Ben Sprecher

BrainTrust Query: What Happens to Traditional Media When it Goes Digital?

June 30, 2010

FROM RETAILWIRE:
At the ARF Audience Measurement conference last week, some speakers brought up compelling points about what happens when all media becomes digital. What obvious and less obvious changes do you see occurring as traditional media increasingly shifts to digital?      [more...]

Joel hit the nail right on the head when he says that the importance of audience size will diminish. Digital media is really about audience sizes trending towards the magic number: 1.

In fact, "audience" as a word may eventually become meaningless. Consider the 42-year-old mother of two with a 4-year-old black lab who is approaching the grocery store between her office and her house at 5:30 PM, with "Dinner" and "Food for Rex" on her shopping list. She is not an audience, she is a critical opportunity--at that moment, at that location.

IAMS may want to reach her with a coupon for their new dog food. The grocery store may want her to know about their newly-improved salad bar and the number of hot rotisserie chickens available right now. And the restaurant near her house may want to offer her free dessert if she makes her reservation for 6:00 PM tonight.

The challenge, of course, will be making sense of all the additional dimensions of your potential "audience", and finding ways to manage and measure the impact of many more much smaller and more targeted campaigns.