Commentary
Being Mary Meeker
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, April 5, 2013
Digitas’ Jordan Bitterman turned a little “Mary Meekerish” in the early part of his “Video In Crisis” presentation at the Video Insider Summit, showing an obligatory
time spent vs. ad dollars spent chart of “digita” vs. TV.
“Marketers are still spending 65% of their ad budgets on television vs. 34% in
digital,” he noted. The reason it is Mary Meekerish, he implied, is because of the data in the other part of the chart on consumer time spent with media, and the fact that digital (40%) and TV
(42%) are nearly at parity.
“There is a vacuum we need to fill,” he said.
Mary Meeker, of course, is the Wall Street analyst
who is famous for trashing marketers slow embrace of digital media, and the fact that they are lagging consumer adoption of digital media -- though not everyone in the industry agrees with that logic
for reasons that have nothing to do with apples, or oranges.
“We still have this perception issue,” Bitterman said, adding, “This thing that we have to
close the gap on.”
But fear not, Bitterman believes the crisis may soon be resolved due to a number of key factors, especially the fact that, “we have tons
of scale” with online video.
“Secondly there are great companies and great technologies that are helping to pave the way. So we have the
infrastructure.”
THe third thing, he said self-effacingly, is the NewFronts -- those upfront-like online video pitches that were incubated by yes, you guessed it,
Digitas. Bitterman’s point.
“When you start creating a marketplace and catalyzing spend,” he said, the money will follow.
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
