Friday’s Connections Planning Conference brought a notebook full of great thoughts, quotes and conversations. One quote, and actually one that wasn’t a original conference speaker line rather one that Gareth shared from a recent NYtimes piece, had me grinning from ear to ear.

In the NYtimes recently Trevor Edwards of Nike proclaimed; “We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive, we’re in the business of connecting with consumers“. Amen to that! How many times have we all preached about a consumer media trend, or recommended a logical creative experience only to fall short of sell through because it was outside traditional norms or “bread and butter” media.

The line makes you grin right off the bat, and I do relish the thought of walking way from the media big boys. But the more I mulled over it, the more it made me think of some of our own exaggerations about new media, the not so distant future of “traditional” and the elephant in the room about our business.

While new micro-targeted media, social marketing and less traditional options are interesting they shouldn’t be held up as panacea for our ills. Traditional media hasn’t lost all usefulness and in fact the opposite. It will become more effective once we reach a Visible World, “Google Tv” addressable media ecosystem, and people will be able to get the content the want on demand. I’m sure Trevor had some of this in the back of his mind when he was quoted… we don’t care where or who we buy our media from as much as we want to make sure its in places that what people are, is relevant to what people want, and where it makes sense for us to be. …hmm yes, connections planning? ;)

So (pardon the ramble), though we aren’t in the business of keeping media co’s in business, we are about staying in business. And truth of the matter paid media helps us get a paycheck.

While big media takes steps to to evolve it’s economic engine: Murdoch’s early move to MySpace, the financial arms race to win Facebook, Network video pay per download on YouTube, I’ve seen little big change on the agency media side. Omnicom’s recent investment in Millions of Us doesn’t really seem to cut it. Though for sure an industry worth billions of dollars can’t turn their aircraft carrier over night, even those that WANT to are struggling with how to make the turn without imploding.

The few thought starters that seem to prevail:

1. Generic talks by all about “pay for performance”.
2. Shops like Anomaly and Naked breaking convention by jettisoning the manufacturing of creative, and instead working an intellectual product angle and creating branded utility for their clients with a share in the profits.
3. Digitas and others moving to a consultancy-based, quantitative analytics and business modeling method along with digital marcom.
4. Others that are simply pouring cash into the industry land-grab for digital media dollars.

I’d bet on further micro-monetization of media and content ala the long tail, and/or revenue models like adsense will be a deeper part of the answer. Since I’m not even close to an MBA, business economist or financial modeler I’ll not suggest I know for sure. But I would like to have an open conversation with more of our business planner types, and look to achieve the nirvana that Trevor’s after for the agency side.  I’m sure there’s somthing more in-depth out there but I’ve yet to see it,
Any ideas.. or sources to peruse?