• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 14, 2007

February 17, 2009. There are two interesting things about that date. One is that it is the day that analog television will finally give up its ghost. Two is that, in the six months that we've been hosting this board, there has not been a single reference to the timing of this important milestone. To make up for lost time, I'd like to start keeping time, and you may already have noticed a little gizmo to help us do that. It's called the "Digital Countdown" and it's located in the upper righthand corner of the TV Board home page.

The countdown is a continuous clock ticking off the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the U.S. TV industry converts from analog to digital broadcast spectrum, and the implications are huge for so many constituents, and for so many reasons. The transition, in fact, is so significant that we're not calling it a "Digital Broadcast Countdown," but a far more encompassing "Digital Countdown." The reason is that it is not simply a development that affects only broadcast TV, but the entire TV universe, and, I believe digital media of all kinds. And if you've been following the discussions on MediaPost - on this board, on the Online Spin Board, in Media magazine, and elsewhere -- all media is going digital. And when it does, the meanings we place on media -- consumers, content companies and marketers alike -- will begin to blur to the point where, I dare say, we will no longer have something that can rightly be called television.

Already, the major media shops have gotten out in front of this transition, rebranding their TV buying units into "video activation" departments, or some such puffery. It's good that they did that now. If they had waited much longer, they would have looked really old school, really soon. We all know TV is becoming video, and that video platforms are becoming ubiquitous, seamless and under the viewer's control. But some of us cling onto words thinking they will help preserve that status quo a little bit longer -- at least long enough for us to get a better handle on things, if not to reach retirement age before we no longer can. So if you ask me, February 17, 2009 isn't just the day the U.S. broadcast TV industry goes digital. It's the day that we reach a new inflection point on the meaning of television.

There are many implications for the conversion from analog to digital broadcast, most of which I'm not going to touch on here and now. Lord knows, broadcast industry trades have regularly discussed such issues. It will be an epic transition. But one of the most amazing things is how little the topic's been discussed in the advertising trades -- both in publications such as Advertising Age or those published by MediaPost -- as well as among the people I talk with on Madison Avenue. I'm not sure why. It's a pretty big deal. One theory I have is that it's been planned for so long that it's seemed to fade into the background of the ad industry's collective consciousness. Another theory is that, given the rate of other changes taking place in the media landscape and business practices of the advertising world, February 2009 still seems pretty far off to most of us. Hence the clock, which depending on when you read this, will tell you that we have some 613 days before all hell breaks loose.

Oops, there goes my penchant for drama. And the truth is, Idon't mean to sensationalize this issue, but I'm hoping to sensitize some people to it and to bring it into the forefront of our discussions, because a lot of things are going to change once the conversion has occurred. And I don't mean to imply that Madison Avenue has got its head firmly planted in the analog TV sand. The topic comes up all the time, but it's rarely carried forward in any way that suggests the ad industry is coming to grips with it. Take today, for example. There were dramatic references to TV's digital conversion during the American Association of Advertising Agencies' day-long Digital Conference in New York, but little conclusion on how it would actually impact the business, or how agencies need to change to deal with it. Most of the focus was about the impact of another kind of digital media: online.

Though at least one speaker, aQuantive President-CEO Brian McAndrews, thought the whole TV vs. online digital debate may become moot. Referring to aQuantive, which is poised to be acquired by Microsoft Corp., as a "digital advertising services holding company," McAndrews, predicted, "In the future when all media are digital, all agencies will be digital agencies. Period. I think there has been a blurring of the line, and I think this is just confirmation of that."

The impact of digital broadcast conversion was also alluded to by the AAAA's Mike Donahue, who suggested that the switch would lead to an inundation of TV advertising inventory from stations opting to multicast new channels with their digital bandwidth, and that agencies might need to move to online auction systems simply to process all the incremental ad inventory.

The conference was labeled "digital," but judging by the agenda, it was pretty much code for "online." And that brings me to one of the key issues for the TV industry as it faces its digital conversion. How will people classify it? I'm already beginning to sense a caste structure around the term digital media. It was evident this week when the Magazine Publishers of America issued an analysis of ad spending trends data showing magazines to be the fastest growing "non-digital" medium, once again using the word "digital' as code for online.

The truth is that TV has as much bragging rights for the word digital as any other medium. Yes, the Internet began that way, but only because of when and how it evolved. But a good portion of TV -- satellite and much of cable -- already is digital. As are many TV-connected devices, including DVDs, DVRs, video game consoles, etc. And there even is one major agency that has been brave enough and prescient enough to brand its advanced television unit with the word: fellow TV Board contributor Mitch Oscar's Carat Digital, which is all about television, while his sister online operations are dubbed Carat Fusion.

In fact, it was some data I came across from Carat a couple of years ago that was among the first to really get my mind around what the conversion from analog to digital means for media -- and I mean all media. You've probably seen it or heard about it before, but I think it bears repeating. It's a chart showing Carat's estimates for the penetration of digital media -- as a percent of all media -- from 1900 through 2020. It shows that 50% of all media already are digital, and that by 2010 it will reach 66%. By 2020 it will be 80%. The significant part of the analysis is that it is looking at all media -- TV, radio, online, outdoor and even print -- and shows the individual digital penetration curves for each medium. This chart is now a couple of years old, and I'm not sure if Carat has updated it recently, but I think it may actually be a little off the mark. As far as TV is concerned, anyway. It's not 2020 when TV becomes 100% digital. It's 2009.

So Carat's been thinking deeply about this transition. Who else? Well, I met with Richard Beaven shortly after he took the reins as CEO of Initiative North America, and two things happened as a result of that meeting. One is that he raided one of my best reporters, Tom Siebert, to become his communications chief, but we won't dwell on that. The other is that we spent a good deal of our meeting talking about the significance of 2009, and whether the advertising world was prepared for it. His belief was that 1) February 17, 2009 is in fact one of the most significant dates for the U.S. advertising business; and 2) that most of the advertising world is not prepared for it.

So here it is. You've got a little more than 600 days to get prepared, and they're ticking off by, well, the second. And if you need a reminder from time to time, just click back here.