A VERY interesting article from Fred Vogelstein at Fortune:

Julie Roehm has more than $2 billion to spend this year, and the way she’s been spending it worries executives at News Corp., the Washington Post Co., and virtually every other media company on the planet. As Chrysler’s director of marketing communications, Roehm, 34, oversees a budget that Advertising Age ranks as the sixth-largest pool of ad dollars in the nation. She decides how many minutes of the carmaker’s commercials appear on networks and cable channels nationwide and how many pages of its ads turn up in magazines like this one and newspapers such as USA Today. Here’s the scary part: Roehm rarely misses a chance to talk about how delighted she is with online advertising. Last year she spent 10% of the budget online; this year she is allotting closer to 18%; next year, she says, she will allocate more than 20%. Do the math: In 2006 roughly $400 million of Chrysler’s money that used to go into TV, newspaper, and magazine ads will be spent on the Internet. Says Roehm: “I hate to sound like such a marketing geek, but we like to fish where the fish are.”

No wonder media executives are concerned. One of their headaches is Googlemania—Google effectively reinvented online advertising with the targeted, classified-like text links that you now see everywhere. Soaring profits from selling those ads have helped drive Google’s stock market capitalization to some $85 billion, making Google the most highly prized media company in the world. But while the old guard is keeping a watchful eye on Google, the company it really fears—and the one advertisers like Roehm increasingly love—is Yahoo.

Hat Tip: InstaPundit