Mike Seiman's Blog

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the DC Summit Series, an amazing gathering of some of the youngest and brightest entrepreneurs to ever grace this world.  While there, I had the pleasure of hearing a futurist named Ray Kurzweil speak about the evolution of technology and where it will go in the future.  He explained the phenomenon of how technology generally starts off linear, and moves into an exponential phase, where it grows at a rate faster than people can generally keep up with.  I thought about this concept long and hard, and decided that it could be related to advertising in general. So, I did a little research and here is what I’ve come up with (this is in no way a complete history of advertising, just a few key points to explain my rationale):

 

1704 – First Newspaper Advertisement Placed

1742 – First Magazine Ads

1843 – First Advertising Agency

1882 – Proctor and Gamble Start Advertising

1917 – First Agency Trade Association Developed

1929 - $12 Million Spent Advertising Lucky Strikes

1939 – TV’s First Baseball Game Aired

1954 – CBS Becomes Largest Advertising Medium in World

1976 - The Supreme Court grants advertising First Amendment protection.

1980 - Ted Turner creates CNN

1986 - Needham Harper Worldwide, BBDO International, and Doyle Dane Bernbach merge to create Omnicom Group, the largest advertising company in the world

1988 - WPP acquires the Ogilvy Group for $864 million, the highest price paid for an agency

1993 - The Internet becomes a reality as 5 million users worldwide get online

1997 - WPP combines the media operations of JWT and O&M to form The Alliance, the largest U.S. media buyer with more than $2 billion

1999 - Internet advertising breaks the $2 billion mark and heads toward $3 billion as the industry, under prodding from Procter & Gamble, moves to standardize all facets of the industry

 

Okay, so now you can start to see how advertising and mediums for advertising started in a linear fashion.  I haven’t added anything from 2000 on, because that’s when it just starts to get crazy, and the exponential growth goes wild.  Think about how long it took for advertising and agencies to start moving when magazines or TV first started accepting advertising, and look at how short a period it took for online advertising to explode after the Internet was embraced by millions. 

Now, the choices are endless, between TV, Print, Online, and Mobile, then it breaks down to Video, Display, Search, Wap, Mobile Apps, In Game, Virtual Currencies, and on and on it goes.  Mix that in with all the choices today for managing your ads, ad servers, crms, optimization, transparency tools, online exchanges, supply side and demand side platforms, ad networks, and who knows what’s next to come.  I guess the overarching point of all this, is that the landscape of advertising is in such a rapid state of change that agencies and advertisers can no longer expect to be able to do it all, they need to start relying on companies that understand the ever-changing landscape to help get their clients' messages out to the world.  

So, I propose the new ad network is one company that can do just that, and at CPX we plan to make sure we understand every inch of the landscape, to provide our clients with the most sophisticated capabilities on the market every second. I could sit here and write a book about this concept and really dig into every last date to show the real exponential growth, but I have way too much work to do, and writing books is not my forte... but, who knows, maybe one day I will.