Online Advertising Landscape Unclear

With a potential deal looming in the online ad space between Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Google, and others, buyers of online ad space should be, and some of them are, showing concern. What this looming deal shows is the need for other options than what currently exist. When a deal is made the options for media buyers in online advertising world will become a maze of solutions that may or may not be integrated, may make it impossible to do a competitive deal, may mean you are working on deals with companies that are heavily influenced by our competition, none of these options seem to be a positive development.

With over $25 billion dollars projected for 2008 online ad spending, I believe companies in the market to advertise need to start leveraging their own network of partners to create valuable ad space on properties that will help drive qualified traffic to their online presence. This partner network already exists and is already qualified, in most cases, as valuable to your business since they are considered business partners. While this won't change the need to still do advertising through the larger distribution channels, it will assist in moving a company beyond the issues related to a merger between the online ad spaces. Once this deal is made, in whatever format it takes these once competitors will need to merge systems that are supporting wide networks of users already. Anyone who thinks that this will happen without a hitch is just fooling themselves, so why spend heavily and take a risk on the current options when they are going through such a distributive process?

It's time online advertising takes on some new approaches before you are locked into a landscape that may start looking a lot like television, high prices, low visibility, high risk, unclear return on investment.