A. Consumers are overwhelmed by intrusive messages

American consumers are submerged with a constant flow of advertisements, which aim at capturing a portion of their attention. Seth Godin has named this principle “interruption marketing”: all advertisements’ function is to interrupt people’s activities to grab his attention.

However, the media’s ubiquity has surged in the last few years. It has been calculated that an American receives around one million messages a year, which amounts to around 3000 a day. If this figure seems exaggerated, one must remind oneself that all stimulations are taken into account.

During a single visit to the supermarket, a shopper is surrounded by about 1000 messages. One hour in front of the television adds a good 40, and a single daily issue of a newspaper contains around 100. Should also be added all the brand names that are printed on tee shirts, logos on the computer, Microsoft’s logo that is displayed every time it is switched on, ads on the radio, billboards, catalogues and unsolicited phone calls that the everyone receives every now and then.

Faced with this avalanche of advertisements, companies are compelled to think of new ways to communicate with their targets, which is more cost effective in regard of the budget/brand recognition ratio.







In April 2004, A Yankelovich Partners poll for the American Association of Advertising Agencies found that a majority of Americans are increasingly annoyed by the tidal wave of advertising they are exposed to:

• 65 percent said they believed that they "are constantly bombarded with too much" advertising
• 61 percent agreed that the amount of advertising and marketing to which they are exposed "is out of control”
• 60 percent said their opinion of advertising "is much more negative than just a few years ago"
• 54 percent of the survey respondents said they "avoid buying products that overwhelm them with advertising and marketing"
• 69 percent said they "are interested in products and services that would help them skip or block marketing"

In response to this loss of effectiveness, marketing strategists have invented a remedy that turned out worse than the evil it offered to cure. They decided to be louder, more aggressive and more ubiquitous in their interruptions. They have thus worsened the impression of aggression consumers have.

This engages marketers in a vicious circle, in which they will have to increase their budgets constantly to stay ahead of the game. The less ads work, the more they have to spend, the more they spend, the more they saturate consumers and make their ads even less effective.

Marketing professionals who have diagnosed this loss of efficacy are starting to turn towards the rising star of new media.

B. Media versus New Media

1. From analogical to digital: an increasingly digitalized environment


Internet has been around since 1997. Narrowband access was the standard. Websites were still relatively few and the content was an adaptation of corporate brochures. Only savvy engineers were able to communicate through forums and IRC channels. Regular people were then starting to use email.
Since around 2001, the introduction of broadband Internet into homes has marked the start of a revolution in the way people handle information, media, and digital content. The bandwidth has increased from 512k in 2001 to up to 18 000 (for some Free subscribers in France).

This surge in available bandwidth has really turned the Internet in a digital multimedia platform, ready to handle heavy content like film, music and high-resolution photography.




Alongside this phenomenon, there was a boom in sales for Pocket Digital Assistants (PDA), digital cameras and movie recorders. As people bought more of these, they demanded more ways to share their homemade digital content, thus maintaining high demand for computers and increased Internet bandwidth.

In 2006, the trend has slowed down. As the market has grown more competitive and mature, bandwidth level is stable and sales in consumer electronics have ceased to increase. The only late boom has been for widescreen TV’s. Internet users have now grown familiar with the medium, and the generation who has grown up with the Internet is increasing in numbers.

In 2006, the massive trend is in media sharing. Dedicated platforms have appeared which let the user do just that. He can share pictures on Flickr, and upload homemade movies on Youtube, and view other people’s content as well, thanks to streaming video.

2. Television versus Youtube

Technological evolution has gradually liberated consumers from TV, which was the only choice for media entertainment since its invention. TV imposed to the viewer to be available at a given time for a given length to watch a program. Channels and schedules are concepts that were built on constraint. These ways have become increasingly difficult to bear in regard to new attitudes and new life habits of consumers.

