Wow. This would be an epochal change, only it’s not really true.
Business Insider’s CEO Henry Blodget dropped a bomb last month with his “digital ad spending is bigger than TV” claim. His slide deck, called “The Future of Digital: 2013,” was part of a presentation at BI’s Ignition event, and has garnered an impressive 3 million views to date.
That’s a lot of people with a mistaken impression of the digital reality, according to commentary by Brian Morrissey in Digiday.
Morrissey questioned the validity of the figures Blodget used, and he called him on it. (Well, he tweeted him on it, and Blodget tweeted back).
It turns out that Blodget was using figures from the top 20 public media and tech companies, a select group to sure, and not indicative of overall ad spending data.
“For TV dollars, Blodget relied on the financial filings of Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, News Corp, CBS; for digital, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and Facebook,” Morrissey explains. “So basically ‘digital is now bigger than TV’ for a group of the market that’s not indicative of the overall market,” he continues.
Morrissey makes a another salient point, that the lines between TV and digital will soon be so blended it will be hard to tell the difference.
“Someday of course digital ad spending will overtake TV. Of course that day won’t be anytime soon, and by the time it does, the worlds of ‘digital’ and ‘TV’ will have blurred so much as to be hard to disentangle,” he claims.
In the meantime, it’s great to know that people like Morrissey are around to scrutinize the hyperbole so rampant in today’s heady digital atmosphere.
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