Shifts in Advertising

Many companies are shifting the money they put towards traditional advertising (TV, newspapers, radio) to social media advertising. Many college students have seen this new trend in the media and have experienced it at internships. During my last internship I did extensive research about blogs and blog statistics, and also helped to maintain MySpace pages for some of our clients.

In an article I read today from the New York Times talked a lot about this new trend. It said that even though many companies have been putting money into online advertising for years, social networking websites are letting consumers do the advertising for them.

This changes things in the world of advertising in terms of where consumers are being targeted, but it also has been changing advertising and public relations internally at agencies. Many agencies no longer work based on commission (they make money when their clients do, as a result from the campaigns they design). More and more agencies are charging their clients for all of the hours they spend on a campaign, because social and online campaigns can be so much more labor intensive.

Even though this is information we all know by now, it's important for us to think about this as students. In this hard economic time we need to learn how to diversify ourselves from others. One way we can do this is by becoming experts in online and social media, because that's where the money is going.