A Decade of Change and The Emergence of Digital Media Analysis of Trade Press Coverage of The Advertising Industry From 2005-2014
A Decade of Change and The Emergence of Digital Media Analysis of Trade Press Coverage of The Advertising Industry From 2005-2014
A Decade of Change and The Emergence of Digital Media Analysis of Trade Press Coverage of The Advertising Industry From 2005-2014
To cite this article: Sally J. McMillan & Courtney C. Childers Ph.D (2017): A Decade of Change
and the Emergence of Digital Media: Analysis of Trade Press Coverage of the Advertising Industry
from 2005-2014, Journal of Interactive Advertising, DOI: 10.1080/15252019.2017.1315320
Article views: 1
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A Decade of Change and the Emergence of Digital Media: Analysis of Trade Press
University of Tennessee, 476 Communication Building, Knoxville, TN, USA 37996, Phone:
University of Tennessee, 476 Communication Building, Knoxville, TN, USA 37996, Phone:
(865) 94-5108
*
Address correspondence to Sally J. McMillan, School of Advertising and Public Relations,
Sally J. McMillan (PhD, University of Oregon) is a Professor in the School of Advertising and
Tennessee.
The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable assistance in the
review process.
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Abstract
This study uses Harold Innis’ concepts of space- and time-biased media to examine digital media
for 10 years beginning in 2005. Both syndicated spending data and industry trade press were
used to assess trends and changes. After the recession of 2008, spending for online media
surpassed spending on print for the first time. Digital was the dominant medium covered in most
years of trade articles; however, the coverage of the rise (and fall) of media types was not as
linear as was the actual change in spending. Additional analysis showed that trade press coverage
focused mostly on the advertising agency business and that digital media were more central to
core topics than were other media types. Concepts of time and space (Innis, 1951, 2007) were
also explored as overarching themes within the sample. Implications for theory, practice, and
Keywords
Harold Innis
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Time and space. The concepts are central to our understanding of the physical world, the media
of communication, and the tools of advertising. During the 1920s, changes in physics, media
technology, and advertising practice led to major changes in perceptions of time and space. And
in the 1940s and 50s Harold Innis, a Canadian political economist, looked back to the 20s (as
well as earlier time periods) as he wove together the threads of time and space in his analysis of
the fur trade, fishing practices, and media evolution (Heyer, 2003; Innis, 1949, 1951).
Innis’ examination of the ways that media are “biased” toward time and space was
influenced by relativity theory (Patterson, 1990). He saw the rise of radio in the early part of the
20th century as an extension of the “space-biased” modern media that tended to favor political
organizations and enable the kind of political persuasion that helped to explain both Hitler’s rise
and Roosevelt’s reelection (Innis, 1951, 2007). He idealized Greek civilization in which a strong
time-biased oral tradition served as a kind of “balance” to the space-biased written medium to
enable a culture in which both political and religious organizations could thrive (Innis, 1951).
Innis also traced a rising “obsession” with advertising that began in the 1920s with an increase in
the need for pulp to create the newspapers on which those ads were printed (Innis, 1949).
For advertisers, the 1920s brought about a need to rationalize time and space in new ways
as they were faced with buying space in newspapers and time in radio. During this period
innovations such as market research, the Audit Bureau of Circulation, and the development of
new cost measures allowed them to develop a new logic based on what they always wanted to
buy anyway -- exposure to potential consumers (Johnston, 2006). By the 1960s the role of the
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advertising “agent” in buying time and space from media outlets had become so ingrained in
advertising practice that it was the core financial model for the advertising business. The work of
agencies was supported by the commissions they earned by buying time and space at wholesale
prices and charging their clients the “list price” for placing their ads (Edwards, 2005; Holt,
1998).
The 1990s brought new disruptions to time and space. The introduction of graphical user
interfaces to the connected networks of the Internet made possible a new form of digital
communication that was not bound by space or time. Negroponte (1995) was an early believer
that digital technologies would empower individuals and social groups to bypass traditional
communication professionals to create their own versions of news and their own
recommendation engines that would replace branded communication. But, as Turow and Draper
noted, such optimistic views of the empowered individual: “often do not take into consideration
the industrial mechanisms that construct both audiences and the realities to which those
audiences are exposed” (2014, p. 648). Turow (2012) suggests that advertising messages
Advertisers were faced with an innovation that disrupted their worldview in much the
same way radio had challenged them earlier in the century (Barnouw, 1966; Lappin, 1995;
McMillan, 1998; Smulyan, 1994). Not only did the Internet allow “anytime anywhere”
communication, it also blurred the distinction between “audience” and “media” (Scolari, 2009).
