I had a fascinating conversation over the weekend with a man who runs a highly successful new media business that is advertiser supported. It is not a traditional media company, but he knows a lot about traditional media companies, because he’s taking money that used to go to them.

I can’t reveal his identity, but I want to share a few quotes and thoughts, because it’ll help people understand the nature of the disruptive threat to traditional advertiser-supported institutions, especially TV.

He said he regularly hears from agencies that “We have all this money to spend, but they won’t let us spend it on television.” He said is what absolutely overwhelmed by this question from agencies and media buyers, “What do you have to sell us that’s not standard television or radio?”

He said television stations are like a guy who just got divorced, and it hasn’t really hit him yet (great metaphor).

He agreed with me, however, that agencies are disincentivised to play in the internet space, because they “want to collect their 15% on a $25 million TV buy instead of a $25,000 new media buy.” That’s changing, because the advertisers are demanding it.

The idea that “people buy TV, because it works” is no longer good enough. Google has shown the ad community that there’s a big difference between the blue smoke and mirrors of Arbitron or Nielsen “methodology” and the hard statistics of action. The horse is out of the barn, as they say.

Word is out that Lin Broadcasting has joined Nexstar Broadcasting in exploring the sale of their local stations. These are public companies that see the handwriting on the wall as stated above. They’d be better off in the hands of private companies, and this is just the beginning.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 10:01 am and is filed under Broadcasting, Advertising, Disruptions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.