners ads and into search, email, video and promotions
• Local online video ads will triple in 2008
• Local media companies (newspapers, radio, TV, etc.) must develop internet-only sales staffs to compete

If you own a local business or lead another local organization you need to be tuned in to the huge impact the Internet is having on the local advertising market.  Perhaps nowhere is the cultural shift creating a bigger impact than in advertising and media.

A good time to get started on a local Internet-based campaign would be now.

But first get a plan.  (See previous post)

That was the prediction yesterday by Steve King, CEO of communications strategy company ZenithOptimedia.

"We predict global Internet advertising to pass three milestones in the next three years," a rep for Zenith said in a statement. "To overtake radio advertising in 2008; to attain a double-digit share of global advertising in 2009; and to overtake magazine advertising in 2010, with 11.5 percent of total ad spend."

Link to article on AdWeek.

Link to global ad spend chart.

“The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did.”  So begins a recently released report from IBM Global Business Services. Many of us have been talking about the cultural shift and its impact on marketing for years, and it’s nice to see “Big Blue” weigh in.

Some highlights of the report projecting growth rates for 2007-2010:
•    US local stations can expect annual advertising revenue growth rates of 2% per year
•    Internet advertising is expected to grow at 20% annually during that same time. (Internet advertising growth has consistently outperformed previous projections)
•    Newspapers 2%
•    Mobile advertising 41%

Some other observations from the report which underscore the cultural shift in media:
•    Within five years, advertising executives expect 15 percent of television viewing time and 25 percent of PC time to be devoted to user-generated content (UGC)
•    Two-thirds of the industry execs expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to shift from impression-based formats to impact-based formats within three years.
•    The US television advertising upfronts are not likely to exist more than another few years.
•    The two variables likely to be most disruptive to the industry’s future are the increasing degree of consumer control over marketing and the shift toward open exchange platforms for advertising sales.
•    Agencies are developing new approaches to put consumers at the center of marketing programs. (Imagine that!)

There’s a lot more in the report which will prove either disturbing or exciting (my view) depending on your perspective.

Download report here.

Also check out the Internet vs. TV street interview.

The upgraded BizDreams site is now live.  It still needs a lot of work on my end, but it's a start.  I'd be interested in any comments.  Thanks.

A friend of mine shared a quote with me about 11 days ago attributed to Dan Rather, "Don't start over so late that it's too late to start over."  Then just yesterday another good friend quoted George Eliot to me, "It's never too late to be who you might have been."

I don't think either of them realized that I was on the cusp of a dramatic move in my life, leaving a job I loved at BMCFerrell Advertising and launching into my own business.  I'm grateful to Ben Ferrell for 5.5 great years, and I'm going to miss the daily contact with some really great people.  But I'm really pumped about my return to the pursuit of my childhood dreams.

The company is BizDreams, and I'll be posting more info and updates in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead.  I'll be working mostly with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial types developing and executing marketing and advertising strategies for top line impact.  I'll no doubt be helping some nonprofits and ministries too since I have a lot of experience with that in my background.

And while I know this announcement is not going to move the needle on anyone's Richter scale it marks a significant time for me and my wife on what has been an adventurous, challenging and profoundly interesting journey.

Link for RSS readers.

Couple of sites with some more details about the Future of Online Advertising Conference.

BehindtheBuzz has the most comprehensive coverage I have seen.

Lots of links to other sites with coverage over at Digital Perm.

The conference has been excellent. 

I'm a bit weary of writing about it, so let me summarize (in my own words like Mrs. Johnson told me in sophomore English).

• The rate of growth in online advertising is steep which is creating a lot of opportunities for those who figure it out.
• According to a survey by Marketing Sherpa, the combined spend for paid search and online ads for a recent 12-month period is estimated at 12.2 billion dollars.  This is substantial but to give it perspective consider that the spend for direct (postal) mail alone was $58.7 billion, newspapers $30 billion, and even local radio rang in at $15.5 billion.  But online is growing the fastest and is in fact eating into ad spends for many other mediums including television.
• According to Jay Adelson of Digg and Revision 3 fame, forget trying to build Internet video around the Flash player.  You're going to need something portable and something that will work well with that big flat screen hanging on your living room wall.
• Carla Hendra of Ogilvy had a lot of great points including: