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| Death of Advertising? |
| As attention spans grow shorter, can ads survive? |
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Sydney Burdick (Sburdick)  |
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Published 2009-10-16 15:13 (KST) |
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Advertising is as old as the human race.
From Ancient Rome to the Middle Ages to the explosion of mass communication in the 19th century, human beings have been, arguably, 'advertising' long before the word existed.
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TODAY'S TOP STORIES |
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| Today, however, the industry seems to be headed in a different direction. With the recent economic crash and the world transitioning to online communication, it appears as though advertisers are quickly slipping into fast sinking sand.
Suddenly, advertisers are forced to change their questions from "who" are we going to target and "how" are we going to target them, to what happens if we "cannot".
In her article, "Overload! Journalism's battle for relevance in an age of too much information", Bree Nordenson argues that consumers are close to maximum capacity.
"The information age is defined by output: we produce far more information than we can possibly manage, let alone absorb," she wrote.
Nordenson also argues that one reaction to the overwhelming nature bombardment of too much information is that we change the amount of attention we pay to any single thing.
"81 percent of young people engage in some form of media multitasking [a process of dividing attention] during a given week," she wrote.
Whether or not this will directly impact the advertising industry is still not known.
"The advertising industry has taken an unexpected turn with the emergence of the Internet," University of Wisconsin-Madison Senior Sarah Resimius said.
"They don't yet know how to effectively segment an audience. Right now there is a great amount of hype surrounding sidebar ads and social networking sites; however, this seems very short sighted in my opinion, as most individuals who use social networking sites barely even glance at the advertisements. We've simply trained our eyes to just tune them out."
Resimius, a Journalism/Mass Communications major, is not alone in her view on Web advertising. She confirms the fear most advertisers have today: that we will soon be trained to 'tune out' advertisements.
The United Kingdom illustrates the potential impact of these changes.
According to a Reuters report, the UK has the largest Internet audience in Europe, consisting of over 40 million people, or two thirds of all UK households.
In addition, said the report, the UK has the largest advertising market in Europe, with approximately US$4.5 billion devoted to online advertising.
With the world market scrambling to rebuild itself and as consumers once again have money to spend will there be a way for advertisers to efficiently target an audience in the future?
Or is this the death of the advertisement as we know it?
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©2009 OhmyNews
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