What does the end of mass media mean to online marketers in search of specific demos?

I first heard the term "embarrassment of niches" used in a May, 2003 iMedia Summit speech by Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News.

What he meant by that phrase was that the modern media landscape is no longer one of an aggregate of mass-appeal content for a mass audience, but is now one of a diverse field of specific appetites sated by content specific to those appetites. We no longer live in a world where everyone can be counted on to watch the evening news with Walter Cronkite or 'All in the Family' in prime time.

There are now as many kinds of content and platforms carrying it as there are tastes among the population.

This has created the conditions for an America and her audiences to be much more inward and self-reflective. Bearing with content in which one may or may not have a particular interest to get to that content in which one does have particular interest is no longer necessary. We can now turn to myriad media and find, on command, an indulgence of our interests and whims, or a confirmation of our biases.

With this uber-fragmentation of media, how are mass marketers to reach enough of the people they need to in order to move their business? What are the implications for both media companies and advertisers? Are we looking at the end of mass marketing?

Or do we need to redefine what "mass" means?

Recently, the idea of multi-channel marketing and multi-media usage has garnered a lot of attention. Rebecca Weeks wrote a two-part series that ran recently in this publication that addressed this, for example.

Multi-channel marketing has gained more attention with the advent of the Internet as a regular, de rigueur facet of most people's life, because -- for the first time -- people are able to use multiple media concurrently and with equal levels of engagement. It is also possible that with the addition of the Internet as a part of our media lives, as well as multi-use cell phones and PDAs, the human being has reached the limit of how many media he can use discretely and when.

In days of yore, people certainly read the paper while listening to the radio, or had the TV on while flipping through the latest issue of their favorite magazine. But this kind of engagement has always been one more of attention splitting than multi-tasking. I equate it to the slicing of a plum: with each cut you lose a little juice.

But with online, studies have found that people throw themselves into the medium at the same time, and with the same energy, as they watch TV. It is now possible to watch a program, while concurrently going online to learn more about whatever it is that has been presented to me on television.

People also no longer see limits on when, where or what media they consume. A sense of entitlement to control when, where and what media we use has infiltrated the culture, carried by the Internet like small pox on a blanket.

According to a recent Simultaneous Media Survey (SIMM) report by BIGresearch, the consumer's use of media no longer happens in the discrete time frames it once did. The research indicated that when watching TV, 87.9 percent regularly or occasionally use other media. And during prime time -- defined by this survey as 7 to 11 p.m. -- 59 percent of the consumers watching television are regularly or occasionally online.

Traditionally, media planning and allocation look at audiences as being distinct by media. Though the tools are there for looking at things like combined reach and frequency -- which serve as the expression of how much communication value an advertiser has against a particular target audience with a given media mix -- the planning, buying and placing of each medium never take into account just how or why each of those media are used. Before, each medium and its use could be reasonably put into silos. Advertisers could count on their being enough mass in any one of those silos to feel comfortable that enough prospective consumers were being reached to make their business.

Now, that isn't so.

Shared attention, media multi-tasking and media synergy are issues advertisers are going to have to consider before making the kinds of significant commitments to their media investments.

More than anything else, broadband has put the Internet at the fore of this media multi-tasking environment. Advertisers are going to be forced to finally start looking for the answer to why people use the media they do in order to most effectively communicate their value propositions to them. And they are going to have to communicate in multiple media to reach the critical mass necessary to make their business.

The media community has long paid lip-service to the importance of media mix and the role that each specific medium plays in that mix, but ultimately the only variance in the execution of a media plan is in the creative format each media accommodates. Doing that won't stop being important, but the 'why' of an audience's usage will become much more important than the 'how' that communication happens within each medium. This is because if we remain focused only on each medium as being discrete, we risk A) not using a particular medium most effectively, and B) not accumulating enough mass within a specific medium to generate sustainable business.

It will become incumbent upon advertisers to, in essence, stack the plethora of niches on one another to aggregate the audiences in great enough volume to have positive effect on a business.

Reaching the youth market has brought to light the significance of thinking about media in this way more than any other marketing communication challenge. The trade's ongoing, public musing about where and how to find the male 18 to 34 demographic -- and marketers' solutions to the problem of where and how to reach them -- is the clearest example of utilizing the available niches. Particular cable networks -- and explicit content found there -- in concert with precise Web properties and the integration of marketing messages (not always recognizable as traditional "messaging") in video games, have all proved necessary for coalescing enough of the audience to achieve the critical mass needed for achieving long-term goals for a brand to whom the male 18 to 34 demographic is important.

The Internet's place in this new way of communicating to audiences is still being defined, but it is clear that the place it will occupy will be significant. First of all, as a medium in toto, there are a significant enough number of people using it to positively affect a business. Secondly, the Internet itself is expressed to, and by, the people using it as a repository for the most niche of niches.