Advertising gradually gravitates to Web 2.0

Newspaper ads and television commercials, as it has been established, are now a shrinking and less prominent area of the overall marketing strategy. What takes place elsewhere, to be specific mostly on the Web, is what matters more to advertisers.

It is not that advertisers have suddenly woken up to the potential of the Internet. They have been gradually shifting increasing portions of their tight budgets online for last few years. The growing popularity of social networking and other innovative Web 2.0 phenomena has only hastened the process of transition.

Their increasing dominance is actually helping the advertisers use the reach and power of tech-savvy users to spread the word. Smart customers are inadvertently doing the job for them, and at a much lower cost. This is allowing them to bring down the attention and thrust on paid advertising.

While more movie studios publishers and music companies, among others, are clearly trying to figure out the various ways to get potential consumers to pay for their content hosted online, advertising is apparently shifting in the other direction. It is not surprising at all that forecasts from PriceWaterhouse- Coopers are not exactly encouraging for newspapers and television media.

The research firm expects that both the print and TV media will suffer from ad spending declines in the range of 11 percent to 16 percent this year. Though even Internet advertising is expected to fall a bit, by about 2 percent, the fall is not so pronounced. Also, it continues to be seen as the future of advertising, the report points out.