The Teckki Says

Have you looked at your website on a cellphone, computer screen and gaming console? The Internet is becoming the common pipe delivering information to viewing screens of all sizes, meaning that you have to consider presentations for each format. This has profound implications of how businesses will purchase advertising, and even how advertising is prepared.

The ad world is still diversified where there are many mediums in which you can advertise on. Print advertising, while it continues to evolve to digital, still has requirements in terms of size and color to make ads fit onto its medium. The same is true with billboards, radio, television, websites and direct mail. As someone who produces content, I often have to produce multiple versions for clients who plan on using a number of different mediums.

The Holy Grail of software development is to write once, run everywhere (on all types of computing devices). This failed primarily because Microsoft, king of the PC world, wanted to rule this environment, and indirectly, all of the devices running the Windows operating system. No one owns the Internet, so the rules are dictated by all of us, the users. We dictate in mass by the types of devices we use, and the amount of information we access. Device makers, content producers and medium providers are left to play catch-up.

As more money goes to the Internet for advertising, your advertising providers will have to deal with a greater number of devices, and not all devices are created equally, or simply. Who is in the best positions to handle this? Ad Agencies, who already develop multiple media strategies for their clients. Who is the least? Advertising medium providers, such as print, radio and television, and many web development companies, among others.

What makes this such a problem is that many of us bypass ad agencies in favor of going directly to the medium provider. It’s a matter of economics. You have to have a sizable organization to absorb the expense of having someone else design campaigns for multiple mediums. But most advertising medium providers, such as print, are set up for those who choose to bypass agencies, so they have in-house staff, specifically orientated to THEIR medium. Everyone knows how to use Photoshop, but print people specialize in the print aspects of Photoshop, video people specialize in the video aspects of Photoshop, and so on. As clients began to understand and consider the number of devices their information will show up on, they will depend on firms that can do it all, and it won’t be media companies selling ad space for their own mediums.

For those that think this problem is relatively far off, I only need to offer up the Apple iPhone as an example. Apple has sold approximately 30 million of these phones in 2-1/2 years, and you can assume the majority are still active. It's a given you can browse the web on these phones, and your target market may well have them. However, if you have one of those gorgeously animated sites powered by Adobe's Flash product (most animated sites do since this is the industry standard), you can forget about the iPhone, because they won’t see it. If Flash programming is your website firm's only expertise, they may not be able to make the accommodation for differences in devices.

This could leave you holding a very big bag of air, waiting to pop with the release of each new hot technology.