Another survey reported on by Mashable, "Contrarian Survey Shows Advertisers Ditching Digital for TV," shows that marketing companies continue to buy up traditional broadcast at the expense of digital.

Strata, a Chicago-based customized media management agency, polled 100 agency clients this month and found that TV is still the dominant medium — 44% of respondents said they are most focused on television above other media. That’s a 24% jump over the previous quarter. Digital was second with 21.1% while radio netted 15.6%, a 75% jump from the third quarter. The figure for digital was actually down from 26% in 3Q, as agencies expressed disappointment with digital advertising’s efficacy.

However, the online world continues to grow, as illustrated in a NYT article:

The number of people online naturally keeps growing. As of June 2010 there were 1.97 billion Internet users worldwide, with 825.1 million of them in Asia, 475.1 million in Europe and 266.2 million in North America.

Social media continues to grow at a fast pace. An estimated 25 billion Twitter messages were sent through the service last year, and the company added over 100 million users. Facebook also saw record numbers, reaching 600 million users. It’s amazing to think that Facebook started 2010 with 350 million users.

So, what gives?

Social media is still being proven out and soft metrics aren't helping the case. In fact, the best socmed case last year was Old Spice. And that really wasn't a testament to the power of social, rather TV. Social media was tagged on well after TV had made the campaign famous. And a coupon did the rest.

With a click through rate of .5% or less, banner ads suck.

And although search represents half the online marketing spend and is necessary, lets face it, search is boring.

But I think the most important point is being overlooked.

The mindset and behavior of people online is much different from other media. With traditional broadcast, we're used to the advertising paying for the content, so it's acceptable and in some cases, like the Super Bowl, we look forward to the ads.

Online is free. Advertising was never an integral component. And display advertising is super annoying, if noticed at all. Also, we tend to skim much more online, rather than engaging. The boredom threshold is much lower. So, it's very hard work to make brand advertising interesting enough to be effective. Especially when applying the typical constraints, sensitivities and political correctness that most marketers demand.