Upstream Group's president challenges interactive marketers to think about the media world in a new way.

The oft-used metaphor of a pie to symbolize the media market ran headlong into a knife wielded by Doug Weaver, president of Upstream Group and iMedia senior analyst. Rather than thinking in terms of the traditional media pie, Weaver challenged the crowd to help him refine a new intellectual model for today's media landscape.

"Stop slicing the pie and cut the damn cake!" Weaver told the attendees at the iMedia Brand Summit, explaining that the model of a pie has become outdated and ineffective.

For Weaver, the cake model consists of three parts, with audience delivery at the bottom, targeted frequency in the middle and activation at the very top.

Audience delivery is the biggest part of the cake, Weaver explained, pointing out that the lion's share of today's advertising dollars go to TV because the medium successfully serves up the broadest audience for marketers. In the middle, targeted frequency dollars go to print, radio and online because each medium allows marketers to deliver a message to a more defined audience group. Activation, which sits at the top of the cake, accounts for a relatively small portion of today's total advertising dollar, even though it represents a large amount of the online ad buy.

"Activation is what online does really well," Weaver said. "Activation is all about that final click that measures sales, or interaction or some other goal. But activation isn't all we can do. If we stay in activation, we are in a low profit, highly complex business."

Rather than refining tools that help brands achieve activation, Weaver insisted that the goal of marketers today should be to harness the full operational power of the internet as a robust medium capable of delivering a global audience.

"The problem is that the internet is fundamentally not being used to deliver the audience," Weaver said. "That needs to change."

According to Weaver, each innovation in technology has marketers thinking about furthering activation goals because they ask themselves how each new tool will lead to more clicks.

While Weaver conceded the value of an activation philosophy, saying it's what interactive already does very well, he asked the crowd to push hard to shift the balance between activation and delivery by reshaping the cake.

"The only thing that stands between us and making audience delivery a bigger part of the game is us," Weaver said. "If we stay slaves to activation, we won't have an internet that serves marketers."

To create the switch in mentality, Weaver encouraged the crowd to figure out where TV campaigns, which currently do deliver the broad audience, turn from muscle to fat.

"We all know that a TV campaign can deliver an audience, but we also know that there's a point where that campaign gets flabby," Weaver said. "We can argue about where precisely the shift from muscle to fat happens, but we should ultimately pick a point on the graph, and to the right of that point we need to allocate money for using the internet to deliver the audience."

To highlight his challenge to think about the media world in a new way, Weaver turned to athletics.

"Up until the 1960s, high jumpers jumped facing forward over the bar," Weaver said. "The style of their jumps was dictated by the fact that the pit was filled with sand, meaning a forward jump was the only way to compete safely."

When the Olympics and other athletic associations began filling the pits with foam rubber, few athletes took notice, Weaver said, pointing out that only one jumper, Dick Fosbury, saw the change for what it was.

"Fosbury knew that the change to foam rubber didn't just mean he had reduced the risk of breaking an arm or a leg when he jumped forward," Weaver said. "He knew that the rubber meant he could jump backwards, gain more height and not break his neck."

For Weaver, the message is clear: In today's fast-changing climate, only the companies that are able to find a different way to jump over the bar will succeed. 

"Our future as a medium is going to be based on our ability to cut the cake effectively," Weaver said, encouraging the audience to discard pie and embrace a new dessert model for a new age.

Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMediaConnection. Read full bio.