The Society for New Communications Research is a think tank on new media. They recently asked a couple of hundred advertising agencies about their plans to advertise and market in “conversational media” (blogs and podcasts and such). Among the findings:

“In the next five years, a majority of advertising and marketing professionals expect to spend more money on so-called conversational media–or online media that encompasses things like blogs and podcasts–than on advertising through traditional media such as newspapers or magazines.

Today, a majority of these agencies said that they spend about 2.5 percent of their total budgets on conversational media, but by 2012, they plan to tip that percentage to more than they spend on traditional media.”

From a post by Stefanie Olsen over at the C|Net Blog (Thanks to Kevin O’Keefe at LexBlog for the pointer.)

As one who has made his living from “radio spots” for 30+ years, this is hard to imagine. But five years isn’t that long. I guess we’ll see.