Majority of advertising money to be spent on blogs/social media, not traditional media, in 5 years : Survey

Need further proof that blogs are changing the face of traditional media? This from Stefanie Olsen at CNET.

In the next five years, a majority of advertising and marketing professionals expect to spend more money on so-called conversational media–or online media that encompasses things like blogs and podcasts–than on advertising through traditional media such as newspapers or magazines, according to a recent study from the Society for New Communications Research, a think tank on new media.

“These are large and small agencies we talked to,” Jen McClure, founder and executive director of SNCR, said here Wednesday at the first BlogWorld conference.

She said her research group recently asked roughly 260 agencies about their plans to advertise and market in conversational media. Today, a majority of these agencies said that they spend about 2.5 percent of their total budgets on conversational media, but by 2012, they plan to tip that percentage to more than they spend on traditional media, according to SNCR’s study.

I’m not a big fan of ads on lawyer blogs but this sort of study causes me to sit up and take notice. Perhaps a network of lawyer blogs, akin to John Battelle’s Federated Media, or an information center/ community, drawing on aggregated law content is on the horizon.

This info will also not be lost on Incisive Media, the owner of ALM and all its affiliated legal journals. If this survey is right, we’re going to see more advertsing on blogs and new media plays than at the National Law Journal and Law.com in the coming years.