Latest Online Threat to Big Agencies: DoMedia's Web Market for Local Promo Shops

(MoneyWatch)  Yet another weapon has emerged to threaten big agency networks: DoMedia.com, an online marketplace for local alternative media buys. DoMedia.com allows media buyers to search for street teams, skywriters, stunt performers, lightbox backpack wearers, and other weird media providers by city, at a single site.

Pictured: Segway riders carrying Yahoo! ads, an offering of Street Blimps in Garden City, N.Y., which BNET found by searching randomly on DoMedia.

The site allows clients to find in a single afternoon the kind of local promotion agency staff that used to take days of phone calls to locate. DoMedia is one of a number of largely online services that replace the "centralized clearinghouse" role traditionally performed -- at great cost -- by large ad agencies.

Others include Spot Runner, PayPerPost, PayPerClip, Current TV, BrightCove, Google's AdSense for radio and newspapers, and, yes, YouTube, which all now offer cheap, fast, online commercial creation, media placement and public relations services without the need for a traditional full-service agency. These small, nimble services aren't without their problems, of course. (Spot Runner, for one, is struggling; and online product placement service Media Matchmaker seems to have gone belly up.) Consistency of execution, quality of account service, billing transparency, creative quality, measurement feedback and ROI are all issues when you spread your ad dollars across multiple, separate smaller services rather than dumping them in aggregate on a large agency.

But they offer one compelling quality for any client in a recession: The ability to do roughly what you were doing before at a fraction of the cost. Worse, they offer your competitors the same thing ...

Not answered in Ad Age's story: How DoMedia expects to make money, and thus survive:

Eventually, the company plans to offer paid subscription services to extend the site's capabilities for buyers and sellers, said Laura Brooks, director-marketing and public relations. But listings and searches on DoMedia will remain free, she said.