The broader economy is certainly going to get a lot worst before it gets better.  In fact, worst does not even begin to cover it. Here’s more doomsday talk from none other than Yale’s Robert Schiller, found via SAI.

But as the saying goes: there’s a bull market somewhere at all times, and reading this rosy outlook for online advertising, I wonder if maybe, just maybe, my stoic outlook in September 2007 was not ill-placed.  Here’s what I said then:

If tomorrow you had to cut 10, 25, 50% of your ad budget, would you cut print, radio, tv, or web?

This ain’t 2000 when the bubble burst and the Nasdaq crashed, or 2001 when 9/11 happened; then, few F500 companies spent heavily or were experienced with web advertising, then it was a matter of “we don’t have the resources to experiment with the Web.” At the time, there were also less people online. It just did not offer you as much reach x frequency as the other medium.

In technical terms, online advertising’s beta (the ratio compared to the average) was much higher so in a downturn it suffered a deeper decline.

Today, the secret’s out of the bag: print advertising is pretty ineffective, TV is expensive and random, no one listens to radio etc., and online is where it’s at. If an externality - say the sub-prime credit situation turns sour - online advertising might be affected, but TV and other more expensive (and inefficient, effective etc.) formats will be hit harder, faster, and unlike the Web, they simply will not recover.

In other words, once advertising budgets recover, a much larger portion will be allocated to the Web, but if something does happen, the Web will be the least affected thanks to the 3 Ts:

- tracked
- targeted
- timely.

Hopefully I won’t look like a buffoon for writing that a year ago, but I still think online advertising will be the major winner with:

- Print being the biggest loser: why?  no one reads print and it is a very archaic distribution method, facing massive asset value drops (hmm… all of them) and steep debt (NYT, Tribune) they will also have to cut resources at a time when they should be investing more and more digital media and in digital distribution.  Print’s only salvation will be the fact that you don’t need to be connected and can take it on the go.

- Followed by TV: even more expensive as audiences fall, marketers’ will have a disdain for untracked media

- Then Radio: satellite radio saw that better technology does not translate into success, terrestrial radio is free and the local flavor is hard to beat.  Radio will be smaller and smaller for sure, but it won’t be as decimated as some expect.

- Then Outdoors: the only real way to reach people when they’re outside, not connected to anyone of the other media.  Plus, as more and more digital screens proliferate, the options for outdoors begin to get better and better.  Still, this will be small relative to the Web.  I should note, WatchMojo.com’s videos reach 15M consumers across 2,000 screens in North America in digital networks outdoors…

• Digg this Blog
• Share on Facebook
• WatchMojo on Twitter
• WatchMojo on YouTube
• Add to Favorites
• WatchMojo Newsletter