Active media has won over passive media: with the web and online gaming, time allocation is switching in favour of the web, for the generations who are born with it. The British Ofcom has measured that in 2006, people between 16-24 years old watch 7 hours less TV than their parents, weekly. That is 1 hour less per day.

The greatest online competitors for traditional broadcast TV are websites like MySpace, and more directly by sites like Dailymotion and Youtube, which focus on video content. Youtube enables users to upload their own videos on the web and view other users’ ones. Each video can be commented and rated, and all videos can be searched by keywords and categories.

Thus, anyone can access any kind of content at any time, for no extra cost than a broadband Internet subscription. Instead of fixed programs, Youtube gives access, thanks to the rating system, to a perpetual “best of”; as the best rated videos and most viewed appear more visible to visitors. Music bands upload their music videos. The audience can be such that it can actually reveal a new band to the public. The band “Ok Go” acquired fame through their Youtube music video “a Million Ways”, as it became the most downloaded music video.


With such success stories, companies are beginning to grasp the new importance of the web and are allocating greater budgets to online advertising.

Coca-Cola has launched its “The Coke Side of Life” on July 10th in France, just after the 2006 Football World Cup. Coca-Cola chose Dailymotion and Youtube to broadcast its new set of video ads, before extending to TV. Youtube has somehow served as a laboratory in which the company could measure the success of their new ads before launching them on TV.





3. Radio versus Webcast Radio

In 2005, Arbitron/Edison (www.arbi-tron.com), an American Media Research company, published the results of a wide study of the media and the Internet in the USA. The study has come to the conclusion that around 55 million consumers use online radio and video services. According to the study, users prefer online radio compared to regular radios for the reasons shown in the table below.



Internet radio brings many features that cannot be found on mainstream radio, and has changed the radiophonic experience for listeners. Internet enables the listener to see the title of the song that is being played, to choose the genre, style and country of origin. Also, whereas terrestrial radio offers a limited choice of stations depending on the quality of reception, Internet radio offers a virtually unlimited choice at a constant level of audio quality.

In this sense, Pandora symbolizes the future of radio. It is a good example of the wide possibilities that computerization brought to radio. Pandora enables the user to personalize his radio. The user enters the name of an artist or song. The software will then play tunes that he is likely to appreciate. As the tunes go along, the user can say whether he likes the song or not by using a thumbs-up thumbs-down button, and the software reacts by refining its play list of songs. The company earns money through advertising and affiliation (see part III). Pandora has been voted one of the 50 « Coolest » websites of 2006 by TIME.com.





4. Press versus blogs

Thanks to blogs, companies can potentially do without any middlemen, and broadcast information online in a handful of minutes, in a less formatted form than the press communiqué. " We don’t have a choice. Either we decide to ignore these new media and our industry is at risk, either we try to understand the way they work and their goal ", says Guillaume du Gardier, CEO of PR Planet, a public relations agency established in 2004 that has decided to integrate blogs in its strategy.

Blogs are a new channel to be explored by companies and press relations agencies. Their first advantage is to allow a cost effective, immediate and easy edition, broadcast and update of news, without an expensive and intricate content management system. The possibilities in terms of interactivity are also a great plus. " Blogs encourage a new form of relationship. This is no brochure talk. It enables you to have direct contact, to open up. Concretely, the information is shorter in format, and we can easily include links, white papers, and studies ", adds Guillaume du Gardier.

Moreover, blogs enable companies to publish information in the RSS format. This file format can be used to distribute content. People who wish to do so can subscribe to the RSS feed with the adequate software. The great advantage is that it relies on voluntary subscription only. Hence, journalists’ email boxes are relieved on some potentially useless messages. Nokia, Microsoft and Cisco have chosen to edit their press releases through RSS, for journalists to read.

The media industry is under tough competition from new forms of communication. Movie sharing platforms, web radios and blogs are transforming the media landscape. In the meantime, traditional media, which relies on a declining media industry, must find new ways to thrive in this new landscape.

How can they adapt?



--- GO TO PART 2