(ME)dia - The Age Of Personalized Media Consumption

Do-It-Yourself, On-Demand Programming Shifts Power To The Consumer

By David Miranda

Today everybody is their own personal media mogul. We are all our own managing editor for our news (myCNN, myYahoo), TV programmers (Tivo), personalized music labels (iPods) and film festivals (YouTube), media distribution channels (MySpace) and commentators (blogs). We can even create our own virtual reality (Second Life).

Media consumption, which used to be time and device specific, is now time and device agnostic, i.e. consume anything, anytime, anywhere, on any device.

It is the age of (ME)dia.

This has made the lives of marketers miserable. How do you market to millions of MEs each with their own personalized media consumption patterns across many channels? The answer is not easily. Like scientists searching for a cure to a major epidemic, experiments on various cures to the problem are many but with mixed results. Each experiment is given its own name, i.e. behavioral targeting, search engine optimization, engagement, one-to-one and integrated marketing, etc., etc.

The findings - promising results, hopeful outcomes, no cure.

Why? Many times in the past, the problem in dealing with the new is trying to solve it with the old. When television was in its infancy, early programming was former radio shows in front of a camera. Why? Radio executives owned the new television networks. TV eventually found the right formula and prospered. There have been some examples in more recent history. AOL missed its chance to dominate the Internet and become eBay, MySpace, YouTube, and Google all wrapped into one. At its zenith, it had over 32 million subscribers.

The age of (ME)dia requires new thinking for new times. Past success is not an indicator of future success. Ask executives at broadcast television networks, local newspapers, yellow page directories, terrestial radio stations, retail books and record stores, etc.

The lesson is this - (ME)dia is here to stay. The consumer of media is in the driver's seat. Find new solutions not retreaded ones. Ambush marketing does not work anymore. More does not work anymore.

What does work? Get to know your target audience from the bottom up - not top down. Find your audience. Observe how they naturally aggregate.

(ME)dia-ize your strategy.

TIVO For The Web? Protection Against Weapons Of Distraction

Will The Web Have An Ad-Skipping, Ad-Zapping Technology?

By David Miranda

I was minding my own business (or at least I thought I was) online visiting a number of my bookmarked sites as well as a few others visited for the first time. Then it started. The relentless onslaught of advertising - banners, skycrapers, sponsored links, auto-play audio and videos (with pre and post roll ads), floating ads, pop up and pop under ads, flash ads, expanding ads, etc. etc.

Some of the videos and audio, I could not stop and they even continued to play beneath the page I was viewing. As I scrambled to find the elusive close button or my volume button, I got increasingly irritated at a combination of perceived responsible parties - the advertiser, their agency, the publisher, and the ad network. I was trying to enjoy my time online and was relentless ambushed by weapons of distraction.

Is it any wonder that click through rates for online ads is like .001%. Is the other 99.999% telling us something. The online ad industry talks about engagement and behavioral targeting to provide contextual ads to the right audience. Let's call it what it is - ambush marketing.

Will someone invent a TIVO for the Web? I'd say it's a certainty. Will consumers embrace such a service? Little doubt. What would be the impact of a Web TIVO to the medium? Devastating.

What's the solution to head this off? Online advertisers and publishers need to be an advocate for the online consumer. Eliminate things that irritate, aggravate, and annoy the consumer. Think long and hard about deploying advertising that puts the consumer on the defense trying to find the "leave me alone" or "how do I turn this damn thing off" buttons.

The options are "do the right thing" or say hello to Web TIVO.