When we talk about advertisers “shifting” ad dollars from one venue to another, we often talk about where the money is going, when we ought to be looking at where it’s coming from. In so doing, we discover the truth of Bob Papper’s statement that television didn’t hurt magazines by taking away readers; it hurt magazines by taking away its advertising.

So it is with online. One of my favorite studies is the annual survey (.ppt) of ad execs by the American Advertising Federation on advertising trends, and this year’s — released yesterday and reported this morning in Media Daily News — reveals online video to be the big winner.

More than half (53%) of the 168 respondents said they expect 20% or more of their TV advertising budgets to shift into online video by 2010 (see table below). “The determining factor will be the sheer volume of online opportunities,” said one agency executive participating in the survey. “Will there be a handful of sites that rise above the fray or will there be so sites to choose from that the media dollars can’t possibly cover enough bases to be effective?”

Notice that word “shift” and that it’s coming from broadcast and cable TV.

The question for local stations is pretty simple. Do you have the technology in place to receive these shifting ad dollars? If not — and even though the survey said advertisers think broadcasters are best equipped to handle these online dollars — you won’t be seeing any of this money.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 9:44 am and is filed under Broadcasting. 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.