Has the financial crisis changed to any extent the meaning of innovation in the digital medium?
Wim Vermeulen: First of all, the media spend went down in every medium except online. There is a number of reasons for that and the first is price (in some countries, TV is much more expensive than other media). Advertisers needed to get their sales, and have been more attentive to the results of their campaigns, to details. If you see that your campaign doesn’t bring you the sales, you go somewhere else, right? And because the online is very countable, you get the ROI. And if you are a marketing manager and you want to spend €2 million, it’s time you go to your CEO and say «I am going to invest this money here, this is the ROI I am going to get out of it». It’s much more difficult in the traditional media to get that number, in the online is very easy to get the ROI. Wall-Street: How can you explain the fact that, despite being so countable, the online medium is losing ground to TV, from a CEO’s perspective? Wim Vermeulen: What’s the average age of a CEO? Around 50. They are the gener
