David Teitler, CEO, BlackBox Media

People who live in the tropics like to say...if you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes. This is not dissimilar to the media business these days. Most rational people would have bolted screaming for the exits unless they are a masochist or they really love what they do.
Those who toil in the advertising industry are damned to a life of forever being challenged to prove their worth and/or be ridiculed as unnecessary. To an extent this is true. No one needs advertising to survive. You can't buy a peck of page views or a gallon of gross impressions. Advertising is, and forever will be, a conduit through which products/services are communicated to the masses in bite size chunks surrounded by content that they find entertaining or intellectually stimulating. Or, at least this has been the case up until now.

Today we find ourselves at a cross-road. Social Media has inverted the pyramid and is brilliant in its simplicity. It's just "conversation" with a history dating back to the cave men grunting at each other in either threatening or friendly tones. It is essentially a means by which affinity groups can find each other and babble for as long as other like-minds will listen in real time about common interests without having to be in the same room and having the freedom to talk in their personal time frame and pace.

"Traditionalists", as we might call them, on both the media and advertising sides are both excited and horrified at where this might all lead. Content providers because affinity groups can now find each other without their intervention. Traditional advertisers because they have been trained to communicate in staccato tones with a definitive start and stop. Social Media is free to flow, meander and evolve at its own pace.

Let's face it, what the hell does "Coke is it", "The Ultimate Driving Machine" or "Just do it" mean in a vacuum. But, given: 30 of sight, sound and motion...magic can happen, worlds can be created, and products can be sold. But set these phrases free to be discussed as part of a conversation that evolves as long as those participating want without being dictated to by an omnipresent third party ...how cool is that!

So, why not let the genie out of the bottle and let both media and the advertising that has supported it be free to morph and flow anywhere it pleases. The promise of a personalized nirvana where each person can evolve their own world shaped to their needs and changed at their whim lies ahead...almost like a media garden of Eden.

As we all know, the true nature of the human condition will invariably come into play. Blogs cannot live by affinity groups alone. Eventually, someone will want coffee and doughnuts with their conversation, and someone will be needed to provide them. Marketers are figuring out ways to almost imperceptibly "control" the conversation. The best examples of social media sponsorships to date are so subtle and nuanced that brand affinity supposedly takes place with the "sponsor" deep in the background or seemingly not there at all. At least traditional forms of display advertising stands up, punches you in the nose and says...BUY MY BRAND....and, at least you know it's there and what it is trying to say (most of the time).

But this is not meant to be a treatise on the whether Social Media is good or evil. The answer is, everything in moderation. In the old days, we used to define media consumption patterns in "quintiles"...the heaviest media consumers were the top 20% down to the lowest 20%. Directionally, Social Media, as an advertising supported "medium" is best used to reach Light Media Consumers"...those on the fringe who have too many and/or too intense interests to consume a lot of "mass" media. Marketing behemoths are dabbling in Social Media but need to tread lightly. Once the genie is out of the bottle, the promise and the curse is that Social Media will take on a life of its own. And, when it inflects to the negative, it is nearly impossible to contain without significant collateral damage. Just ask P&G about the disaster they had on their hands about 20 years ago when the seven stars in their logo were linked to devil worship. I cringe to think if that happened today. I feel the risk of Social Media as an ad supported model outweighs the benefit outside of Public Service functions, which limits its scope.

But what does this mean for the future of online display advertising? Online still only accounts for maybe 15% of total advertising at best. A good chunk of that being text based SEM, where unless $1.00 earns you $2.00 RIGHT NOW, you're thrown out with yesterday's trash. The DR business will forever have a place in our society but god helps us if it takes the place of display advertising. What a grey world that will be.

The future does not belong to SEM. It will lead and perhaps completely subsume other forms of Direct Marketing simply because it's more efficient and that is DR's sole criterion for success. But, at some point, once every algorithm and CTR is ground into dust, devoid of meaning and value, where do you go from there?

Social Media will play a roll...perhaps a large one but it will continue to be like juggling nitro glycerin. There will always be a "Handle with Caution" sign on it that will keep it from reaching its full potential.

On the other hand, there will forever be a need for consumers to make direct comparisons between Tide and Cheer, Mercedes and BMW, Master Card and VISA. In this regard, I place online display advertising in the same context as the: 30 TV and radio spot and 4C magazine and even a 4C newspaper page.

Display advertising is, at its essence, a mass communication tool which, done well, builds affinity through product differentiation in a non-cluttered well edited, original-production entertainment environment.

The economy is both converging and collapsing at the same time and it's doubtful that anything will come out the other side unscathed. Display Advertising will be no exception.

But the incessant drum beat of accountability is not a product of this most recent economic downturn. Spurred on by their clients, agencies have pushed the concept of media as commodity to its limit. Starved of resources, magazines have started looking more like catalogues with editorial indistinguishable from advertising while original programming on TV is becoming an oxymoron. .

The pendulum started to swing towards accountability way back when the accountants like Martin Sorrell ripped the agency world away from creatives like David Ogilvy. Since business is cyclical, I have to feel the pendulum will start to swing back into balance where quality (brand) and quantity (commerce) come to share the stage more equally.

If (a big if) we learn from this experience and wean ourselves away from our CTR fixation and reliance on "spank the monkey" creative, online display advertising will not only survive but thrive once we come out of the other side of this miasma.

We continue to find new ways to compete more effectively for market share with traditional media sources...which, as alluded to earlier, accounts for about 90% of the total. A less cluttered editorial environment and more tastefully done rich media applications will serve to limit inventory availability and increase CPMs to a level that will far outweigh keeping tertiary ad units and attract more brand dollars to our space. Innovations in cloud computing along with the growing ubiquity of broadband will help build the scale necessary to compete more effectively against traditional media for share of market.

And, ONLY with our branding chops firmly established, do we pull out our ace in the hole... accountability. To date, no traditional media form dared address the accountability issue because they know the answer. They will now be forced to in light of the internet's new found status as a builder of brands.