The last bastion of competitiveness is local advertising sales. There's little being spent by local advertisers on the Internet. That's where local media have leverage.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The market for local advertising is in the billions.
Traditional local media are adding local search capabilities to their sites so they can share in the local search traffic and ad revenues in the local markets they serve.
Traditional media brand advertising is 65% to 70% spend; online, it's like 28%. You've got a huge margin.
If you look at the Internet, it's been hard for a lot of the traditional media companies to launch viable brands.
Local television is a slightly different story. It is under much more pressure in the same way that all local businesses are, whether that's a local newspaper, local radio or local television. But I think television in the aggregate is actually in very good shape.
New York is really the cheapest ad market. When I go on TV, I'm hitting a country. The market is as big as some countries, you know.
The Internet is king. Newspapers are dead or dying. Magazines are shrinking every day. Ad budgets are being cut. The bottom line is now the only line in advertising.
Businesses are not just local or even national anymore - good ideas are immediately global. So the market opportunities are much larger than we've ever imagined or seen.
Clients are becoming more global; they're realizing that markets are more interconnected. It's no longer the local regional clients buying the local regional flavors. It's everybody asking for everything.
Being able to compete for consumers' attention and dollars over the preciousness of access is a thing of the past. Everyone is using the Internet to globally market a product.