MarketingInsideOut.com

The 30-second TV spot isn’t dead.  Neither is radio or print advertising. But according to Outsell Inc., an information industry research firm, the surge of dollars into the online advertising sector continues to grow at a faster pace.

Outsell projects spending on online advertising to surge to 19 percent of advertising spending in 2006. By contrast, spending on print ads will grow an estimated 2 percent and spending on radio and television ads an estimated 2.4 percent.

That projection seems to hold up fairly well when considering that according to an estimate from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released today, Internet advertising revenues surpassed $3 billion for the second consecutive quarter in Q4 of 2005, a 35 percent increase over the same period in 2004.  

Outsell estimates that the Internet is now used by 80 percent of advertisers, a broader adoption rate than is generally acknowledged, and projected a 90 percent adoption rate by 2008.

Last July only 13% of respondents felt they knew the meaning of the concept podcast, according to the  Pew Internet & American Life study.  A mere 7 months later, eMarketer projects podcasting advertising to reach $80 million this year and $300 million by 2010.

The audiece for podcasts is growing extremely rapidly especially  when you consider it “started” in September of 2004.  And with the audience’s attractive demographics and flexibility of this new “anywhere, anytime” channel — advertiser are hot to take advantage of this medium.  

Advertisers are looking at podcasting as a way to reach consumers that are difficult to reach with traditional media and indeed finding the right podcast can provide a compelling messaging environment for an advertiser’s brand.  And where there’s demand, there will be supply…two new podcasting ad networks — Kiptronic and Podtrac — officially launched in late January.

But advertisers are not the only one looking to jump on the band wagon.  PRWeb, a online release distribution platform, has introduced a press release podcasting service.  

From AdAge today, there’s a good article by Jonah Bloom that’s worth a read.

[Despite an overwhelming mass of evidence that their business models are fatally flawed and their service offerings out of step with many marketers’ demands, the biggest agencies have done remarkably little to substantially reinvent themselves. It doesn’t seem to matter how many of their clients shift projects or even full-scale brand assignments to smaller, nimbler, flatter structured, less-30-second centric agencies, the biggest agencies seem reluctant to really blow up their model.

That’s not to say there have been no moves at all. John Dooner’s McCann Erickson has made smart use of Worldgroup to offer a multidisciplinary approach to marketers’ problems; Andrew Robertson’s BBDO has shown willingness to make personnel changes and is evolving from a 30-second-obsessed agency into a flexible organizer of collaborating Omnicom shops; and Ogilvy has shifted to a single P&L to eliminate financial barriers to collaboration among its disciplinary units.

Layers of bureaucracy
But all the big ad agencies still have layers and layers of bureaucracy, rampant job-title inflation and hundreds of people whose chief role seems to be managing up. Their product has barely changed (you could count the genuinely big ideas from the last 12 months on one hand), and I’ve heard at least three separate first-hand reports of people within those organizations who’ve had good non-TV ideas for a client being told that they’d have to be turned into TV commercials before they could be pitched.

I’ve recently been rereading “Re-imagine!,” management guru Tom Peters’ brilliant look at the new business order, wrought in large part by the Internet and which, he says, requires every modern business to constantly destroy and reinvent itself to survive.

Fear incrementalism
He takes issue with organizations that tweak rather than reinvent: “MIT Media Lab boss Nicholas Negroponte said: ‘Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.’ Sad fact: Big organizations, by their very nature, are addicted to incrementalism ... they seldom make the changes necessary to deal with a discontinuous environment. ... Most big enterprises that survive a challenge from an upstart do so as shadows of their former selves. Still alive. Still big. But no longer the pathfinders.”]

The Hurricanes in 2005 certainly took a massive toll in  many ways. And it certainly wasn’t the best year for insurance companies, but the insurance category was the biggest gainer in the top 15 categories of ad spenders in 2005, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.  According to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the category ad spending jumped 31.3 percent, Adweek reports.

Geico increased spending by 51.3 percent to $470.1 million, and Progressive’s spending jumped 45.3 percent to $354 million. Some of the increase in the category has been attributed to online opportunities which have created new opportunities for people to shop for insurance.  A new report reveals that auto insurance quotes submitted to online direct insurers increased by 23% in 2005 compared with the previous year, and actual policy purchases jumped by 29% during the same time.

The insurance category increase significantly outpaced the overall 2005 growth of 7.4 percent in ad spending to $125.5 billion. Ad spending in 2004 rose only 6.3 percent from the previous year, and spending in 2003 rose only 5.1 percent.