Dave Morgan of Ad Age ably glosses the reasons why the tech giants such as Googe, eBay and Microsoft have failed to disrupt the TV ad market they they have disrupted the rest of old media. His conclusion is that, fundamentally, the TV ad market does not want to be disrupted, and, by the way, business is still done there by people and not interfaces.
What Morgan says is largely true, but it was also true for newspapers, magazines and direct mail -- right up until the moment when their viability expired. TV has resisted longer, for reasons that I suspect have more to do with the power of the broadcasters than the ad community, but it will not hold out forever. Media consumption over television and the Internet have been converging, first slowly, but ever more persistently, and the day is not long off when the TV will be just one more device for aggregating media, alongside the tablet, phone, and, for all we know, the kitchen window. TV advertising will not long survive the consequent demise of broadcasting, so the abandoned efforts of the likes of Google are simply price paid for learning more about the next media frontier. Tighten your seat belts, folks, until then this will be a bumpy ride.
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