While it is important that we start thinking about the future, we should guard against the impulse to take hasty action". - Bill Gates (The great man who once wrote off internet in its infancy as a fad!)Whenever someone talks of interactive TV, or e-newspapers, or e-books or e-whatever, usually one gets a huge yawn in return, with "Yeh sab India mein nahi hoga, boss!"

Often, when trying to decipher what lies ahead, it is useful to just look back - 5 years ago internet was a little name one threw around to announce an techy-have image, 8 years ago mobile phones were an ultimate expression of self-indulgence by the super-rich, 10 years ago satellite TV was but an infant, 20 years ago colour TV was just born, and the list can go on…

"So what" I hear you say. Well, the common thing between all the above is that they seemed either impossible to deliver or toys/ fads meant for the elite that will not move down pop-strata in a hurry. And the remarkable thing is, they all did, and how! Can you comprehend life without these things today? If you are a very small minority that can or wants to live without these tools, all I can say is "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"!

Let's first see what the future most likely holds in store for us…
Communication technology keeps moving forward, so personalisation of various media is just a question of "when" rather than "if". Digitisation of almost every media as we know it today is an inevitability that is punctuated by issues such as costs of adoption and investments in hardware. In all the publicity about the negative impact of CAS, perhaps one thing completely overlooked (at least as I write this article) is the role that the set top box will play in digitising and hence making interactive our TV viewing experience unimaginably.

However, mass consumer adoption of all new technologies comes about when these technologies become easy, fast and cheap. Market factors (Consumer demand) coupled with changing economics (Affordability) will mean that penetration of the set-top boxes will reach the level of today's C&S penetration over the next 3-5 years. Does that mean we will see ubiquitous broadband digital entertainment then? Only time will tell, but very likely yes…

Government regulation too has a role to play in the arrival of e-age. For example, it is still illegal for a broadband network to carry both voice and data. But then hey, just 12 years ago carrying a 100 dollar bill in your pocket was a crime equated with treachery of the highest order. For a consumer's home to become digitised, a lot will have to change on the legislation side, but I guess it is again not a question of if but when?

Which brings me to my key question for this article: "Are we, in advertising, prepared for this drastic change?"
Almost overnight a lot of intrusive media we so take for granted will disappear or change so drastically that we will no longer call the shots - They will! What form will the media planning of tomorrow have to take to meet this new challenge? What shape will the research of tomorrow have to take in order to decipher the new choice-enabled consumers? What shape will the creative execution in media have to take for the message to be noticed from among the hundreds of others staring at the consumers?

Let's just consider a few simple truths about our own selves to better understand the mythical entity called the "consumer".
Over the past 10 years or so, one entire generation has become ATMised… When was the last you went to a bank teller to withdraw cash? Today, we withdraw it where we want, when we want it and with no intermediaries to bother us.

In every sphere of our life the key trend is that consumers have greater choice, greater control and fewer intermediaries. Let's take a simple example:
Trans-continental communication used to take weeks in the era of ships with 10's of intermediaries, including the "super-fast" pony-expresses. The time taken dropped dramatically as Ships were replaced by the telegraph as the fastest mode of communication, and so did the intermediaries. From there to Trunk calls to STD to e-mail, the time just kept getting shorter and shorter… Intermediaries fewer and fewer… Today it's a matter of a few nanoseconds - with no intermediaries (Chat-clients/Messengers).

This global mega-trend of more control, more choice and fewer intermediaries is sweeping across almost every sphere of our life - even Government, law-enforcement, Medicine, Finance, you name it. And last but not the least, Entertainment!

The important issue is that when the timing and duration is under consumer's control, advertising is often an irritant, and works negatively. Gosh! Can you believe it? You can't decide when to serve the consumer an ad, she'll decide when she wants it - now doesn't that change our whole world?

To my mind, this is the biggest challenge we face in the e-era.
Adding to the complication are the effects of the two much abused terms: Information translucency and Audience Fragmentation. Simply put this means that the consumer is more aware and more difficult to reach.

Finally this is further complicated by the simple fact of media clutter. A simple fact is that the number of messages received by a consumer is growing by a factor of 10 per 100 years. Simply put, your grandson will receive 10 times as many messages as your father did at his age. How do you think he'll cope? Will he process all the messages as intently or will he skip a few. It's a no-brainer, really…

There is one school of thought that the pollution of our age is not the black soot that we saw coming out of the chimneys in the previous century, but the things that we see coming out of the boob tube! And in our zeal to surround the consumer in 360 degrees, we media professionals often disregard the consumer's need for privacy and ad-free peace. Is it any wonder then that the remote controls are far more active today than any other time in history during ad-breaks? Or that the "don't call" lists are growing.

Information is the new product for the new consumer. And this has huge brand opportunities as well as implications. The era of huge margins and protected markets is well and truly gone, but existing bigger brands will find that their power keeps increasing day by day. Also, come CAS, DTH, DTT and what have you, and suddenly audience fragmentation will reach heights hitherto unknown. And the good news is that there is no possibility of this trend reversing.

The 1/8th of an inch - the thickness of our skull - that is all the protection nature has provided us with for the most important organ of ours - the Brain. And increasingly this is getting more and more difficult to penetrate. When faced with a barrage of messages, the one choice the brain has is to switch itself off from them, unless something in the message catches your fancy and you are intrigued to know more.
As the primary role of advertising shifts subtly from informing to entertaining and informing, one of the most obvious ways to counter the remote controls is to integrate the ad message with the content. That way the consumer will be forced to at least give you a hearing. But obviously consumers don't appreciate this trickery too much. Surveys after surveys show increasing consumer disdain for this practice. And at some stage it will start hurting the brands that indulge in this, if the tool is overused.

Viral marketing is another not-so-obvious tool, because the Virus here is spreading almost by choice. But viral marketing is an approach that can be used only in so many cases and not everywhere.
Barter, cross-promotions and sharing of ad weights is another tool that can help overcome the consumer resistance to giving us a hearing, in a cost-economical fashion.

Research will have to clearly find answers to some fairly more complex questions like, How do consumers consume communication while multi-tasking? Or how do we assign different values to different vehicles?
Figure out innovative ways of measuring people that go beyond the normal demographic definitions. One of the big plusses of the interactive communications is the real-time possibility of measuring response. This needs to be harnessed in a meaningful way to aid in planning.

Its not that these questions have not been sought to be answered earlier, but the attempts have been at best half-hearted or have chosen to skim the surface.

So the story is blindingly simple. The consumer is changing faster than ever before. She is increasingly in control. She is overloaded with information and is choosing to shut out over half the information that's beamed to her. It needs skill and understanding to ensure that you don't end up on worse half of the choice spectrum. You need insights of a different and more evolved nature to make the grade. Fortunately, the very technology that offers the consumer the choice, also offers a degree of measurability and quick-time insights to us.

In the near future, the media planner will be more knowledgeable about how people consume communication and also about why they do it. He'll probably be armed with data that will let him make sophisticated choices about which vehicle to choose for what purpose. He'll be able to tell under what circumstances a consumer is more likely to choose to see his ad and when not.

Yes, the media planner will have to be a very different creature in the future. But hey… wasn't he another very different creature just 10 years ago?

References:
* Greg Blonder – http://www.genuineideas.com
*“TIVO Offers personal viewing data to advertisers, broadcasters”,
http://www.warc.com, June 3, 2003
*“Over One Third of TV Homes Worldwide Will be Digital by 2010”,
http://www.warc.com, May 28, 200

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