Bidding for time and attention
Consumers have already seized control of media creation. We blog and wiki. We upload and share our photos, videos and audio. We spend our time online checking out friends' profiles on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. We'll even go so far as to create ads for the brands we use.
Consumers are beginning to take control over media programming. We TiVo and Sling. We create personal start pages that aggregate all the content and functionality we want to see, and none of the things we don't. We use new technologies to discover the content we like on TV, the web and and in music - and then we port that content to the device we like best, and go... Hooman Radfar had a great post about the fall of pre-programmed media and the rise of widgets as an empowering technology for citizen programmers.
So what next, consumers? Yankelovich MONITOR president J. Walker Smith predicts that consumers will come to control when, where and how advertising gets placed. See his MONITOR Minute piece here. {Download Yankelovich_2006_MonitorMinute_November27.pdf}
A lot of thought, energy and investment (at Google, Yahoo! and even eBay, to name a few) is going toward the creation of auction-based media buying systems that will allow advertisers to schedule ads across a wide variety of online and offline media properties.
Smith argues that what ultimately gets auctioned is not media space but consumer time and attention. He sees a future where consumers aggressively block ads delivered through traditional push methods (this is of course already beginning to happen) and name the price of their attention, with the most valuable target audiences garnering the highest rates. The end result -- a consumer who willingly opts to see ad messages in return for the greatest possible relevancy and even financial compensation. Interesting concept and, really, it makes a lot of sense.
In an age where each consumer creates and programs a wholly unique, personal media experience (we're not quite there yet, but rest assured that this is where we're going) the notion of sponsoring a media property (be it NBC, Yahoo! or Car & Driver) loses relevance. It has never been easier to screen out unwanted ad messages (many of the technologies described above allow just that, either explicitly - TiVo - or implicitly - personal pages, widgets, even the iPod) and as consumers create and program, many advertisers get left out in the cold.
Sponsoring the individual consumer, regardless of the media he or she consumes, provides one smart path forward. Truly relevant advertising (for example, car ads ONLY when I'm in the market for a car and ONLY from those manufacturers that I've expressed a preference for) starts to look more like a service FOR the comsumer than it does marketing TO the consumer. And what if the consumer herself (rather the company that happens to produce or distribute the content that she happens to be viewing right now) also gets compensated for her time and attention? In that case, relevance and financial incentives together provide the one-two punch marketers will need to entice that consumer to pull advertising into their personal media experiences.
Advertising will never be the same (how's that for an understatement). Quite a sea change, and one that I predict many media companies and marketers will have a hard time adjusting to.
