A shift to CRM and the Web according to Advertising Age

'Old-World Media Start to Feel the Pain' writes Matthew Creamer from Advertising Age in an attempt to analyze why U.S. ad spending fell for the second quarter in a row (a first time since 2001) :

"Depressing as it might appear, it's a trend you might want to get used to, though not for the business-cycle reasons you might expect...Simply put, American companies are shifting more and more marketing dollars out of paid media. You see it happening every day as marketers talk about things such as word-of-mouth and conversational marketing, the kind of activity that doesn't feed the coffers of media sellers or traditional ad agencies and hence goes unmeasured in bellwethers such as TNS reports".

According to Matthew Creamer something that was happening before, is beginning to show up in macro ways and he provides tangible signs:

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  "ROI-conscious marketers from Procter & Gamble to Jim Beam have been loud and proud about their efforts to cut back broadcast budgets and repurpose dollars to the internet and disciplines such as CRM and word-of-mouth, which don't involve any media outlay."
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  "The holding companies, despite being most associated with big ad agencies, continue consistent performance through these months of paid-media slippage and don't seem to be sweating it. Attribute all of this to their success over the decades in diversifying their offerings with things such as direct marketing, PR and, most recently, digital and interactive services. For instance, Omnicom Group, biggest by market cap, gets nearly half its revenue from customer-relationship management."

(link to the full article: http://adage.com/article?article_id=120490)