All in a tizz over TV advertising

Quick, Liquid And Agile, Marketers Look To Web For Post-TV Messaging
A media critique by Wayne Friedman, is a comment on the latest developements in US TV advertising on Media Post.
Friedman intelligently critiques what is happening with TV advertising spend and its migration to other media channels.
Mitsubishi has cut $120 million from its Autumn TV ad spend because it believed there was a better way to spend it, reinforces the trend of a movement away from mass TV media
The New York Post says

In 2003, viewers shelled out $178 billion for fee-based services such as cable TV, recorded music and Web access, reports independent media merchant bank Veronis Suhler Stevenson.
From 1998 to 2003, there was a 32 percent increase in amount of time consumers spent with these fee-based services.
During the same period, there was a 2.2 percent decline in time spent with advertising-supported media such as broadcast TV.
The 30-second broadcast ad has been put on the back burner as marketers use more innovative branding tactics such as product integration in movies (Coca-Cola in "Shark Tale") and video games (McDonald's in Electronic Arts' "The Sims Online"). But the golden child of the new marketing model is the Internet.
Online advertising revenue exploded to a record $4.6 billion for the first six months of 2004, up 40 percent vs. the same period a year ago, according to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Every year, [TV ads] have less and less of our interest because we're aware that it's intrusive, said Jim McDowell, BMW's vice president of marketing. We want to increasingly be involved in situations where our prospects invite us into their homes.

And so the debate rages. Friedman argues that branded entertainment cannot provide marketers with the crtical mass they need, as TV does or did, depending on which side of the fence you want to stand.
But it might be also that it is combinations of cross-platform activity that moves from an interruptive model to an engaging one which could see the break through to success that marketers so desperately want to see. It certainly is not in product placement which is as crude as it gets.
It requires something a little more subtle. Combinations of; CRM, entertainemt, infotainment, the mobile platform, experience or even converting the marketing budget to service orientated solutions that will create success.
Gary Hamel called it "leaps of the human imagination", we agree.