• Ad Age, Tuesday, March 28, 2006 10:45 AM

In an age of rapid and rampant digital expansion, traditional media has taken solace from the fact that--to date--no medium has ever been outright replaced by the emergence of others. Well, as any stat watcher knows, such precedents exist to be broken. Remember the 2004 World Series? No team in the 100 year-plus history of baseball had ever come back from 0-3 to win an American League Championship until the Boston Red Sox. Perhaps that's a bad analogy, but the point is, anything can happen. Ad Age columnist Jonah Bloom agrees. He calls it "wishful thinking" on the part of big media that all media will stay intact in the aftermath of the digital revolution. Nothing so potentially disruptive as the Internet has ever come about in the history of media. Why? Because the Internet is so much bigger than an advertising medium: it's a sales channel and CRM tool, and a perfectable--or at least, continuously optimizable—one, at that. Online will only grow and become more powerful as search and display integrate, and targeting becomes so ridiculously granular and relevant, that consumers will welcome ads as they do content they choose. Well, maybe that's a little bit too much wishful thinking, but relevance and engagement will always trump mass marketing in effectiveness, and that's what the Internet is all about: connecting. Bloom says that all Internet media companies like Google, Yahoo and MSN need to solidify their rise to the top of the ad pile is "scale, inventory and talent."  

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