In digital environments, individuals both create and consume content, and advertisers place their
messages online in ways that often funds the conduit rather than the content creators. These
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trends in online advertising are making companies like Google, which “serve” many of the
online ads, highly profitable (Farzad, 2008; Kohut, Doherty, Dimock, & Keeter, 2008;
MarketingCharts staff, 2015). But they are devastating to media companies that host
professionally created content and have seen huge declines in advertising revenue
advertising media planning could and should retain the “language” and methods that had
emerged in the 20th century as they incorporated 21st century digital tools into integrated media
The term Web 2.0 came into use in 2005 and was characterized by online venues that invited
user participation rather than the read-only digital publishing of the Web 1.0 era (Bulik, 2006).
The term “social media” also came into use in the mid-2000s as “a catchall phrase for everything
that the old media is not” (A. Fernando, 2007, p. 9). Social media is a term used to refer to digital
By the mid-2000s, there was a growing recognition that the Internet and related digital
technologies were becoming deeply embedded in common life and that it was important for
scholars to examine the many technological and social practices that have created today’s
“online world” (Haigh, Russell, & Dutton, 2015). A recent review of the advertising literature
found that in 2005, research about the internet surpassed research about both print and broadcast
media in advertising journals (Kim, Hayes, Avant, & Reid, 2014). By 2014, “new media” tools
such as advergaming, blogging, keyword search, twitter, and viral videos, were broadly
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represented in the academic advertising literature (An, Jin, & Park, 2014; Chen & Haley, 2014;
Cho, Huh, & Faber, 2014; A. G. Fernando, Suganthi, & Sivakumaran, 2014; Jin & Phua, 2014;
Yoo, 2014). By 2014, researchers were also beginning to recognize ways in which digital media
environments were creating new multi-tasking behaviors that could actually improve outcomes
such as perception of advertising utility (Duff, Yoon, Wang, & Anghelcev, 2014)
In short, the period from 2005 to 2014 offers a lens for examining the media environment at a
time when both popular terminology and research topics were showing a significant shift toward
digitally enabled interactive advertising. While some literature has examined the impact of
et al., 2015; Olmstead, Matsa, Mitchell, & Rosenstiel, 2012; Zavoina & Reichert, 2000), little
has been done to specifically examine how the advertising industry may have changed beginning
Did a major shift in “new media” begin in the mid-2000s? Has the advent of new media tools
fundamentally changed core aspects of advertising practice? Or has the addition of more user-
driven digital tools marked just another minor shift in a constantly evolving field? As Scolari
(2009) notes, Innis has much to offer to the theoretical field of digital communication. This study
will examine how the concepts of time and space, as developed by Innis use the “soft
determinism” (Ritzer, Dean, Jurgenson, Shaw, & Benkler, 2012) of the space/time continuum to
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Four specific research questions provide the framework for the current study and are
designed to help us understand the larger questions of how advertising practice evolved during
RQ 1 How does coverage of digital and other media types in the advertising trade press align
RQ 2 How central are digital media and other media types to the primary cluster of terms used
RQ 3 What overall themes were covered by the trade press during this period?
RQ 4 How were time and space portrayed in the trade press during the sample period?
Earlier studies have shown that the trade press can provide insight into changes in industry
practice. A study of advertising trade press coverage of interactive media from 1993-1998 found
that articles covered a variety of media ranging from the Web to CD-ROM and that those articles
frequently saw advertising as a key element of the financial model for growth of those media
(McMillan, 1999). Other studies have also used the advertising trade press as a way of
children (Asquith, 2015; Elliott, 2014), advertising and social issues (Moodie & Hastings, 2009;
Niesen, 2011; Russell & Lamme, 2013; Wilken & Sinclair, 2011), and food and beverage
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The trade journal AdvertisingAge was selected for analysis of advertising practice and to
address the research questions. While it is not the only trade publication representing the
advertising industry, it is one of the oldest with 85 years of publication. According to Kantar
Media’s Standard Rate and Data Service (2015), AdvertisingAge had a verified circulation of
62,381 in 2014. Readers of this magazine are primarily in the advertising, marketing and media
professions. It has also been successfully used as a data source in other scholarly analyses of the
advertising business (Asquith, 2015; Elliott, 2014; Klein, 2008; McMillan, 1999; Wilken &
Sinclair, 2011).
