By Paul Thomasch
NEW YORK (Reuters) - It's getting harder than ever to score in the ad game.
Long gone are the days when a TV spot or newspaper blurb would suffice, replaced by a world where companies grapple with reaching a more diverse, less attentive audience chatting on cellphones, downloading music, ordering video-on-demand or banging away at video games.
"The more media you have, the more complex the challenge," Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group Plc (WPP.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the No. 2 global advertising group, said this week at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit.
"The more fragmented, the more complex, the more challenging, the more difficult," he summed up.
The shift in spending from traditional advertising space, such as newspapers, to new media, like the Internet, is nothing new. Publishing executives have worried about it for years.
But these days, even the still relatively fresh Internet advertising ground has been joined by still newer spaces, including cellphones, mobile music players and video games.
The fragmentation makes it tougher to decide how to spend advertising dollars, companies say, and makes it nearly impossible to reach the sort of broad audiences they used to with newspapers or network television.
Advertisers also now have to serve more markets -- particularly growth countries like China and India -- and the tech products they are selling have become more complex and difficult to explain. Continued...
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