The way audiences use media has changed, but agencies' planning processes have not. Here's how marketers need to adapt for the platform-independent future of media consumption.
When you walk into a media buying and planning operation, you typically come upon a common operational structure. There are people who plan TV, and there are people who buy TV. There are people who plan radio, and there are people who buy it. For out-of-home, print and online, the individuals who plan the channels are typically also the ones who buy them. But, as with broadcast media, the planner/buyer is focused solely on his or her medium. Like the content they traffic in, they are platform-dependent operators.
This is how media has been planned, purchased and placed for a long, long time. In the early days, it made sense to think about moving messages to audiences in a platform-dependant way. After all, those audiences were using media in a platform-dependant way. When oration gave way to writing, people had to think differently about content. When writing gave way to radio -- thereby moving back to oration but without the need for physical proximity to the orator -- people had to engage the content differently yet again. When radio gave way to television, the same thing happened. When the internet and interactive media entered the picture, they represented a convergence of multiple platforms: text, audio and images.
Once a medium becomes established as part of the everyday lives of most modern people, the platform on which the medium's content is carried -- the vehicle for the content and the vehicle's association with that content -- also becomes part of the background of their lives. It's not the radio, television or internet that matters to people. It's the content those media deliver.
Today, media planners and buyers still focus on determining the right platform for carrying messages, the currency for placing that message and the metrics for determining the success or failure of that platform. The audiences that planners and buyers wish to reach, however, do not think of their media consumption this way. Thus, much of the planning landscape is being neglected by the discipline's practitioners. They end up measuring the potential of a platform rather than the content associated with an ad message. In short, planners and buyers are measuring forests without knowing anything about the trees that are in them.
What audiences want from their media has changed. The practice of planning for it has not. A medium is no longer just entertainment or information; it is utility and service. Search, for example, is not content, but it can be thought of as a medium. The same goes for software.
Audiences are focused only on the content they get, the utility that is delivered and the information they collect. The platform does not matter. It is only a part of the equation when the collection of the content is forced into the foreground in the form of downloading, recording or carrying.
The future -- or, should I say, the encroaching present -- of media is its platform independence. What consumers want and engage with is what matters, not what makes it possible.
Let's take a quick survey of emergent -- and already established -- formats of modern media that exercise platform independence. These formats demonstrate how metrics for media must be amended, updated or even reinvented in order to keep up with modern media and its consumption.
Utility media
As I mentioned above, what constitutes today's media is not limited to traditional content such as narrative entertainment or news. Applications related to the consumption of our media -- or the performance of tasks dependent on that media -- can now also be considered media.
Tools and software are an integral part of media consumption. And although the platform is not what is important to the media consumer, the ongoing success of that platform's operation is essential. Software isn't just for computers anymore. Software now runs everything from our cars to our TVs and DVD players.
Even though it has been around for some time, bundling is something we are likely to hear more and more about. Bundling is how the browser wars were carried out back in the late '90s.
The extant media landscape is a technology-driven place. It is also technology dependent. The applications that help audiences get more of what they want out of their media are themselves what audiences want out of their media.
Bundling can offer utility and facility to end-users. It is useful, less invasive and enables more efficient installation. From the perspective of the modern media planner, it can also serve as a marketing carriage for a third party that has a higher engagement factor on the part of the end-user. Distribution of useful software to end-users in a more efficient manner helps to lower the costs and friction associated with that software.
Software marketing companies like W3i are not only excellent points of distribution for what I'll call "utility media," but also great ad vehicles for reaching an ever-growing audience that needs applications to maintain or enhance their media experiences.
Widgets
Widgets are part of the above-mentioned utility media. Whereas bundling can be used as a way to distribute utility, widgets are manifestations of utility itself. Or can be.
Most of the widgets we come across are applications on Facebook that come to us as automated invitations for useless means of staying in touch with people. Karma and (Lil) Green Patch are good examples. But other widgets have more meaningful uses or provide entertainment value.
Widgets are becoming easier and easier to manufacture. In the same way that blogging tools opened up website publishing to the masses -- although some might say this was not for the better -- widget distribution networks like Gigya and widget solutions experts like Appsavvy are making it easier for regular consumers to find and install, or even create, their own widgets that do whatever it is that they want.
Allowing widgets to carry marketing messages, either by virtue of their utility or a simple branded logo snipe, allows those producing the software to recoup their costs. Such a model also offers advertisers a way into environments they can can't get into otherwise. Instead of crashing the party, advertisers receive an invitation.
Portcasting
"Portcasting" is the term I use for what in the past would have been called podcasting. Because the near-future of media usage is based on its portability, "port" is the operative descriptor for the media being "cast."
Be it video or audio, this kind of content is more and more frequently being unfettered by time and space. It can be engaged anywhere, any time.
Portcasters, such as Personal Life Media's Susan Bratton, offer a vast array of podcasts with a variety of focuses, all of which can be listened to anywhere, any time. Mevio, formerly known as PodShow, is the same type of outlet, but for video. (I'm sure there are others; feel free to reach out to me to tell me who you are.) In both cases, the platform only matters to the audience when it comes to acquiring the content. Once the content is acquired, how it is consumed no longer matters.
All of the above-mentioned trends portend an increased emphasis on mobility going forward. Such portability will ultimately be achieved though devices such as today's smartphones, as well as media consoles like the iPhone.
If they hope to maintain relevance in the coming years, agencies must find a way to address the meaning of platform-independent content and the need for real cumulative media effectiveness measures across platforms. The above are just a few examples of what media is becoming and how it is going to be used by the audiences that advertisers are desperate to reach. Increasingly, marketing professionals are being forced to step away from platform-dependent thinking and cease modeling new modes of media through analogy.
Media strategies editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International Inc., an Omnicom company.