The EBSCO database, Academic Search Premier, was used to draw the sample. The database
provides a listing for each issue of AdvertisingAge and allows for a “drill down” view. When an
issue is selected, the database shows how many articles are in the issue and provides a unique
number for each article. The random number generation feature in Excel was used to select a
single article from each issue of AdvertisingAge. The researchers then captured all of the
information provided for that article including year, volume, issue, date, number of the article
selected, title, abstract, full text of the article, number of words in the article, and subject terms
applied by indexers. A total of 449 articles were selected over the 10-year period.
Table 1 provides a summary of the number of issues in each year of the sample, the average
number of articles in each issue, and the average number of words per article in each year. While
AdvertisingAge still bills itself as a weekly publication, the total number of issues per year
dropped dramatically over the sample period. This may reflect the challenge of operating a print
publication in a media landscape that has grown increasingly digital. AdvertisingAge does
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maintain a website that reproduces articles from the print editions, provides updates between
editions, and adds multimedia content that cannot be included in the print edition.
RQ1 was addressed by looking at actual spending and trade press coverage. The spending
data was drawn from the Interactive Adverting Bureau (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2017) for
digital media and from Kantar (2015) for traditional media. Media spending data was then
collapsed into four broad categories: digital, print, broadcast, and out of home. The random
sample of articles drawn from AdvertisingAge was used to compare actual spending to trade
press coverage of different media types. Two coders read each article and noted all articles that
referenced any medium and further coded those articles to indicate whether they included
reference to digital, print, broadcast, and/or out of home media. They had 100% agreement on
To address RQ2 and RQ3, all data from the random sample of AdvetisingAge articles was
imported into QDA Miner, a text management and quantitative content analysis program. The
WordStat module of QDA Miner was used to perform computer-assisted content analysis to
address those research questions about centrality of digital media and changes in themes covered
The researchers approached the final research question about how time and space were
portrayed in the trade press during the sample period, from a qualitative paradigmatic perspective
(Guba, 1990). All articles included in the sample were read multiple times. The authors
highlighted both the implicit and explicit references to time and space in the text. The authors
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then pulled together all of those highlighted references to compare and contrast emergent ideas in
Findings
The first research question asked: How does coverage of digital and other media types in the
advertising trade press align with actual spending as reported by syndicated sources? Two
Figure 1 summarizes media spending trends over the 10-year period. The two most dramatic
trends are the rise in spending on digital media (from 10% in 2005 to 34% in 2014) and the
decline in print (from about 38% to 14% during the same time period). The trend lines for those
two media types “crossed” after the 2008 recession with digital receiving 21% of media spending
in 2009 and print receiving 20%. Spending on broadcast media rose to a high of 58% in 2006,
but since then has been on a slow but steady decline ending the period at 50%. Spending on out
Figure 2 shows patterns of media coverage that are a bit more chaotic than the relatively
steady spending trends illustrated in Figure 1. But many of the trends in media coverage parallel
those in advertising spending. Out of home consistently received the lowest media expenditure
and is also consistently the least mentioned media type in the advertising press. In 2005, print
was the primary medium covered in media-related articles (appearing in 40% of all articles). But
just as spending on print has been on the decline so has media coverage -- no articles related to
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print media were found in 2014. Broadcast and digital coverage have more peaks and valleys
than other media types. But overall, the trend for both media types is up: broadcast coverage rose
from 9% of the total in 2005 to 33% in 2015 and digital rose from 23% to 67% over the same
Cluster Analysis
The second research question asked: How central are digital media and other media types to
the primary cluster of terms used in the advertising trade press during the sample period? To
address that question, cluster analysis was run using WordStat. The cluster map is shown in
Figure 3. The large green cluster represents the primary topics covered during the sample period
in AdvertisingAge. As one would expect some of the most frequently used words (and thus those
with the largest circles and most central to the green cluster) are industry terms such as
To specifically address the question of how media types cluster in the word cloud, black
arrows point to the words digital, TV, and magazine because each word is core to one of the
three media-related themes (digital, print, broadcast). Other theme-related terms are typically in
close proximity to the identified word. For example, the words social, online, web, and internet
are all in close proximity to the word digital. And, as shown in Figure 3, all of those digital-
related words are relatively proximate to the central green cluster. By contrast, the word
magazine is far removed from the central cluster and other print-related words (e.g., book,
journal) are also on the periphery. The keyword TV is closer to the central cluster, but many
television-related words (e.g., networks, cable, upfront) trail off into the periphery. Because of
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the very low coverage of out of home, no words clearly emerge on the cluster map to align with
Primary Themes
The content analysis feature of WordStat was used to address research question three: What
overall themes were covered by the trade press during this period? Ten clear themes emerged
from the data as shown in Table 2. In addition to providing a summary name for each theme,
Table 2 also shows the primary keywords that cluster together to form the theme, the eigenvalue
for each theme, the percent variance accounted for by this theme, the frequency of theme
appearance in the sample (could be more than once per article), and finally the number of cases
(articles) in which the theme appears expressed both as a number and a percent.
