Cinema’s comeback is a tale worthy of the big screen

When I was a young, beautiful marketing professor in the late 20th century, it was customary to show the amount of advertising money spent across the various channels in pie chart form. You’d have a big blue chunk for TV, another giant red one for print and then a bunch of smaller multicoloured slices for outdoor, radio and the rest.

The choice of a pie chart was telling. Because although there were small variances from year to year, in general the carve up of advertising budgets rarely changed very much. Hell, in 1997 you could use a transparency on an overhead projector (we did that back then) with a pie chart from 1989 and feel relatively comfortable that the proportions were still relevant seven or eight years later.

And then the internet came. And after that social media. Followed by digital. And the pie charts quickly turned into line graphs because shit was changing at the speed of light. Every year told a different dynamic story of the fall of some media and the rise of others. In less than a decade the whole media map changed. New kings were crowned, old emperors diminished.

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