Advertising Deflation

In a very smart post, Eric Clemmons argues that advertising on the Internet is failing. I think this is largely correct and is/will be responsible for an ever widening deflation in the value of media. Think about it: for years the adage was "I know 50% of advertising doesn't work, I just don't know which 50%." Well, Google has allowed spending to be much more measurable, so theoretically marketers should be able to get the same bang for much less buck for at least part of their budgets.

As for the marketing spending that is devoted not to people who know they want to buy something (which is what search ads are aimed at, bascially) but the spend that is aimed at people who DON'T know they want to buy something, that spend works great in media like TV and magazines but I'm not sure the web is as constitutionally conducive to it. Imagine if people were suddenly spending less time watching TV and more time playing cards. We wouldn't just assume an ad model would emerge to monetize card-playing. card-playing just isn't conducive to advertising, and perhaps a lot of web-surfing isn;t either.