Fuel Industries' EVP of strategy recommends that you consider nodal marketing, which tracks your customers' behavior as it evolves.

The media glut of the new millennium has arrived hard, and has fundamentally changed the way that we as advertisers must look at media. Thanks in large part to the giant leap in web technology over the past few years, we now have thousands of streams of information we can access whenever we want. Consumers are going off the traditional media grid and dipping their toes into a world of on-demand content, and it's rendering traditional media buying methods practically extinct.

Advertising has always been based on buying access to eyeballs. That access was easy to get because scarcity of media existed-- people could be easily found on relatively small media map. The internet has effectively eliminated that scarcity, and it's this truth that is changing the very nature of media. Home broadband penetration is approaching 50 percent in the United States and is over 65 percent in Canada. An on-demand world is just around the corner, and with it comes a very big opportunity to rethink how we reach out with our marketing messages.

Techcast estimates that on-demand entertainment will become mainstream by 2009. The next version of Windows will integrate Windows Media Center and the newest versions of Mac OSX comes standard with Front Row. The tools that will allow for massive participation with on-demand content are going to be readily available to consumers within the next twelve months.

The key problem is that in such a fluid media world, the old way of measuring audience does not keep up with how people are evolving moment by moment. Understanding consumer behavior and acting on it is no longer a matter of watching and reacting over extended time frames. Advertising in a on-demand world is not about attaching to an existing landscape as much as it is striving to become part of that landscape.

To truly understand consumers is to understand their browsing history. 

Nodal Marketing is an approach to moving with the market in real time. Nodal marketers realize that each quest for information or entertainment by a consumer is really a complex chain of events, experiences and places that people move between to satisfy their wants, desires or interests.
 
Nodal marketing is not about using simple site stats to plan online media buys. It is the study of how people find and move. It is the science of becoming your customer. Once we as marketers understand the chains that consumers string together when they explore their own world, we can then use the understanding to create advertising, content and entertainment that will intersect their quest at the right place and the right time and break through precisely when the consumer is most open to the message. Nodal marketing is about determining how a particular brand can attract its own audience rather than leveraging the eyeballs of someone else's audience.

Nodal marketing is completely media agnostic and a nodal chain can be composed of any type of media. Whether a media search takes place across websites, game, blogs, television shows, radio programs, DVDs, magazines, newspapers or CDs, a nodal chain is simply the collection of all media that people consume around a topic or interest.

All nodal campaigns start at the beginning of the chain and follow it through to the end. The starting point in a consumer experience is the seed. The seed is always the first collection of likely starting nodes and can take the form of a URL, an email or a search query. Once the seed in known, it then becomes a matter of mapping the interconnection that people will make as they move from information node to information node.

Here is an exercise to try yourself. Make a list from a consumer's perspective of five core things to consider when purchasing a new car. Take those groups of keywords and enter them into Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. Keep the first 10 returns from each search engine and use those results as a baseline to understand how this seed leads to many connections. Imagine the results from increasing that sample base by a factor of 100 and you will see the power of the nodal approach. The wealth of nodal connections on any one topic is quite astounding. Knowing and understanding these connections gives us the hard insight we need to create nodes that will be highly relevant to what consumers want to find.

Brady Gilchrist is executive vice president of strategy and head of BlueScience, Fuel Industries' creative strategy and research division. Read full bio.