Marketing To A Fragmented, Time-Starved Consumer

No more old days in advertising—a time when a few commercials on broadcast television or an ad in a major magazine could reach the masses quickly and easily. In the old days, almost all the creative energy of marketing and advertising could be spent on crafting a message to the audience.

Enter a new day. In the fragmented, media-saturated environment of the present, much of the initial creativity in marketing must be focused on finding the audience and passing the relevancy test to get a few seconds of consideration. Creativity is still needed to break through the clutter, but the ever-increasing number and sources of messages, combined with a finite number of minutes in the day, have trained the consumer to be extremely judicious with their consideration of any marketing message.

For years, the accepted concept in marketing was your message had to be creative enough to “come in under the consumer’s marketing radar screen.” This stealth approach is still an option, but more difficult to achieve because the consumer’s radar screen has improved and is now solid white with the identification of marketing bogies.  However, all is not lost and part of the problem (people spending more time online and less with traditional media) can also be part of the answer. Business Week has a nice take on how the Web can glue marketing fragmentation back together. A central point in the BW article: “How do you reach folks who don’t sit still long enough to see or hear ads—and who use their iPods and TiVos to vaporize them instantly?” Their answer in a nutshell: “Truth be told, too many marketers and media outlets have no clue. But there’s a glimmer of hope emerging for these embattled industries. Because even [as their are those consumers] who are disassembling media in the Digital Age, they’re also reconstructing it. In these millions of networks-of-one lies a surprising opportunity: the chance to engage the masses one by one instead of hoping some ad punches through the flatlined brains of couch potatoes.”

The BW article also includes a link to follow-up installments that use examples from progressive companies to illustrate the message in the main article. Many would consider these companies to be on the marketing frontier, but it appears they are more so in productive, settled territory. Welcome to The New Days.