“The next big Internet race might turn the buying and selling of advertising space on Web sites into the online equivalent of the pork-bellies pit.”
I wrote a few weeks ago, following the Google and Microsoft acquisitions of DoubleClick and Aquantive, that the disintermediation trend of Web 1.0 — e.g. Travelocity killing travel agents — would extend to the advertising industry by cutting traditional agencies out of the planning and buying model. Indeed, now that an exchange model for bidding on open ad slots is beginning to emerge, the skill set needed may be more attuned to the CBOT pork bellies pit than the old Nielsen/Comscore driven model of ad trafficking used in the past. What certainly will occur is an end to campaigns and the rise of real-time trafficking, with ads flowing to properties that perform the best, and away from dog sites that under perform.