The theme with the strongest eigenvalue includes terms related to advertising agencies. This
is consistent with the focus one would expect from an advertising industry trade publication. The
keywords listed in Table 2 show that this agency-focused theme includes not only generic
agency terms but also the names of specific advertising agencies and agency groups.
The other nine themes include three media types (television, digital, and print), two client-
focused themes (automotive and consumer brands), three themes related to broader economic
and structural issues (advertising spending, executives, and business), and one theme that brings
together job-related terms, time-related terms, terms that address creative themes such as ideas
and designs, and superlative terms such as good and high under an umbrella that we have labeled
“work.”
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Table 3 provides sample quotes from articles in which the themes appeared. The samples
were drawn from multiple issues and years during the sample period and are intended to be
illustrative, not exhaustive. They also illustrate the overlapping nature of themes. For example,
the quote shown as an example of digital media also includes automotive themes. Both the print
The final research question was: How were time and space portrayed in the trade press
during the sample period? The researchers approached this question from a qualitative
Time
The word “time” was used 569 times in the 449 captured articles. Consistent with the industry
focus on “buying time” in broadcast media, many of the references to time were in the context of
television. One article noted that television began with relatively “long-form” advertising, but
over the course of decades, duration of ads dropped from 60 to 30 to 15 seconds. But by 2011,
advertisers had begun to experiment with time in new ways. They tried 5-second pitches. And
they also “embedded” promotional messages in headers, footers, and scrolling bars that kept
messages on screens during programmed content to fight against the “fast forward” option on the
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Several articles each year addressed what is called the “upfront” market for buying time
on television and cable shows in the spring and summer before those shows actually begin to air
in the fall. In the early years of the sample, those articles were a fairly straightforward report on
new programs and how much revenue they generated in the “upfronts.” But by 2007, it was clear
that the traditional model of “pre-selling” time was under assault. An article began as follows:
[T]he mania has already begun, as networks pore over how best to bring their
assets to market and agencies wrangle over myriad measurement issues, from
Then there’s the headache of how digital will roll into those complex package
This quote reveals several disrupters to the market for time. First it points to changes in how
television time is measured. In 2006, Nielsen ratings, the primary metric for television
viewership, changed to track not only live but also “time shifted” (also known as live plus)
viewing (Dumenco, 2006). Secondly, both the networks and the agencies buying time from them
were trying to determine how to measure and place value on ways that consumers engaged with
television content both on social media such as Facebook and Twitter and on digital platforms
Other articles provided information on how cable networks were using behavioral
targeting and sequential ad serving as alternatives to attract advertisers to their web sites when
revenue from sales of broadcast time dropped (Klaassen, 2006). Media companies later used
those same micro-targeting techniques in selling broadcast time (Kantrowitz, 2013). And
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advertisers began making their decisions about which broadcast time to buy based on levels of
By the last two “upfront” seasons, it was clear that the tradition of ever-increasing cost of
network shows had given way to a new tradition of decreasing advertiser investment in
television. In 2013, upfront buying was down by an estimated $1 billion over the previous year
(Poggi, 2013). As early as 2012, the networks were trying to enhance their failing revenues by
pushing “value added” digital content through something they called the “NewFront” season
Time, as it appears in the sampled articles, is about more than upfront or NewFront buying.
Multiple articles also focused on the need for timely interaction between producers and
consumers. There were also frequent contrasts between past and present practices. One article
that tied together these concepts was a profile of direct marketing legend Lester Wunderman who
contrasted “old” methods which separated personalized selling from mass advertising with the
new form of “personal advertising” that is evolving through digital media. He said:
I can’t tell you what a revelation, in my lifetime, [it is] to see us go from kind of
the horse-and-buggy form of advertising to the internet. It’s just miraculous. The
things we know about people, our ability to make messages more relevant and
The topic of time also appeared in the context of some print media. For example, one article
chronicled the decision of the Wall Street Journal to add a Saturday edition but noted that one of
the challenges was that many readers get their weekday papers at a business address but want the
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Saturday edition at a home address. Technology enables the delivery of a weekend paper in one
place and a weekday paper in another (Schnuer, 2005). Not only does this article address
addition of a new time for a print publication, it also shows the interplay between time, place,
and technology.
