Two pretty interesting articles on Venture Beat about digital media and advertising changes.

The first, Beyond direct response ads: Three trends in the future of online advertising, provides a really nice taste of the volatility and rate of change in digital advertising. Then it goes into the natural evolution of online advertising, from direct response to brand advertising.

But what about brand advertising? Social networks and blogs have begun unlocking the interactive potential of the Internet, but taking full advantage of this interactivity and online communication remains a huge untapped opportunity for advertisers.

Although social networks have traditionally struggled to effectively monetize their inventory, the emergence of scalable, engaging brand advertising driven by consumer data could go a long way towards helping such large web companies make the most of their online audience. The advertising world is starting to realize this.

Three companies are mentioned leading the emergence of a new kind of brand advertising, but I think they’re totally missing the changes if they think these companies are leading any change.

1. Spotrunner offers cheap stock footage and a slick way to splice together and customize video to make ads.
2. NextMedium is product placement…on the web!
3. 33Across is PR for online influencers because journalists have lost power.

All three offer incremental change for a marketing landscape facing disruptive, reinventive changes. They’re boring and safe. They may see some short-term revenues from marketers desperate to feel like they’re doing something worthwhile, but they’re quickly becoming irrelevant. No one’s online wondering when the marketers are going to show up.

TV ads, product placement or PR on the web are just the same bullshit shoveled with a garden trowel instead of a backhoe. Behaviour data may be the aspect of the web that marketers get hard for, but people don’t care. They want to hear real stories from real people. They want authenticity and an end to the bullshit, no matter the serving size.

It’s that kind of regime change that I believe AdHack proposes. It’s also the kind of change that returns us to what we’re all already hard-wired for — people communicating with each other, no matter whether it’s on-brand or not. We’re built to communicate with each other. That’s the new brand marketing.

The second Venture Beat article, Digital Media is Growing Fast, Very Fast, covers a report and some stats from the world of newspapers. Quick hits:

• Digital platforms of newspapers are growing at a double-digit rate worldwide
• Digital and mobile advertising revenues are expected to increase 12-fold from 2002 to 2011
• Digital and mobile advertising revenues in 2011 are expected to be around $150 billion worldwide
• Wireless device subscriptions will increase threefold to 3.4 billion in 2011 (again, from 2002 numbers)
• The number of homes with broadband will likely rise 10-fold in that span as well
• Some countries will use the Internet as the primary source of news and information in as few as five years
• As a result of the above point, newspapers will continue to lose readership

Nothing really new in the numbers if you’re paying attention, just more numbers to bolster the macro trends toward digital media and advertising.

And, more topically, still no discussion of who will make all those ads when revenues increase 12-fold from 2002 to 2011. And, even more topically, how media will convince their audience to pay any attention to those ads when they’re just more of the same old nuisance costs on attention.

Thanks to Russell Davies for the title of this post, Dying like coal, not like dinosaurs, and the thinking behind it. Recommended reading for anyone trying to understand the changes going on in the ad industry.