Audience fragmentationalism
A hideous new word for a hideous problem in media agencies.
Ok, so I made up a word for the headline in an attempt to score some followers for my first Medium story. But it think it’s quite fitting as it explains the massive challenge facing media planners and buyers when trying to reach an ever increasing fragmented audience for their clients.
Audience fragmentationalism could be defined as the rapid and sensational fracturing of audiences, across mediums, and the exponential rise of publishers within those mediums, leading to a universe of possibilities when trying to reach your audience. It’s then coupled with the inability for media planners and buyers to effectively reach the same audiences they used to; in those golden days when TV shat on everything else, and you only needed a newspaper ad and maybe some radio to back it up.
There’s a reason “Ad-land” was all about long lunches back in the day. There was simply not that much to do.
The biggest problem facing the media agency model today is not that certain mediums are going to die, and therefore media planners should be looking elsewhere. There are more eyeballs, consuming more content, in more ways than ever before. What’s near impossible is planning and delivering tailored cohesive content across all these channels at the same time. You can’t just force fit a TV ad onto facebook and expect solid engagement. Same goes for Snapchat, and not just because of the vertical screen syndrome. While there are great campaigns being deployed on these mediums, I have still yet to see a multi-channel campaign that embraces the unique and amazing attributes of all the individual channels all at the same time.
The idea of the “BIG IDEA” is one of the oldest in the advertising world. It’s “Integrated Marketing Communications 101”. Use one big idea, and deploy that across all the channels, using the uniqueness of each channel, while retaining a core message — lovingly known as the single minded proposition. When I went to University and studied advertising, there were 5 channels and this thing called “internet advertising” which was mostly just websites and some really bad banners, and all the strategy you needed for it was to make sure it’s on brand. Now there are literally millions of different ways you could skin a campaign, across traditional, digital, social and new and emerging channels, and the burden to do so means that no agency has ever truly delivered.
And how can they, when agency systems and processes means that people are spending more time copying and pasting from spreadsheet to spreadsheet than they are strategising about truly next level campaigns. As publishers old and new charge towards new ways of reaching their audiences, the problem for agencies only gets harder. The is still no simple coordinated way to plan and buy all mediums effectively.
Audience fragmentationalism is a hideous new word to describe a hideous new(ish) problem. And as yet, there are no solid solutions.
