Maggie's Farm

The piece on newspaper advertising hits home with me. There are 2 former newspaper execs who live on my street, and both have struggled to find, or hang on to, jobs in the last 4 years.

Both have had to shift their focus to areas of media where I've spent my time over the last 27 years, and making a shift like that is not a simple task. The industry is overrun with former print people.

The upside is that startups are everywhere, and if you're willing to take stock options and a lower salary (I did that once, and never again), you can find work. The work is difficult and more suited to 25 year-olds with the energy to put into developing interest in a product that is hard to sell.

But some have started to make that jump. You do what you must to pay the bills.

The other upside is, as the article points out, that overall advertising spending is growing. Oddly enough, there is a link between easy money and ad spending. It's not surprising, really, but it exists (I did a study for a company I worked for several years ago that shows how policies like QE actually increase free cash flow, which usually winds up being spent on advertising).

Despite such a link and its benefits to my industry, QE is a dangerous policy that is likely to fail in the long run. But you make hay while the sun shines.

Advertising and inflation are inextricably linked, as well. Assuming QE leads to inflation, and it likely will (it already has, depending on how you measure it), this will increase advertising revenues, too. I entered the industry just as the high inflation years of the late 70's and early 80's was ending. Many old-timers lamented the slowdown in spending which coincided with the lower inflation.

And finally, technology isn't slowing down. Every 'new' thing is creating new advertising 'space'. I've seen companies creating Twitter accounts and selling the 'space' on their 'tweets'. Creative destruction, as Schumpeter would say, at its finest.