Adapting to Fragmentation

CableWORLD has posted an interesting Q&A with Deloitte's Tony Kerns, who heads up their US Technology, Media & Telcom Group. He explains how media fragmentation has forced the adoption of niche programming and a rapid evolution towards value-added features that focus on branded portals. I can think of a good example in the Discovery portal with niche offerings such as Discovery Health, Discovery Times, Discovery Kids, Discovery HD, Discovery Espanol.

While these new venues provide opportunities for marketers and advertisers, they also dilute core brand identity. This is the tightrope big media companies will increasingly walk as they attempt to morph linear business models to the new media environment.

"There are so many platforms today--even within the house with all these different devices, we've got tremendous fragmentation, and that creates a big fragmented audience. The mass audience is becoming masses of audiences. It's hard to capture them all for a single event with time shifting  and everything else that's going on. That requires a fragmentation in content, and you have to be able to slice it and deliver it in a whole lot of traditional ways."

Tips on Adapting to Fragmentation

• Offer content across a variety of media channels and formats;
• Repackage and market content, not just as products but also as services;
• Extend content's life span by offering more digital content that can be quickly and easily packaged, or sold and rented across a range of media (such as DVDs, memory cards, downloads);
• Think on demand: VOD, webcasts, podcasting, mobile phone downloads;
• Add interactivity to content: participation, voting, purchasing, news, games, Web-based chat.

Tags: marketing tv branding advertising business media PR