In case you missed it, check out the Mad Avenue Blues video on YouTube created by Terence Kawaja lamenting “The Year The Media Died” to the tune of Don McLean’s famous American Pie.
As Kawaja (LMcDuff on YouTube) explains:
Mad Avenue Blues is about the media/advertising world and the impact to the traditional models brought about by the accelerating migration to digital.
And while the song reflects a lot of inside humor from the ad agency perspective, I think the points will resonate with many of us in the larger advertising and marketing industry.
The shift from old media to new media has been an ongoing topic for the Yellow Pages industry. We spoke at length about our digital transformation at the Yellow Pages Association conference in April and it will surely be a big topic again at DMS09 in September.
The song, with its oft-repeated chorus that “Tech has taken us for a ride, Algorithms got me cross eyed” implies that search has all but killed traditional advertising. This has some layers of truth – it’s not the whole story. And our industry should remember that we are in a unique position as both advertising vehicle and search engine. We started our digital transformation years before many other competitors saw the tsunami in the distance. That means that we have emerged with models to integrate ad sales, search marketing and print and online advertising in ways that provide new value to our customers, while also providing very clear ROI metrics.
But let’s not take it too seriously – it’s a spoof after all. I admire the creativity and wit that went into it.
The video has hit a lot of nerves, and therefore has been blogged about quite a bit, including Wall Street Journal’s Andrew LaVallee and BusinessWeeks’ David Kiley.
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