• by Jim Meskauskas , November 9, 2004

If any of you read the trades, were in attendance at Ad:Tech in New York, or read anything about Ad:Tech this week, you came across this piece of news: total online ad spend for 2004 is shaping up to be some $9.4 billion.

In a release made public in advance of Ad:Tech, eMarketer stated that search marketing spending will be approximately $3.9 billion in 2004, while non-search advertising will come in at around $3.3 billion (as of this writing, it was unclear where the other $2.2 billion will come from).

In the same release, eMarketer says they expect spending to be double for 2005.

These are some big, hefty numbers. Compared to Robert Cohen's media spending analysis, we're talking about more spending than in outdoor, national spot radio, national syndicated TV, or network radio (individually, not cumulatively) in 2003.

If these numbers are at all accurate, I think that it is no longer sensible to use phrases like "the jury is still out," or "more research is needed," or "testing still has to be done" when some marketers talk about online advertising. It's here to stay and there is no way around it. Numbers this big don't just go away, unless of course you are talking about a telecommunication company.

At this point, the industry has arrived. Representatives of this business can no longer spend time, ink, or breath on how the medium is an underdog or that if only clients and big agencies understood, then there would be more spending.

The whining will have to cease.

Among the biggest implications for the online advertising industry is that like it or not, we are becoming mainstream. We are no longer outside the umbra of "advertising" at large. We are now a part of it. This invariably will lead to many early pioneers and their ideas being co-opted. The now-nearly ubiquitous talk of accountability coming from the heads of the major shops is just one example of this. Their talk of consumer control is another.

But this shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us. It is often said, revolutions always eat their young.

What is all this going to mean for the scrappy young revolutionaries that helped build this industry?

Well, many of them have long since left the space for other lives doing things as far removed from online advertising as the imagination can make possible.

Others are no longer so young and... well... "revolutionary." They have become part of the advertising establishment and are now leading it in the direction that many of us always postulated it would go in. People like Rich LeFurgy, recent recipient of the IAB lifetime achievement award, or Brian Monahan, who now heads all of Microsoft's media for Universal-McCann are emblematic of where the space has been and where it is going - a synthesis of technology and holistic media considerations.

Now that spending against online advertising has reached such heights, and, if we are to believe the prognosticators, this figure is just the piedmont of a much higher mountain; it is time to stop talking about which medium is better than the other and time to focus attention not on advantage or disadvantage of a medium versus another, but on the project of marketing at large.

It is time to address consumer rejection of marketing. It is time to tackle clutter. It is time to attend to the schism between the desire for meaningful communicative action and the need for positively impacting business. Online media is a discrete but no longer "alternative" part of the consideration set for approaching these tasks. It has proved itself as part of the establishment. And there are 9.4 billion reasons to think so.