Disparate Realities
Thursday, March 5, 2009 20:18If yesterday at the 2009 4A’s Media Conference & Tradeshow was all about transparency, today has seemingly revolved around the generational evolution of the consumer mindset.
We have been hearing for over a year now that “digital changes everything,” and today’s emerging themes – as voiced by 4A’s CEO Nancy Hill, GroupM North American CEO Marc Goldstein, and HP’s CMO Michael Mendenhall – further enforced that that the line between digital and traditional marketing is slowly being erased, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think.
Indeed, the real stars of the day were the consumers – live, in person, and embodied across three separate panel discussions – and their uniquely varied media needs and habits.
The first panel, featuring 20-somethings of the millennial generation, were full of youthful brashness and vigor, adamant in their passion for Corporate Social Responsibility and steadfast that content should be primarily free of charge to all and ready to consign the newspaper literally to the trash heap of history. Not even obsessed yet with the instant gratification of Facebook and Twitter, the panel seemed to feel that media should be consumed when they want and where/how they want it.
Meanwhile, a graceful collection of local Baby Boomers offered a much more traditional take on media. Their days were filled with programming such as Navy NCIS, Oprah and Dr. Phil, and the broadcast nightly news…not to mention the old standby newspaper. The more middle-range Women 25-55 Panel, logically, then straddled much of the middle: TV still played a prominent role (Regis & Kelly, Lifetime), but the Internet (Craigslist) was a much stronger and omnipresent influence.
The reality of the situation, then, appears to be that there is no one magic bullet for media planners and buyers, or for anyone in the marketing communications biz. Large, non-niche campaigns will continue to have to provide fully integrated messaging across all disciplines for the foreseeable future in order to reach not just the primary consumer, but EVERY consumer.
Cross-posted at the 4A’s Events Blog
