Three things had me thinking, as I re-read Old Media Seek To Know Google Not Just Fear It:

The genius of Google has been to couple search and advertising more effectively than anyone else. Its key word and contextual ad placements – mimicked by other Internet companies – have been nibbling away at the revenue base of traditional print and broadcast media as advertisers shift more of their budgets online.

And then:

In seeking to balance efficiency with targeted reach, advertisers will turn to niche ad networks … helping agencies reaggregate fractured audiences while not sacrificing targeted environments.

“Advertisers are going to look for filters that say what’s good and what to trust and not to trust…”

And finally, I thought of something I originally read in the old, bathroom friendly New Yorker (none of whose ads – alas – mean anything to me), by Michael Specter :

“We have to be careful not to rush from denial to despair,” John Elkington told me … He believes there is a danger that people will feel engulfed by the challenge, and ultimately helpless to address it.

“We are in an era of creative destruction,” he said… “What happens when you go into one of these periods is that before you get to the point of reconstruction things have to fall apart. XXXXXX will fall apart. I think XXXX” — a company that Elkington has advised for years — “will fall apart. They have just made too many bets on the wrong things.

“A bunch of the institutions that we rely on currently will, to some degree, decompose. I believe that much of what we count as democratic politics today will fall apart, because we are simply not going to be able to deal with the scale of change that we are about to face. It will profoundly disable much of the current political class.”

The only thing is, of course, Elkington isn’t talking about the collapse of the media at all, but about the automobile industry and climate change.