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Yesterday’s BusinessWeek.com featured a section titled “Taking the Pulse of Marketing: A survey of leading thinkers, gathered to judge the advertising world’s Effie Awards, offers a valuable snapshot of an industry in flux.”

I initially found the premise curious.

BusinessWeek wanted to find out about the marketing industry’s state of flux. Specifically, how emerging media and Web 2.0 technologies are revolutionizing the world of marketing. (I assume that’s what “industry in flux” meant.)

To find out how TV, print, and radio ads have entered into this state of flux – and are becoming less and less valuable every day – the magazine asked the people making TV, print, and radio ads. The folks asked included top marketing execs from Kraft Foods, Home Depot, Yahoo!, and Pepsi, and agency executives from BBDO, Leo Burnett, Ogilvy & Mather, and Saatchi & Saatchi.

Please realize that except for the Yahoo! representative, all those surveyed make huge salaries to pay huge mortgages based on their abilities to deliver valuable and non-fluxing 30-second TV commercials and print ads. (No one makes huge money creating radio ads.)

That’s like asking King George III what he thought of those New World colonists and his empire in flux.

My assumption was that they would universally pooh-pooh emerging media and deliver the stock answer, “Online audiences are too small. The only way to reach the masses is through TV” – which of course, ignores the tremendous waste that results from this line of thinking.

However, it was the results, not the premise, I found curious.

42.4% of the largest advertisers (clients and agency-side executives on accounts larger than $750 million) who took part in the survey said TV spending would take the biggest hit in their budgets this year. While only 18% of respondents said TV would see the biggest percentage increase in their entire media budget. And many agreed that newspaper, magazine, and radio would also take major hits.

So, I’m thinking, wow, they do get it – even the royalty of the advertising industry.

Then I viewed the final question in the survey: “Name one buzzword you are sick of hearing.”

The top answers were “buzz marketing, “viral,” and “user-generated content.”

Well, King George III underestimated a few things too.