Space
The word “space” was used 829 times in the 449 captured articles. Many of the references to
space were in the context of newspapers and magazines. One early article used historical context
while also explaining the relationship between space and money in the advertising business:
The mid-1800s brought the birth of the ad agency business, with the first ‘agent.’
soliciting ads to fill their space and collecting the money. Francis Wayland Ayer
then created the ad agency as it was to remain into the 21st century, representing
Articles related to print publication, and selling space in them, were more frequent early in the
sample. For example, a 2005 article chronicled the rise of new magazine titles and included the
following quote from Peter Hunsinger, publisher of GQ magazine: “What’s happening is a lot of
one-night-stand journalism. A lot of people are starting new magazines to attract advertising, not
because there’s a real crying need from readers” (Fine, 2005, p. 51). But the economic recession
of 2007-2009 forced print publications to recognize that their business model was changing.
Print publications lost millions of dollars during the recession and most advertisers seemed to
have little interest in returning to the traditional model of buying magazine space (Ives, 2008).
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References to space and space-related terms appeared in other contexts as well. For example,
there were references to “geo-targeting” tools that track users’ actual location in real time (Patel,
2011). Bonin Bough who is global director for digital and social media at PepsiCo said: “We
know where people are and can talk to them from a geo-located perspective that’s a huge
The term “native” was also used in the context of the “geography” of media content.
“Native content” is also sometimes called sponsored or branded content. Typically, it is paid
placement of content that is made to look like the medium in which it appears. Often seen as a
strategy for “low-end” publications, a 2013 article announced that, partly in response to 12
consecutive quarters of declining sales of traditional ad space, the New York Times planned to
add native content to its web site (“Native ads coming to the New York Times,” 2013). Media
purist who believe in a firm separation of ad space from media content, depicted this move as “a
deal with the devil” and “destroying the village in order to save it” while proponents of the
practice noted that these “native ad spaces” are clearly labeled and not produced by the
This kind of “encroachment” of advertising messages into editorial spaces was reported
across media types. A 2006 editorial reported on survey findings that half of senior marketing
executives have paid for editorial coverage in print or broadcast news and that two-thirds of
consumers thought editorial mentions of a product had been paid for. But AdvertisingAge editors
criticized the “pay to play” practice and noted that “trusted, independent editorial creates the
environment crucial for effective advertising” (“Pay for play is bad news,” 2006, p. 15).
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Several articles also made reference to digital places and spaces. In an interview with
AdvertisingAge, Microsoft founder Bill Gates talked about how digital spaces were evolving
from two-dimensional places to three-dimensional environments where customers can feel like
they are “walking around downtown on the screen.” He noted that these kinds of interactional
spaces are fundamental shift from the “old broadcast approach, where the sets are fixed and
everybody’s got to watch the same thing” (“Garfield vs. Gates,” 2007, p. 4).
Discussion
Overall, four broad research questions guided the study: 1) How does coverage of digital and
other media types in the advertising trade press align with actual spending as reported by
syndicated sources? 2) How central are digital media and other media types to the primary
cluster of terms used in the advertising trade press during the sample period? 3) What overall
themes were covered by the trade press during this period? 4) How were time and space
As reported above, a clear spending trend emerged with digital on the rise, print in a dramatic
decline, broadcast experiencing a slow decline, and out of home holding steady in a minor role.
It is interesting to note that the point at which digital began to outpace print for advertising
While overall trade press coverage of media types did not show quite as clear a trend line,
specific articles did report on the post-recession shift to digital advertising as a cost-saving
measure (Bradley, 2011; Crain, 2009; “Glimmer of Hope on the Jobs Front as Staffing
Stabilizes,” 2009; Michael, 2010; Zmuda, 2011). This study was not designed to study valence of
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any of the covered topics. But a quick review of articles, shows that some of the coverage of
traditional media turned increasingly pessimistic in the latter half of the sample. Some headlines,
such as “Will print survive the next five years?” (Ives, 2008), hinted at a potential doomsday.
Others, such as “Guess which medium is as effective as ever: TV”(Neff, 2009), sound almost
desperately hopeful for the future of traditional media and business models.
