In hi-tech business, it’s worth tracking the money to look at where the future of our technologies will take us. And often, you can at least look at where VCs are thinking about their money:
Mark Kvamme’s keynote at ad:tech:
Yet in spite of the changes in consumer behavior, the media spend still lags behind. Kvamme noted that while average household time spent with TV is 33 percent, the average ad spend on TV is 38 percent. In contrast, average household time spend on the internet is 33 percent, but the ad spend is a “miniscule” five percent.
And, Kvamme said, breaking it down by CPM makes the differences in media weight even more apparent. A $64 CPM on network TV is a bad buy when compared to a premium internet CPM of $30, and it looks downright terrible when compared to an internet ROS CPM of $10.
And really, those ratios are even worse. With the advent of DVRs, I think a lot of us are just skimming past the commercials (Although I’ve noted a marked increase in the quality of advertising eye candy on TV, possibly to get folks like me to stop and watch the pretty pictures). But an Internet ad pretty much always catches your eye; and it can be better targeted than the brute demographics of TV ads — when I hit a handful of car sites, you know that I’m a pretty good target for vehicular ads.
There’s an interesting thing to watch out for here. I think there will be a lot more money moving into online advertising, and more into the streaming media space – good news for us – but I wonder if we’re going to see more of the excesses of the advertising space. Blink tags. Popunders. Loud, bad music blaring inline from our browsers. Animated banners covering up that news article.
Either way, it’s more media to move.
(hat tip: Craig Newmark)