When we give consumers more choice and, hence, control, are we really giving them what they want?
Conversations regarding the plethora of choice that people have today in terms of their media consumption is now a mainstay of marketing conferences and a given when planning advertising. So much so, it’s practically cliché to say that the modern consumer lives in a world rich with options, from what kinds of products to chose, to where they get their news and when they watch programming.
This unmooring of media from time and place is the next biggest thing happening to the consumption, impact and practice of media since the dawning of the commercial internet itself.
For the first online users with phone-cradle modems, or plodding through Prodigy’s walled garden on a 2,400 baud-rate modem, it might be hard to imagine how this is going to influence what I like to call the “always on” generation, but it should be among the primary concerns of marketers, advertisers, agencies and media companies alike when considering the architecture of media’s future.
PDAs, mobile phones, DVRs, laptops and PSPs are just the beginning. Think about a time when people will have inexpensive, high-resolution digital paper, to which can be downloaded regular updates of the day’s news by walking past (or through) a wireless network, with users setting up an auto-pay for a per-usage charge. Or have portable, expandable compact viewing screens on which to view programming on a whim.
The sociological implications are uncertain and tend towards both the utopian and the dystopian. For example, there may be democratized content and Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” of collaboration on the one hand and the replacement of practiced knowledge with information-by-reflex and actions borne without deliberation and a sense of consequence on the other.
What is certain now is that all of this lends itself towards more and more personalization of the products and media we consume.
By Jim Meskauskas
No comments:
Post a Comment