The trend lines in Figures 1 and 2 suggest that money “talks” in a relatively measured and
systematic way as advertisers make decisions about where to place their messages. By contrast,
the trade press took more wild swings in coverage of media types with only out of home
advertising maintaining a relatively similar position in both spending and coverage. This could
be a function of the sampling method used in this study. It could also reflect the tendency of an
industry-focused trade publication to both “hype” change (digital coverage began to outpace
print in 2006 -- three years before digital spending outpaced print) and hang on as long as
possible to “cash cows” (despite the steady decline in broadcast spending from 2006-2014,
AdvertisingAge coverage of broadcast media was on a fairly steady rise after 2010).
The cluster analysis presented in Figure 3 provides a visual summary of key terms used in
AdvertisingAge throughout the sample period. It also illustrates relatively centrality of key media
terms. As one would expect from the coverage summary presented in Figure 2, broadcast and
digital received more coverage and are closer to the “central cluster” of words than are print
media. And the marginal role of outdoor media is also confirmed as no terms directly related to
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It is interesting to see that the words surrounding digital include other related terms such as
online and social. In addition, key business terms, such as revenue, ads, and marketers appear
nearby. Television is by far the dominant broadcast medium and appears fairly close to the
central word cluster. Other television terms such as show and director appear nearby. But, as
noted earlier, many TV terms (e.g., network, commercial, and ratings) are far from the central
core as is radio.
Magazines, books, and journals all appear at the periphery of the word cloud. This
marginalization of print media is also evident in the thematic analysis presented in Table 2. The
print theme explains the least in terms of variance among the 10 identified themes and appeared
in less than half of all articles. Television is the dominant media-related theme in terms of
eigenvalue, but it appears in slight less than half of the articles whereas digital has a lower
eigenvalue but appears in almost 70% of the articles. This suggests that digital media has become
pervasive in articles on a broad range of topics whereas articles about television are more
focused on that specific medium rather than on broader advertising topics. Advertising spending
almost always focuses on media buying and selling. Thus it is interesting to note that this is the
As noted earlier, the dominant theme in terms eigenvalue is agencies. This theme appeared in
almost 73% of all articles and often appeared more than once in articles. This is not surprising
given the target audience of AdvertisingAge. Other themes such as work, executives, and
business also directly touch people who are working in the advertising business. While the
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consumer brands, the sampled articles clearly have a stronger agency focus.
Finally, in returning to Innis’ ideas of space and time “bias” in communication, the
qualitative examination of content related to time and space revealed several interesting trends.
Innis observed that media evolution tended to favor space-biased media that enable bureaucratic
structures, speed up the process of communication, and minimize oral traditions. He idealized
the classical Greek period and suggested that it was the counterbalance of “time-biased” oral
culture and “space-biased” writing tools that enabled that civilization to flourish (Innis, 1951).
The text analyzed in this study, supports Innis’ prediction that media would continue to evolve
into tools that minimize time. But digital media have also dramatically changed notions of
space.
There may be a resurgence of “oral cultures” online as individuals have the opportunity to use
social media tools to update their friends and family about the every-day aspects of their lives --
a practice that Innis associated with time-biased media that required people to be co-located for
this type of communication (Innis, 1951). But as Turow (2012) noted, these interpersonal
“places” have evolved in a way that privileges commercial structures of media and marketing
organizations. Both the trade press (Kimmel, 2006) and earlier academic research (McMillan,
2010) suggest that consumers are fighting to keep advertisers out of their personal spaces. But
industry giants like Facebook have the muscle to fight back (Delo, 2012).
Advertisers may acknowledge that they need to engage in dialogue (Bloom, 2006; Lico, 2008).
They may also recognize that consumers are empowered to use search tools to express interest
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(Bloom, 2005), blogs to express opinions (Sanders, 2005), and recommendation tools to express
satisfaction (Bloom, 2006). But in the context of the advertising trade press, all of that dialogue
is in service of commerce. This does not mean that citizens aren’t using digital dialogue tools in
non-commercial ways. But this sample suggests that marketers are trying to find ways to
“monetize” dialogue.
news content, seems to be in danger of becoming marginalized. Why should a retailer buy
advertising space in a local paper if consumers can receive targeted messages on their mobile
devices as they are walking past a retail store? Why should retailers have stores at all if
consumers can digitally walk through a 3-D environment made up of all of the retailers who
carry merchandise of interest to them? This environment has come to be called u-commerce
(with “u” indicating ubiquitous) and McGuigan and Manzerolle (2015) note:
medium theory and political economy. The work of Harold Innis is uniquely
McGuigan and Manzerolle note that the evolution of mobile computing devices is central to the
development of u-commerce which removes all the friction of time and space from marketplace
interactions.
