Few industries have undergone change on such a scale and at such a pace in recent years as the media planning and buying industry.
Media and advertising are two sides of the same coin. Media is the conduit via which those lovingly crafted adverts are disseminated - in the hope, with varying degrees of certainty, of them gaining purchase in the mind of potential punters and influencing their future behaviours.
AND THEN ALONG CAME DIGITAL
Today, digital marketing and digital media offer unprecedented opportunities to target messaging to ever-narrower sub-segments of the population with previously unthinkable levels of accuracy, transparency and reportability. At the same time, the number of available media channels has exploded. No longer do we live in the golden age of television, where an ad on one of the big three US TV networks could reach 70 percent of the viewing audience.
These days we have endless digital TV channels, social media, in-app advertising, paid media, paid search (PPC), online media, even ‘smart’ retargeted advertising that proactively stalks potential customers based on their previous behaviours. And the list continues to grow, creating both an increasingly fragmented media landscape and a huge spike in the volume of advertising. Back in the 1970s we were exposed to 500 ads a day; today, it’s as many as 5,000.