Advertising networks are fragmenting into specialized verticals like travel ad networks, women’s ad networks and gay ad networks, according to Frank Addante, serial entrepreneur and CEO of advertising technology company The Rubicon Project. The fragmentation is mimicking the way television stations split off into cable channels…

Permission Marketing

In 1999, renowned author and marketing “guru” Seth Godin writes about this concept in his book, “Permission Marketing”. Godin describes a change in marketing where consumers give marketers permission to read their advertisements.  We see it every day in targeted ads like Google Ad-words and ad-banners (some ad- banners).  And now, as Beet.tv mentioned, the industry itself is changing.

Innovate and be creative

Since the first radio programs of the early 1920′s, small commercial advertisements were placed in the middle of broadcasts to help pay for the program; a program that was, by all practical measures, distributed to the public for free.  Consumers understood that these commercials paid for their program, and learned to accept the occasional interruption.  Fast-forward 80-90 years and we have television programs and streaming multimedia.  Almost 100 years later and broadcasted programs still use an interrupt-based model.

Are we doing all we can?  Maybe it’s time we rethought a few things.

It’s not about the media

We live in a world where bringing new multimedia to the web is not enough.  At this point, multimedia is expected.   What’s important is that media becomes discoverable. More often than not, people are so focused on getting their rich media platforms to the web that they forget about making it discoverable.  Imagine a world where a google search returns results of an instructor’s lecture series in iTunes University, or an instructor’s YouTube Channel.  Adobe’s efforts to include automated transcripts for videos is the first step in this process.  It is important that your media remains easy to access.  With the abundance of media out there, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle.

“If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”

So what do we do?  It is important that you know your audience.  Notice I didn’t say, “know about” your audience.  If you only know about your audience, you will only be able to give them what they are asking for.  But if you truly know your audience, you will be able to give them something they don’t know they want.

Lessons About Knowing Your Audience

Here we have 2 clips; the first is from a few years back.  This first clip is from The Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.  Here Triumph is interviewing people waiting in line for Star Wars Episode II.  It is approached with obvious humor, and seen as comedy.  The Conan O’Brien Show knows their audience and the people they are interviewing.

This next clip comes from recent television coverage of the iPhone 3G release. Here the reporter tried the same tactic as Triumph, but failed miserably. Maybe it’s easier to take insults from a toy puppet? Or maybe Apple fans have less of a sense of humor than Star Wars fans. The bottom line is, this guy did not know his audience.  (The hyphenated “i-Phone Mania” in the lower third of the news clip is only more evidence to that fact)

Another important lesson…Don’t try to insult your audience on Live TV.  Late night was smart enough to pre-record their bit.