There are changes in the air, literally, that will have a profound effect on the way that advertisers and marketers will communicate with their existing and prospective customers. The traditional media trinity, consisting of television, newspapers/magazines and radio, has dominated the media landscape and, subsequently, media budgets since the 1950s. However, the emerging Gen X and Gen Y spend a large majority of their time in substantially less controlled and less homogenized environments including physical areas such as bars, restaurants, health clubs, ball parks etc (Out of home and armed with lots of mobile devices); online; gaming; listening to satellite (non-commercial) radio; and listening to iPods and other digital music devices. It’s a world of social networking, downloads, digital communities and heightened mobility. It is not a world where the traditional media trinity lives or where advertisers have been for the past 30 years. Hence, the stage is set for a major shift of advertising dollars to the emerging media in order to capture the attention of these lucrative emerging consumers. A new trinity is emerging – internet media, out-of-home digital media and mobile media. Recent data shows that Internet and out-of-home digital media are the largest beneficiaries of this shift of advertising dollars.
While baby-boomers are adopting new technologies, it is clearly not at the pace of adoption by younger generations. Most baby-boomers’ “brand preferences” were established long ago; marketers, as a result, have a somewhat stable base of consumers in their customer base. However, Gen Y grew up under a different environment - with dual income families and the economic boom of the 1990s. As a result, they grew up in more affluent circumstances than their parents. They were raised as consumers and respond well to advertising. However, their brand loyalties have not yet been established. They are more likely to switch brands – while they may show fierce loyalty to a brand; they are likely to switch to another brand, if they perceive it to be more current and ‘hip’. However, an advertiser must be able to reach them where they are, appeal to them in the language they speak, and approach them in the way they think, if they want them to change their mind and try their brand instead. “Most advertisers don’t cater to us. For example, the big television news cable networks — CNN, FOX, MSNBC — think they can attract young people by playing rap music at the beginning and end of their shows. We see right through it.”
In the traditional media triad- television, newspapers/magazines and radio, an agency or an advertiser can work with a handful of TV or radio networks to plan and buy their advertising across the country. Conversely, the new media triad is extremely fragmented, with millions of web sites and hundreds of out-of-home networks, making it challenging for agencies and advertisers to create broad campaigns. As the Gen X and Gen Y segments cause the shift of advertising dollars from the traditional media triad to the new media triad of web, out-of-home and mobile media, a few technology enablers are needed to make it easy for agencies and advertisers to take advantage of this medium. This has already happened in the world of web advertising and about to begin in the world of out-of-home digital media.
A handful of ‘consolidators’ such as Doubleclick and Advertising.com have emerged as the leaders in the world of web advertising, making it easy for agencies and advertisers to run broad Gen Y campaigns without having to individually interact with each website. These value-added service providers buy inventory from various web sites, and then leverage sophisticated technology to provide integrated metrics and pricing to the agency/advertiser to first help them create a campaign plan and then execute a buy at the ‘click of the mouse’. On a weekly basis, these service providers provide integrated ad performance metrics at various levels of detail. On the other hand, advertisers and agencies have not had access to such service providers for out-of-home digital media, making it extremely challenging for them to create broad regional campaigns - until now.
Relief is finally here for agencies who want to build multi-city campaigns for Gen Y with out of home digital media. Companies such as SeeSaw Networks (www.seesawnetworks.com) have developed a service that aggregates ad inventory from multiple networks and makes it visible to agencies to enable them to plan, buy and measure regional campaigns. For example, a company can get an aggregate view into all venues across multiple networks, see their key traffic, demographic and cost metrics and use that information to easily develop a multi-venue campaign plan that spreads across multiple networks. Once the campaign is developed, making a buy is as easy as the click of a mouse. Integrated analytics provide the metrics and information needed to show the effectiveness of the campaign.
Therefore, as advertisers understand how to reach the Gen Y market and secondly gain access to the tools to plan, buy and measure their targeted campaigns in web, out-of-home and mobile media, they will be able to accelerate the shift of advertising dollars from the traditional media trinity to the new media trinity to more effectively achieve their advertising objectives.
Download the whitepaper | Read the Mediaweek article
