April 22, 2006
The director of global and strategic media and marketing for leading U.S. advertiser Citibank, Mark Ingall, made the ultimate contrarian announcement that "pretty soon" internet advertising is going to peak and plateau, and quite possibly decline.
"Online seems to have leapfrogged right over other media, but given just what happened to the direct mail category over the last 10 years, the prediction for online is that it will spike pretty soon,...Over time...we're going to have to turn our attention to something more traditional," Ingall is quoted as saying during a keynote speech at the Advertising Club of New York's yearly Magazine Day.
He added that this will be a promising development for magazines, but quickly added that magazines will not be able to survive without the internet: "If there's any publisher or editor in here who thinks they're going to survive just with print, I look forward to seeing whether you're here in five years' time."
While I don't have any problem with somebody saying that advertising may decline on the internet (I don't agree with this at all at this time), there is something in the way it's being said that makes it a little hard to believe for me. Just adding the comment about magazines makes me think that he may be just trying to spin some type of self-fulfilling prophecy to prolong the market.
It hasn't been a big story around the web, but Google has quietly extended its advertising reach beyond the web as part of its overall strategy. But I don't think that it is a move to protect its potential online model at this time, but is rather a move to better serve its base who are demanding a more comprehensive approach which includes mulitiple advertising outlets.
The reason I don't think it's going to happen at this time is because the more mature online viewers are slowly starting to move in the direction of online purchasing. Now one area where this may be true may be in the younger web users, who have readily adapted to the online way of advertising.
