Expenditure online is clearly in dynamic growth and most of that money is going to a handful of truly global media owners.
One of the very interesting things about the media owners in the online space that are taking the giant share of advertisers' money (and will continue to take more of it) is that they are truly international brands. But they don't feel like it. Their international aspect is both a fundamental part of their appeal and, at the same time, completely irrelevant to it.
MSN, Yahoo!, Google and YouTube are all global in look and feel. Call up MSN's home pages by country and you'll get the same branding, but in different languages. In the case of YouTube, one of the things we love about it as consumers is the anarchic way it is used in less democratic parts of the world, as an unprecedented (in terms of speed of communication) window on repressive regimes.
But at the same time, the global online brands feel completely local. Google or MSN's UK homepages don't seem American in the way that MTV or Time always do.
Amazon.co.uk is a local shop as much as a high-street shop such as WHSmiths or Waterstone's for me.
This aspect of www media brands represents quite a step change. Global media owner brands have been compelling before, but usually for niche audiences. So MTV as a channel brought together the music-loving youth of the world. This was initially hampered by distribution channels in a way that internet brands are free of. And anyway, when you bought into MTV, you were really buying American culture.
So quite a change is going on in media agencies around London. Their international departments are moving from just being experts in relatively niche target audiences. Increasingly, they will be experts in mass media audiences online as we move away from the historic indigenous communications planning rules by country.
This actually heralds a major change. As expenditure continues to move online, and therefore to global websites with global deals, we may find more of us in agencies are working out of the digital international department sooner, rather than later.
- Sue Unerman is chief strategy officer at MediaCom, sue.unerman@haymarket.com.