Digital Signage to Benefit the Advertising Chaos Scenario

The Digital Signage industry will benefit from the so-called advertising Chaos Scenario.

In an epic 5,500-word front-page article in the April 4 print edition of Advertising Age, columnist Bob Garfield laid out a sweeping vision of an advertising industry caroming toward chaos and disruption wrought by the digital media revolution. Boiled down, his theory goes something like this: The marketing industry is currently whistling past the graveyard and largely ignoring signs of massive, fundamental changes in how the business of mass marketing will be conducted in the near future. The broadcast TV model is working less well each year and will eventually cave in on itself as it reaches ever-fewer viewers with a fare of low-quality programming and mind-numbing clutter. Marketers will increasingly abandon it.

But despite their glitzy promise, the aggregate of new digital technologies -- from Web sites and e-mail to cell phone content, video on demand & digital signage -- lack the infrastructure or scale to support the minimum amount of mainstream marketing required to smo!othly sustain the U.S. economy. The result, as the old systems are abandoned and the insufficient new systems struggle to carry an impossible advertising load, is what Garfield calls "The Chaos Scenario" -- a period of serious disruption moving like a tsunami through the marketing business as well as the economy and the broader society itself.