One of the greatest victims of the economic downturn has been traditional advertising.   As cash starved companies slash their marketing budgets, traditional advertising, and the media companies built to deliver it, find themselves in a desperate situation.  Even without the weakened economy flaying the market, advertising, even on the web, was already broken, and disruption of advertising and media was inevitable.

Traditional advertising, and again, even traditional banner advertising on the web, is built on distraction.  By nature, advertising has been built to draw the audience’s attention away from content, and direct it somewhere else.    So-called innovation in advertising has only served to make advertising more distracting. 

That has created a fundamental conflict between advertising and content.  Content must be compelling and engaging to continue to attract eyeballs.  Companies must continue to make their content that much more interesting and interactive to keep the attention of their audience.  Deepened engagement is now a critical competitive advantage. 

Yet, while companies struggle to involve their audience with their content, they continue to sell advertising whose primary purpose is to draw that very attention they are trying to cultivate.  Content and advertising, at their most basic level, are in complete conflict with one another. 

It is that conflict that has broken advertising.  It is that conflict that continues to threaten media.

What must and will change in advertising, and what will ultimately change media, is the ability for advertisers themselves to involve themselves with media’s content and audience.  It will inevitably take diverse strategies and forms as elements work for certain content and audiences and not others, but advertising with change just as the rest of media has – it will become participatory.

Advertising and marketing campaigns will be built on reaching smaller audiences directly and in an interactive way.  They will not simply try to blanket audiences with enough impressions to distract just enough people to produce some kind of ROI, instead they will involve those audiences in the creation, reaction, and spread of that campaign. 

It will be an evolution, but they will be changes that advertisers must make.  Just as interactive and social features are now critical to the engagement and success of a website, those same concepts will drive the future success of advertising.