The Next Big Media Battle: Publishers vs. Ad Agencies | Post Advertising.

The media business has been in chaos for a decade, and there’s more coming. The next big media revolution will be an escalating and increasingly bitter competition between the content creators–especially newspaper and magazine publishers–and their former friends, the traditional ad agencies, which still create and buy most print ads for their clients.

The traditional ad agencies are going to lose becausecreating great, engaging content is emerging as the key skill in marketing. And they don’t have it.

(This article has also beenpublished on the Huffington Post)

This is great news for the news business, which badly needs new revenue sources to replace dwindling traditional ad dollars. But it is threatening to the big ad holding companies–WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic, Publicis and their ilk–which have been dinosaur-like in adapting to a media environment that has been suddenly and radically changed by technology.

Dinosaurs were replaced by mammals (including, ultimately, you and me) because we were better able to adapt to radically changed conditions after a huge meteor’s impact with Earth. The extinction-level event for traditional ad agencies is the ad world’s rapid uptake of the idea that original content is the new path to engaging consumers. In a world where brands need to create and own original, engaging content, it is publishers–the people who actually understand and manage content creation–who are best positioned to profit from selling content-creating services to their advertising clients.

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