Jaffe Juice

Cover story of Ad Age: McKinsey Study Predicts Continuing Decline in TV Selling Power

Read it and weep (with tears of joy or sorrow)

• by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990
• real ad spending on prime-time broadcast TV has increased over last decade by about 40% even as viewers have dropped almost 50%
• (Teens) spend less than half as much time watching TV as typical adults do. Teens also spend 600% more time online, surfing the web.

...but really this is what is comes down to: the so-called Catch-22 of so-called limited online inventory and so-called fragmented audiences which "will keep TV in booming business for the next several years."

In other words, if I'm reading this right...we're saying keep your money in TV because we don't know where else to put it and/or there's no better alternative. This is just plain bullshit. According to a specialist at McKinsey, the reason not to shift up to 30% of TV dollars to the Web would be because there's no room.

Look. It's late at night and I'm feeling crabby, so to do all of us a favor, I'm just going to politely disagree with all the respect in the world based on the grounds that the online opportunity does not equal buying out ESPN Motion's 30-second slots or Yahoo's homepages.

There is a world of untapped opportunity right now - prime for big thinkers, risk takers, creative visionaries and budgets in search of a new home. It's time to open your eyes, open your ears, open your minds and open your purse-strings.

...but then again, if you're reading Jaffe Juice you already know this and I'm just venting to the choir, aren't I?