WILLIAMSBURG,

Va. – We’re at a critical juncture in media history, one that is redefining the

landscape so quickly that we’ve obviously reached a tipping point. Usage of

online media has become ubiquitous and necessary, and usage of traditional

media advertising has become niche and optional. It used to be the other way

around.

A Borrell

Associates survey of 7,228 Small and Medium-sized businesses indicates an

acceleration in upward and downward trends for media buying. More have told us

they’re planning to increase digital budgets than we saw in our 2011 and 2013

surveys, and more have told us they’re planning to abandon traditional media.

Meanwhile, 82

percent of SMBs have established their own media channel in the form of a

website or social media page. We’ve found that 72 percent of them are

purchasing digital services to support those channels, spending far more on

those efforts than on basic advertising.

As a result,

advertising as we’ve come to know it is in decline. We found clear evidence of

that in IRS tax records. If businesses were devoting the same percentage of

this year’s gross revenues to advertising as they were 10 years ago, the

advertising economy would be $56 billion richer.

This year,

online media shimmied to the top of the local media food chain, appealing to

the largest percentage of local advertisers and taking the largest share of ad

budgets of any other media. It was a position held by newspapers since 1704.

Over the next 12 months, the gap will almost certainly widen to the point that

all traditional advertising channels – print, broadcast, outdoor and mail –

begin to look like niche support mechanisms to a local businesses’ digital

marketing plan.

We are

clearly at the end of Golden Age of Advertising. Both the present and future

belong to digital and the targeting capabilities it offers. We are witnessing

the dawn of the Golden Age of Geomarketing. It’s a complicated environment, but

the good news is that millions of local businesses are in need of marketing

leadership. Their digital savviness is lacking, as we outline in this report,

and they yearn for someone with a marketing plan that makes sense of it all.

For more information, click on https://www.borrellassociates.com/industry-papers/papers/local-advertising-at-the-tipping-point-jun-15-detail