I’d planned a post on the shifting attitudes towards e-advertising (worth $21-billion last year) when I got a query from a Canadian dealer friend, still using traditional methods, asking pretty much the same questions only from the retailer side. How did/can you (the customer) find us? This is when I coincidentally started seeing H-D’s new second tier banners popping up on Yahoo.

A recent Washington Post feature summarized the latest look back on major brands’ adventures with web advertising. And the big news is, the biggest spenders aren’t who you might think: number eight Netflix lays out $10-mil a month to push those irritating popups in our face. So what’s going on these days?

The world’s biggest advertiser, Proctor and Gamble, doesn’t gamble. They know their audience, where they live, and how to target. So no surprise that P&G’s $4.9-billion ad budget remains largely in print and broadcast. The University of Phoenix, though, is based solely in cyberspace and right now is the biggest online advertising spender. Quite a contrast.

Major brands are historically familiar with paper and electronic mediums for display advertising. But for now it’s the search category – the paid listings that appear alongside your Google, Yahoo and MS returned results – that’s pulling the biggest bucks as advertisers puzzle their way from traditional to online. They’re unsure about what works and what doesn’t despite online’s onionskin ability to parse the metrics.

Coming up with an online strategy is proving more challenging than expected by those who assumed a straight transfer into the new medium. No major CMO is going to double down until, well, until forced to as a result of dwindling print and broadcast influence. And until web can deliver demographic specifics – or mind sets change as to what online can deliver – it’ll be a crap shoot.

These characteristics are putting marketers in a bind as they look to the past for answers about the future. A company like P&G can single handedly keep afloat a forest’s worth of magazines to spread the word, but more niche specific publications are finding themselves in very deep water as major brands refocus their recession budgets – as has already happened with the automotive sector in motorcycle books.

Traditional media will have to be part of the solution, transferring their audience knowledge and graphic sense to an online format. For now, most of the powersports sector’s early results at coming up with a web version of the print product range from mediocre to disappointing.

Print tends to remain stodgy and hidebound in a silo mentality regarding the migration of talent and production to a successful web product, and it has yet to sink in that the traditional physical handoff of content to a printer for conversion into hard copy isn’t the model for the future. Publishers will have to adjust their thinking and abandon the historic workflow that’s been used since Gutenberg.

So for now, we’ll see such unlikely brands as University of Phoenix and Classmates Online occupy leaderboard positions as online advertising innovators. But that’s got to change. And what about our dealer friend in Canada? Online marketing’s a bargain that doesn’t view size as an advantage. The road map’s clear. It’s up to the individual when to start the engine.