Russell Davies has a great post on ‘newspapers and all that‘ which looks at the current debate on the future of newspapers and asks where the advertisers/media planners are hiding during the discussion.
As he outlines the reasons why they’re not particularly active in the debate, it echoed my own thoughts – not just on newspapers and magazines, but also about social media. Consumers have jumped all over social media/social networking (175 million+ on Facebook, 133 million+ blogs, Twitter growing fast, Wikipedia essential etc), and celebrities, direct sale companies and media businesses are all getting there pretty quickly – but it’s all being slowed by the reluctance of the majority of advertisers and media planners to adapt to new ways of working, new measurements and new metrics.
Which means the people that will spend money, and the routes to them are evolving quicker than the money which will fund it, and that situation is the slowest one to change.