Modern advertising
Imagine a world without advertising, it is simply impossible. Large sports competitions depend on commercial sponsorship and consumer magazines and website depend on their income from advertisement. Besides that, on a personal level you would not know what products are out there. In the first two hours of your day you will be exposed to over 250 commercial messages ranging from brand names and packaging to billboards, television and internet. McKinsey & Company shows in their 2013 Global Media Report that companies in 2012 spend over 450 billion USD on advertisement and that we will exceed a spending of half a trillion USD in 2014. For your imagination; If you would divide a half a trillion USD evenly among US citizens it would mean that everyone would receive a little over 1500 USD. That illustrates how big commercial advertising is in global media. It is an ever evolving business but there will be a change in how products are offered through online advertising due to a more recent change made by the Federal
Communication Commission (FCC), an independent agency of the American government, who regulate the whole telecommunication business including the radio, television, cable, satellite and internet communication. On April 23, 2014 the FCC announced it would be proposing new rules in net neutrality, allowing Internet Service Providers (ISP) to offer “fast lane” internet at a premium rate to content providers.
NET NEUTRALITY
What is net neutrality now exactly? Net neutrality is the principle that ISP’s and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and models of communication. At first it looks like a complex matter in which people tend to think that net neutrality is a bad thing but it isn’t. In plain English this basically means that all the data on the internet move over the same highway, without discriminating the content and that is exactly what makes the internet the open and free landscape as we know it. The FCC is about to change the current state of net neutrality in the US and it will basically mean that we lose our current freedom of the invaluable Internet as we know it. They say that the existing highway has to be upgraded to toll roads, where the ISP’s can now charge content providers for transporting their data across the internet landscape. While the ruling is definitely a blow to internet freedom, it also has several implications for digital marketers. Facebook and major content providers alike have made a fortune over the years through advertising, Facebook alone reported a revenue from advertising of 2.27 billion dollars during the first quarter of 2014. The Internet Service Providers now decided they also want a piece of that pie.
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