Not with a whimper but a bang

The term "tipping point" is one the most over-used and miscontextualised I see every day, and it is therefore with a due sense of wearniness and dread that I drag it out and apply it to a potential change to the US newspaper ad maket.

Alan Mutter today comments that retail analysts at Deutsche Bank are predicting Macey's will cut its US newspaper spend in half by 2008. He puts this in context:

"Federated and the newly acquired May Department Stores last year spent a combined $1.2 billion on newspaper advertising, making them, by far, the industry's largest retail account."

This is, apparently, 2% of all US retail newspaper ad sales. People talk of a "decline" in newspaper advertising revenues, as if this is going to be a steady, manageable process of a few percent drifting away every year either to other media or to the bottom line of the ex-advertisers. The possibility of a tipping point being reached, and soon, seems increasingly every bit as likely. There are only so many buying points - advertisers and media buying agencies who actually make the important decisions to commit $x billion to print or to TV or to online or to keep the money. As in any industry, a certain level of herd-mentality keeps them all pointing in rougly the same direction. And all it takes if for a handful of the big ones (like Macey's) to decide that, no, actually, the money's going somewhere else, and everything could, possibly, suddenly...tip.