Reaching The Unreachable.

I'm still absorbing this lengthy article about the trends in on and off-line advertising and am struck by the contradictions.

We are told that newspapers are dying and yet we read that

Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), publisher of the Daily Mail, last week published figures showing that advertising revenues at its national titles had grown by about 4% in recent months.

We are told that the web attracts 27% of users' media consumption, but only 11% of ads are placed online perhaps because as the Finance Director (hmm why not the marketing director?) declares:

Our 5m readers, “very targeted in terms of middle England”, were still a big attraction for “heartland” advertisers such as Marks & Spencer. “To get to that volume of people in their marketplace online is still pretty difficult....it’s going to remain so. It’s complicated to get to the same number of people by aggregating different web properties.”

We are told of the difficulties being experienced in trying to get online video viewers to accept pre-roll advertising clips and yet

Glen Drury, head of Yahoo UK, said the increasing ease of using online video opened up the internet to brands that found it hard to use search. (Nobody searches for “tooth-paste”, he pointed out.)

My conclusion? If anybody tells you they know how this will shake out, run a mile. But give some real thought to that throw-away line "nobody searches for toothpaste" because in a world of fragmented audiences, advertising aversion and prosumers, that is a biggie. If your potential customer doesn't want to be interrupted but refuses to search for you, how do you stop becoming a commodity?