More pathos

More on the pathetic attempts by Old Media to prove its relevance to “The Youth” by buying ads… on Old Media?

Meanwhile, (via Buzzmachine) Starcom’s Rishad Tobaccowala says the disintegration and disintermediation of media means (effective) ad prices are going to rise.

Fragmentation and consumer control will drive the cost of digital media upwards by 20 to 30 percent annually over the next several years, predicts Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe Media and president of SMG Next.

“At some stage it becomes more expensive to buy Google than to buy network television,” said Tobaccowala, citing the pay-per-click auction environment and the costs of re-aggregating audiences once reached via a single network TV buy.

Tobaccowala spoke about the challenges facing media buyers at an online advertising conference in San Francisco this week.

“Less and less are you going to have products that are very broad-based,” he said. “We have a different economic model for our television-based plans, and a different one for the re-aggregated plans, and the second one costs 10 times as much.”

Tobaccowala also predicts media buyers will simply have to pay more to capture people’s attention in an increasingly consumer-controlled culture.

“The cost of getting someone’s attention is going to go up much, much more,” he warned.

Here’s a related thought:

perversely, virtually free and infinite ad space is not necessarily good news for advertisers. As volume increases, the cost of being heard rises even faster. The ad classics ‘ banner, button ‘ have been stretched into 15 shapes and sizes, ranging from the ‘microbar’ (88×33) to the ‘wide skyscraper’ (160X600). But even with this new artillery deployed the basic problem remains: traditional metrics for purchasing advertising like ‘demographics,’ ‘frequency,’ ‘share of voice’ and ‘reach’ are becoming obsolete; so what if you can reach 80% of the males age 20 to 25 ten times a day for free if every competitor and his brother can do the same? In short, traditional advertising strategies for getting and holding the consumer’s attention may become as futile as inflating a zeppelin with a bicycle pump.