Goodbye 60- and 30-second commercials...and good riddance

Written by Don Keith N4KC

I’ve been preaching for a while that the traditional electronic media mainstays—the 60- and 30-second commercial spot announcements—are going to soon fade into the ether.  They have to.  Blame the DVR, the proliferation of programming choice, satellite radio and Pandora, the short attention spans of Gen X and Y, or the simple inability to easily tie results to investment, but the spot announcement will soon join the newspaper classified ad, the Yellow Pages, and the ad-supported wall calendar in the pages of advertising history textbooks.  Assuming the textbook itself still exists much longer, which I doubt.

Here’s a great article about a company that gets it: http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/relativity-launches-branded-entertainment-agency-madvine-signs-evian-mondelez-as-clients-1201151723/

Word of disclosure: this is the same Relativity Media that still holds the film option on my novel FIRING POINT and still says they are going to get it made this year.  I assume our
submarine will float in a sea of Evian water!

Agencies who think they can still skate along, dazzling their clients with their skill buying CPM or cost-per-point or Tapscan rankers, will see less and less return for the people who keep the company juice bar stocked and a charge on the agency CEO’s Tesla battery.
Advertisers who rely on “social media consultants” (read: “charlatans”) to help develop strategy will end up prolonging the life of MySpace, Yahoo, and others who have long since outlived any ability they might have once had to deliver brand loyalty or eager customers for a company, product or service.  (I’m not quite ready to throw Facebook into that pile of drying bones, but the time is coming unless some of these seemingly goofy investments they are making turn out to be just what they need to actually give some value to all those eyeballs they have assembled.) 

Media—and especially traditional radio and TV—who don’t realize that they must be what Relativity calls itself—a “content engine,” and one with myriad ways to reach and engage potential customers for advertisers—will soon have nothing left to sell. 

Nothing except air.