As we move into a new era of communication tools, there has often been confusion over
what makes them new. Scolari (2009) notes that major discontinuous changes in media (such as
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radio brought in the early 20th century) often lead to semantic change in how we think about
media. Since the mid-90s, both scholars and practitioners have referred to the current
communication era as “new media.” What makes it new: hypertext, networking, interactivity,
social media, or is it really just about “being digital” as Negroponte (1995) famously
How would Innis see today’s “new media?” Would he see the capacity for both space-biased
and time-biased communication in the blending of the personal, professional, political, and
commercial spheres? Or would he simply see that digital media tools have further extended the
space-biased mechanisms that speed up time, weaken communities, and place power in the
hands of centralized and bureaucratic organizations? As Carey (1967) noted, one of the great
ironies of technological revolutions is that while they continued to have the technologically
driven characteristics of space-biased media, they served to reverse relations between space and
time.
seems like an ironic twist of language, spatially biased media obliterate space
Have digital technologies obliterated both time and space? From an advertiser and content
creator perspective, data reviewed in this study suggest major shifts may be occurring.
Marketers no longer need to buy time or space in professionally created content in order to
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reach consumers. They can engage with them directly on social media and respond to their
search requests with targeted purchase offers. Content can be created by “amateurs” and the
consumers themselves in blogs, social media posts, and feedback left on retail sites. Both time
What will be the impact on society? Innis saw biases of communication as central to the
communication enabled the rise of regional and global political structures and ambitions.
Changes in media technology led to “disturbances in public opinion and political organization”
(Innis, 2007, p. 187). And Innis also saw technological change in communication as being a
central factor to his belief that “every civilization has its own method of suicide” (Innis, 2007,
p. 141). Will digital communication tools be a form of suicide for civilization as we know it?
That is a question beyond the scope of the current study, but one that is clearly intertwined with
the concepts presented here. During the study period and in the text analyzed, there were clear
indications that digital communication tools were beginning to change the political process. The
United States election cycle of 2016 will undoubtedly be heavily examined in that context.
Implications
This study has illustrated the potential usefulness of the work of Innis in helping to shape an
understanding of media evolution. While the work of Innis informed Marshall McLuhan and
provided the underpinnings of medium theory, relatively few researchers have specifically
looked to Innis’ work in “space” and “time” to help us understand the digital world that
transcends both space and time (Buxton & Acland, 1999; Compton & Comor, 2007; Lazaroiu,
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2009; McGuigan & Manzerolle, 2015; Mullen, 2008; Pietrzyk, 2012; Widder, 2015). This paper
suggests that such work should be continued and that understanding of space and time is also of
critical importance to mass media practitioners who are seeing major disruptions in their space-
time world.
For advertising practitioners, this research study suggests it is important that advertising
professionals seek a broad range of inputs to understand their environment. If they depend on a
single print trade publication, they might see a world that is agency centric, that virtually ignores
consumers, and that has come to focus almost all discussions of media into two categories
(digital and broadcast). Advertising professionals could also see a world that is “shrinking.”
