Leading National Advertisers are leaders in outspending, not outsmarting

Ad Age just released their annual Leading National Advertisers report and I always scrutinize this to see who's who in the new marketing zoo.

• What caught my eye this year was this chart (you can click to view it a little clearer) which shows ad spending totals by media.

Now there are a few caveats here (see expanded post)

...but what struck me in this analysis (2005 versus 2004 and Top 100 LNA's versus all spending) was the extent to which the so-called leaders are in fact not. Take interactive for example:

• Interactive grew from 2.4% to 2.6% of budget from 2004 to 2005 amongst the Top 100 LNA's. However, "Internet" grew from 2.8% to 3.1% amongst all LNA's during the same period. The difference is somewhat more pronounced when you factor the Top 100 LNA data into the overall averages.
• Television of all shapes and forms (network, spot, syndicated, cable network, cable local spot) dropped (yes it did drop) from 35.3% to 34.5% (a 2% decrease)
• As a % of total measured media, that's 57% of total (I guess it would be "paid media")

I could have my math horribly screwed up, but ultimately what I see shows an acute lack of leadership, openness to experimentation, ability to change, both on behalf of the top 100 LNA's (our so-called blue-chip leadership), as well as from the companies that track their spending sprees.

Am I missing anything here? Do the caveats below reveal any new insights/reinforcing or contradicting evidence?

Caveats

1) The definitions of measured versus unmeasured are important. Unmeasured in particular refers to direct mail, sales promotion, co-op spending, couponing, catalogs, farm publications (?) and special events, to name a few...in other words, this is the illustrious "other" category

2) I'm not sure what to name a few means, but I'm wondering where social media, mobile and gaming would fall...

3) The TNS Media Intelligence numbers certainly validate the "Life after the 30-second spot" hypothesis, demonstrating a measured:unmeasured ration of almost 1:1. It also points to why we continue to see the supply/demand for channel neutral planning

4) I recall some debate over the TNS definition for Interactive and as I recall, it does not include certain elements of search...in which case would make the whole analysis pretty meaningless.