I am at the Interactive Marketing Summit 2.0 (Etkilesimli Pazarlama Zirvesi 2.0, link in Turkish), organized by Marketing Turkiye.  The morning’s highlight was a  presentation by Martijn Daalder.

For me, the entire morning was about emulating work, as we traditionally understand it (go to a seminar, have coffee and network, sit and listen to a few good speakers, and perhaps a bad one – usually the sponsor, have coffee and network, etc.), organized around a concept that is thinly understood by everyone in the room. 

One early presenter shared videos of people on the street being asked what they understand from concepts including, interactive and marketing. As you can imagine, the answers were skewed towards the clueless. The problem is, in an effort to tag and brand ideas, these concepts are floated around without much digestion.  As a person in the middle of the Web2.0 discussion since the beginning, I’d have a hard time articulating it.

Daalder made one remark that caught my attention. He mentioned that the revenue mix of media companies have moved from 95% advertising, to 50%, and that this is a trend that will continue.  When asked about the fact that Google, the most successful media company of the last decade makes almost all of its revenues from advertising, he countered by saying google doesn’t represent significant media revenues (as opposed to Disney and Viacom, for instance) and that even Google may go towards subscription-type revenues.

I could not disagree more.  As the price of attention goes up, the per capita spending on goods and services increases, the cost of content will shift towards those who’d like to command that attention.  I’d love to see my cable company try to charge me for premium channels in 10 years.

My bet will be with those who strip content to smaller pieces (microchunking, in Umair‘s words) and float it on the edge.