AdvertisingAge has shrunk from 51 issues with an average of 58.29 articles per issue in 2005 to
25 issues with an average of 41.00 articles per issue in 2014. It’s also important to note that print
content (which was used for purposes in this study) could have been shifted to online articles and
content housed behind a pay wall on the adage.com website. A trend that further illustrates issues
For educators, this study is a reminder that media history remains an important bedrock of our
curriculum. While the detailed political economy treatises laid out by Innis may be too complex
for undergraduates, those students do need to have a basic understanding of how technology has
changed communication over time. This study also offers evidence that the trade press can serve
at least a partial agenda-setting function in helping students identify emerging trends in the
career fields for which they are preparing. But the study also points to the importance of taking
both an historical and current reading of the pulse of the trade press to help students understand
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the industry. It’s always important for advertising educators to integrate economic perspective
For advertising scholars, this study provides insight into the content associated with the most-
read trade publication in the industry. The WordStat module of QDA Miner was used to perform
computer-assisted content analysis to identify and chart key trends and themes printed in
AdvertisingAge from 2005-2014. These trends can provide big picture assessments of what
Investigating only one trade magazine may limit the generalizability of our analysis. While a
decade worth of articles provided fruitful insight for analysis, future research opportunities might
include expanding the years of study given that the publication is almost 90 years old. Updates
It could also be interesting to examine and compare/contrast how other trade publications
portray the advertising industry differently. A future research study could compare the findings
of the current study to 2005-2014 content in the other major advertising industry trade
publication, Ad Week. According to the 2015 Ad Week media kit, the magazine had
approximately 45,650 print subscribers in 2014 (as compared with 62,381 print readers of
agencies, marketing professionals and media companies/agencies read the publications to seek
information about industry trends. By analyzing article content of the two major trade
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Future research should examine other texts and artifacts that help us understand the role of
individuals and institutions in creating and consuming content and buying and selling time,
space, and attention in digital media environments. If, as Learmonth (2012b) suggests, we are in
the midst of a truly discontinuous media revolution, we cannot look to pre-existing corollaries
to understand that change. Rather, we need to examine “current history” to trace implementation
While both computer-assisted analysis of media content and qualitative analysis of text can
provide some insight into what those media are presenting to their publics, this kind of analysis
cannot give us direct insight into individuals and organizations. Future research should use
techniques such as interviews and surveys to better understand how practitioners, citizens,
consumers, media organizations, marketers, and advertising agencies perceive and are affected
by digital media.
WordStat proved valuable in identifying words and themes and graphical depiction of
centrality of words within the sample. While it is a tool that allows for exact replication and no
“user error” in coding content, it does not have a sophisticated user interface and is currently
Finally, this study shows that in the 10-year period from 2005-2014, digital media came
to hold a dominant position in trade press coverage and in actual media spending. While the
academic literature also has begun to broadly cover digital media (Kim et al., 2014), there may
be a gap in theorizing about what this shift really means in broad contexts. While Innis can
inform this work, and others have also begun to theorize about what it means to “be digital”
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(Castells, 2000; Haigh, 2014; Krumsvik, 2012; Negroponte, 1995; Turow & Draper, 2014),
more work can be done to explore the potentially revolutionary ways in which time and space
biases are leading to shifts in the media landscape and how these shifts shape our understanding
Conclusion
The 10-year period examined in this study shows some clear change, some stability, and a fair
amount of uncertainty in the world of advertising media. An article published near the middle of
the sample period of the current study attempted to predict the future for a one-year period. The
authors suggested that chief marketing officers (CMOs) would “use digital platforms in new
ways to make their brands integral and integrated parts of customers’ everyday lives” and went
on to suggest that “CMOs should select digital platforms that deliver high engagement value,
connect brands with consumers’ social networks, and provide value and relevance in the context
of each consumer’s location and activity” (Martin & Todorov, 2010, p. 61). The trade press
articles reviewed here suggest that marketers see the value in this type of approach but are still
struggling to fully integrate digital strategies and tactics with their overall media and marketing
The 20th century saw a move away from buying print space and broadcast time to buying
opportunities for target audiences to see advertising across media types. Media buying language
continued to include space-based terms such as column inches and time-based terms such as:30
commercials. But brand and media leaders used broad media-agnostic terms such as cost-per-
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Are digital media leading us toward a similar shift? As consumer interactions in digital
environments provide a wealth of data about their reading, viewing, and interacting patterns, are
marketers moving toward a model in which new metrics will allow them to “normalize” their
media purchases in new ways? For example, will measures such as engagement with brand-
related content replace GRPs? Will cost-per-click replace cost-per-thousand? Arguments have
been made for fully integrating all media planning (Cannon, 2001) and that advertisers need to
think beyond reach and frequency as new, uber-targeted variables are often available on digital
platforms of today. But will that integration occur by finding ways to plan for digital media
within existing frameworks, or will advertisers and marketers develop a whole new advertising
language?
Consumers read less paper (Starr, 2012), have shifted to digital news sources (Olmstead et al.,
2012), and are multi-tasking among multiple types of professionally prepared and socially
generated digital content (Duff et al., 2014). The sought-after audience of millennials, those
young people who are currently18-24 years old, is a generation that has grown up on digital
platforms and devices. In the next few years, millennials will join the advertising industry and
start their own career paths in a world of endless digital targeting options. By 2024, another
decade of change may result in a new way of understanding relationships between consumers,
advertisers, and media that erases space/time language in media buying and develops a new
individual/action language that describes new relationships between producers and consumers.
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