I don't think they'll "stop trying to pay money to get their message to customers", but the nature of what they pay for will change. I've seeing big brands bur

I don't think they'll "stop trying to pay money to get their message to customers", but the nature of what they pay for will change. I've seeing big brands burning a lot of cash to get ridiculous any way you count it, be it eyeballs or what. But they'd still do it, just because it's part of their "budget". Even if it doesn't work, no one is really that accountable. They're doing what they're told and in reality no one knows what'll stick so it's hard to point fingers. That will continue for a while, but some people ARE seeing the writing on the wall, and even advertising agencies that are profiting from the current situation can see it. That's what I felt, and I could see the work I did getting less and less relevant. The move I'm seeing is not just towards brands realizing they're running a lot of fuel to move at a slow speed, but also towards agencies becoming more "studios" than "agencies" (an irony in itself considering it's the opposite of what started happening 8 or so years ago), and building things FOR and WITH clients rather than some on-off forgettable new shitty online campaign or "viral" crap no one cares about. A great site or application for, say, booking online flights does wonders towards a customer's perception of a flight carrier. It makes sense for Delta or Jetblue or anyone to create the best damn flight checkin/booking/etc app so people want to use it. So instead of spending millions in yet another online campaign, they can spend a portion of that creating a damn good app that will be with them for a while. Same applies to so many other businesses. That's the kind of move I'm seeing, at least in the kind of work I do. Advertising won't die, banners won't die, but they'll be the loan sharks of the web. Of course this move also creates a problem, like newspapers that insist on creating their own useless apps. But that's just to prove not everything fits into this model, and each business or brand will have to find its own way to actually serving their customer better.