The Future of Media in 100 Words.

My friend / Draftfcb compatriot Andrew Eifler has been doing some thinking around the future of media, gathering short-form thoughts from media professionals with the aim to publish as a collaborative post on several forums. When he approached me about contributing to his project, The Future of Media in 100 Words, I was more than happy to throw some thoughts his way, for three main reasons:

1. It seems to me that the media community is largely underrepresented in the social sphere. I'm not talking about "social media experts." I'm talking about media folks: spreadsheet-making, calculator-touting, hardcore-negotiating, rep-hobnobbing media planners. For whatever reason we don't seem to be a big blogging bunch, so it will be nice to hear from a few people in my line of work.
   
2. Cross-publishing is fun. I did a cross-publishing project with Adam Kmiec (also the DFCB blog) a while back, and it was awesome. Cool to get perspective from commenters that don't normally read my pith. Collaboration! Sharing of ideas! America!
3. 100 words = yes. Appreciate the effort to keep things concise. Good thinking.

Andrew kicked things off yesterday with his 100-word thesis, below. It's exactly 100 words, which is awesome. Count 'em.

Five years from now – Data will be King.

New complex tracking and data capture techniques will allow for all advertising, regardless of media channel, to be purchased based on audience demographics and lifestyle variables. Reach, Average Frequency, and GRPs will give way to much more precise metrics and – not without a touch of irony – the media industry will no longer find importance in the channel of media distribution, there will only be content and audience.

The kind of data-driven quantitative analysis that has revolutionized Wall Street over the past 10 years will soon make its way uptown to Madison Ave.

Here are my thoughts. Not to be outdone, this is, of course, exactly 100 words.

Five years from now, I’m hoping we’ll be of the mindset that providing relevant information to information-seekers yields greater returns than screaming our messages at the masses.

I’m sure we’ll still be buying SuperBowl spots and wallpapering Times Square with glittering, high-def awareness messaging. I hope we’ll also be continuing to use the internet to do more refined listening to consumers, to active information-seekers, and carefully and respectfully distributing relevant content as such. With major media channels becoming less passive, we need to proactively step away from old-timey objectives and instead provide interested consumers with the information they actually need.

I think we're kind of saying the same thing, which is interesting.

Andrew and I have a list of DFCBers that we'd like to contribute to the project, but if you're a media assistant / planner / supervisor / director / guru out there in the interwebs and would like to contribute your two cents, drop a line in the comments and we'll be happy to add you to the list. And, tune in to Andrew's blog and the DRAFTFCBlog for updates.

Happy reading!