Love that new show on AMC called Madmen. ( short for Madison Ave men ). The story of a 1960’s advertising agency pushing Lucky Strikes, Department stores, etc. Great snapshot of that time in advertising history. It’s especially interesting from the viewpoint of where advertising is headed today. Placing big buys on Broadcast and in Newspapers garners a big juicy commission for the agency. Yet in the new world of Web, not so much.
Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 highlights this dirty little secret, that some think might be true, but won’t be caught dead discussing in public.
Madison Avenue still hasn’t figured out the how to make buying new media as profitable as as buying traditional media, so they are going to continue to push traditional media on their clients, come hell or high water.
But sooner or later big corporate advertisers are going to wake up and wonder why they are only allocating single or low double digit percentages of their ad budgets to a medium that commands more than half of most people’s media time.
Read his take on the matter here.