Culling the herd; the stragglers will get picked off in '08 says Ad Age

One of the trends that Advertising Age writer Jonah Bloom forecasts for 2008 is that there will be a culling of the traditional media heard.

Even the quadrennial kick of Olympics and election won't be enough to hide the fact that advertisers are spending more time and money speaking directly to consumers or trying to insert themselves into word-of-mouth networks. Along with marketers' ever-increasing frustration about the opaque returns on their media investments, this shift already has caused a drop in media's share of the marketing pie and a slowdown in revenue growth. Factor in the rising cost of raw materials, particularly paper prices -- which are expected to climb 25% this year -- and the shift in major media companies' investments to the digital space, and you've got something akin to a perfect storm. Smart media owners will make the tough decision to kill off the weaklings this year -- especially as they'll know that 2009, without the prexy circus, could look even worse.

Other trends he notes are that

• boomers will be (even more) ascendant and that we'll be seeing lots more ads for "handsome old folk surfing, skydiving and generally having more hair/a better time than you."
• social networks like Facebook and MySpace will soak up a lot of ads while at the same time "gated communities" will offer premium-service business models whose major attraction will be that they don't have ads.