• by Kristin Sidorak , January 3, 2006

After a year of mediocre growth, some of Madison Avenue's top media directors are predicting strong growth for media - especially online - and a greater integration across media. New business activity will also be strong, full-service agency media departments will benefit from the trends, and so-called "e-business" technologies will begin to transform the way agencies plan and buy media. These were among the chief predictions industry leaders made for 2006 when contacted by MediaDailyNews at the close of 2005.

"There will be a lot of new business activity and it will appear as though more money is being spent - when it may [actually] be a reaction to the conservatism that we've experienced over the past few years," expects Robin Donovan, a senior partner and media director at Bozell & Jacobs, Omaha, Neb., adding that the lines between media will begin to blur as they become more integrated parts of a plan.

"Media will integrate to the point where you may plan Internet banners in order to get a TV buy, or you may plan print in order to get your out-of-home schedule of choice," she predicted.

Larry Kelly, senior vice president-director of media and research at Fogarty Klein Monroe, Houston., agrees that online will become more formally integrated with the rest of media as clients begin utilizing full-service agencies to make "all disciplines work together."

He predicted that full-service agencies would adopt a "10 percent rule" for online similar to the way traditional agencies mandated cable buys in the early days of the cable TV business to make up for broadcast's "underdelivery" in cable homes. "I think that online is going to start in a similar path where all plans will have online either as a component or test," he said.

Kelly also showed his research stripes, predicting that Arbitron's portable people meter technology will become "the measure of the broadcast arena with a much quicker rollout than anticipated."

Holly McCollum, vice president-media services at Keating Magee, a full-service agency in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans put a regional spin on her predictions. While she echoed the overall sentiment of "explosive growth" for online media in 2006, she said this would be especially true in the South, "as more marketers begin utilizing cost per thousand strategies across all platforms."

McCollum also predicted that the aftermath of 2005's storms would continue to make the Gulf Coast region one of the most studied media markets in the country, as media scramble to find ways of accurately assessing impressions and universe estimates." The area will be a beta test site for new technology, and will be a case study for years to come for demographers and statisticians," she foresees, adding that marketers already are reevaluating their consumer targeting strategies in the South, "as the region has become younger, more male, less black, and more Hispanic from the out-migration from the storms."

Another side effect, she said, is the fact that regional housing shortages are transforming household compositions, forcing "more households into multiple generation or multiple family, so traditional [viewers per viewing household] numbers will no longer apply."

Print media, meanwhile, will continue to be transformed by the shift toward digitalization and convergence with other media, predicted Bozell's Donovan. "Print will continue to morph through convergence, making it much more in demand, but not necessarily for the print itself, rather for the package of everything that you get."

Another trend likely to emerge in 2006, is the acceleration of so-called e-business methods for conducting media plans and buys, predicts O. Burtch Drake, president-CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, an organization that has been pushing for such changes, encouraging members to adopt new transactional platforms, as well as the AAAA's Ad-ID digital media tracking venture with the Association of National Advertisers.

"E-biz for media will move from the talk state to the test stage," predicted Drake, adding that Ad-ID would be adopted by a "majority of television advertisers" in 2006.