There is a very interesting battle beginning to take shape in the CPG advertising world. Three evolving advertising approaches are poised to pick apart the traditional advertising providers carcass (and the revenue spent thereon.) The three camps include:
- The traditional players disguised as new media players. Entrants here include quadrantOne and Yahoo’s newspaper consortium (sheep in sheep’s clothing?) As structured I don’t think this will pan out but will cover my reasoning and the capabilities in future articles.
- Approach number two involves moving traditional advertising dollars into new vehicles and approaches to the place where CPG dollars are spent, the store! These advertising dollars are not to be confused with the already large pot of manufacturer dollars spent in trade allowances with retailers. It will be a fresh infusion for brand advertising involving current and new in-store vehicles and technologies. The approach is early stage, but with support from top pedigree manufacturers, agencies and retailers. Their efforts under the banner P.R.I.S.M are ongoing and picking up steam rapidly. But there are some pretty significant unanswered questions. This too, will be the subject of future articles.
- The web and web 2.0 are also siphoning off traditional CPG advertising dollars. The trickle of dollars that began some time ago is becoming a stream as manufacturers discover BT and soon BT/contextual combinations. These powerfully targeted tools are receiving rave reviews for efficiency and effectiveness and are driving the transition. For instance Kimberly Clark spent 10% of their ad budget in 2004 on alternate media, including online. This year they will funnel 34% into the channel.
Two of these three approaches were threatening to join forces as News Corp. tried to woo Yahoo from the arms of Microsoft. News Corp., in addition to their entries in traditional and Web marketing has a huge in-store presence (some would say too huge…) with NewsAmerica and SmartSource. With just a few more pieces this combination could have ended up with a huge share of the ongoing CPG ad revenue running through it.
As it is, it would appear that Yahoo wishes to stay independent (and Microsoft might let that happen if Alibaba Group manages to engineer its own buyout from Yahoo.)
So it looks as if, those of us who are looking forward to the donnybrook over the carrion of the traditional media will have our entertainment.