The Online Marketing Avalanche

June 29, 2009 by Evan

The Avalanche is coming, The Avalanche is coming, forget it, the Avalanche is here!

I fondly remember back to a conversation that I had with a Sr. VP of Sales at a leading newspaper roughly 5 years ago (who I was an Online Specialist for). It went something like this:

What do you think will happen moving forward with the newspaper, the magazine and the sites?

My response was “watch out because the Avalanche is coming”. What I was referring to was that with online audiences growing steadily and newspaper and magazine ad revenue (and readership) dropping like a stone, it was pretty clear that any irrelevant media source would be wiped out. It wouldn’t happen overnight but it would definitely happen, magazine by magazine, paper by paper, city by city.

“Readers” weren’t readers anymore, they’re now people. They didn’t like yesterday’s news or to be told what was happening. They no longer bought the media, they controlled it, they made the media, had voices and they reached out to places where they could be heard. They used to think we were nuts that we went to YouTube or Blogged, now it’s called things like User Generated Content, Tweets or Postings and these dark dungeons are now called Billion dollar companies. Imagine the pleasure I had back then in being a webhead. How much for a button thingy on the front page? how do I find Google on the web? I must have short man’s syndrome or something but it’s amazing now that people are living the dream – people read newspapers, people watch TV, people listen to the radio but people USE the Internet.

Now that we are USING the Internet we’ve taken media to an absolutely new level. That new level has been incredibly fun for my peeps, my fellow webheads. Before you put on your party hat and print your revolution t-shirt, stop and think for a second about something that this growth has created – Advertisers’ pain. They can’t find you anymore. They’re having difficulty learning how to speak WITH you instead of speaking AT you. Come on tidy demographics, can’t you just congregate at the local newspaper like you used to? It was so much easier when one phone call would buy media for millions of people in a specific demographic.

To make things worse, the economy has gone from “the challenge area” to the “Don’t lose my job at all costs” phase and now these Marketing Managers and agency folk are pressed to sell more products with each Marketing dollar spent. That’s right, selling products is important again. Pass the Rogaine, people are losing their hair out there. The avalanche is here and the snowboarders are winning! It’s ok, we’ll help them out right.

You never know, maybe they’re reading your blog right now, clicking on an ad and helping you make a few affiliate bucks.

Guest Post by: Mike Carney of MediaTrust

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