You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that those creative types based in Hollywood would be really switched on when it comes to new technology like the Internet. But they are not. In spite of a few examples, such as the Blair Witch Project, film makers in Hollywood have yet to exploit the Internet in any major way. This is made clear in a new report on movie studio advertising spend which shows that only 3% of their spend was on the Internet – this is in spite of almost half their audience using the Web as their main source of information on new movies. So what’s going on? Are the money men behind the creatives so old-fashioned they have yet to hear of the Internet? Is the movie industry so traditional and set in its ways that it can’t yet conceive of advertising outside newspapers and magazines? Or is something else happening? Chances are it is the “something else”. You see, movie studios are not alone. Many mainstream industries that target young people have yet to exploit the Internet. Big business can’t move fast enough for the Internet world. For huge movie-making corporations and other big businesses, decisions take time. But the Internet doesn’t give them time. As a large business goes through the process of making its mind up about some novel online technology, the technology itself is changed. Before they get time to implement their decisions about online activity, the Internet world has changed, rendering those decisions useless. The movie industry is a great example of where big isn’t always great in the online world. If they want to stay big, they have to think small and behave like a small business so that decision making is rapid, allowing for exploitation of the Internet. Without doing that we’ll be back here in a year or two saying that Hollywood is still old-fashioned and out of date.