Our media strategies editor meditates on the challenges of measuring audience in a decentralized media universe.

The measurement of audiences has always been a key component of effective media planning.

At first, simply knowing how many people an advertiser could potentially reach with a given advertising vehicle was enough.

Then it became knowing what kinds of people were being reached with a given advertising vehicle as well as how many of those particular kinds of people could be reached.

It was then incumbent upon media planners to be able to not only quantify and qualify those audiences, but to also understand how often those audiences needed to be reached in order to come to some conclusion about the effectiveness of that communication.

Reach became the metric for indicating potential breadth of advertising communication and frequency the metric for indicating potential effectiveness.

Now the number of people reached or the number of times you reach them is becoming more difficult to determine and its importance less certain.

Most audience measurement and the planning tools they inform are losing their predictive value because the audiences consuming any one piece of content are getting smaller as the increments of media consumption are getting smaller. The actions emergent from large groups of people are easier to predict than the actions taken by a single agent. Smaller audiences are closer to the individual, and the individual is much more susceptible to a behavioral "X-factor" than is a large group of people. That's why people in groups can so easily become mobs and be told what to do (think of the Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment), but getting an individual to overcome extant norms and do what you want them to do is harder. Knowing how many of what kinds of people your advertising is going to be exposed to isn't going to be adequate when done by traditional means.

How should media planning as a discipline take into account the fact that the audiences they might be planning against are in such small parts?

The first difficulty to arise when confronting this question is one of measurement.

Measuring a micro-media universe

For the purposes of television audience metering as television had traditionally been used -- as a significant single source for media consumption -- it used to be enough to use a few hundred people meters and a few thousand diaries from which audience numbers and details could be extrapolated.

But those audiences are no longer as coagulated around a few places. Audiences are spread out, fewer in number for any one piece of content, but greater the number of groups proportional to the number of content options.

What is happening is that the audiences for particular servings of content are getting smaller.

There is more consumption of media, but it is happening in smaller increments. The measurement of those audiences needs to be refined in such a ways as to take that into account.

I am going to need to find a way to count these audiences that doesn't rely on sampling, because the audiences for any one piece of content will be too small to accurately reflect a larger population.

Audience measurement needs to shift its focus from using the channels that carry content as the proxy for content measurement to the content itself.

Many emerging media platforms do not carry content that cannot be engaged in another format; it really is simply a different platform. The content itself can be just what it is through television or on the radio. A metering service like Nielsen has long monitored audiences for programming (content), but it has always been specific to a vehicle (the network) and the medium (television). Now that media consumption has been separated from any specific medium, the metering of audiences has to be fixed to the content rather than the medium.

I focus on television from which to view the growing quandary of audience verification and qualification for a number of reasons. It was the television medium that spurred on the degree of audience measurement we have now: number of people, demographic breakdowns, et cetera. And television metering by Nielsen is moving to the measurement of smaller increments of time (minute-by-minute), which will give a better indication of ad ratings rather than just program ratings.

Another reason to focus on TV is that outside of direct mail and newspapers, television remains the biggest recipient of advertising dollars.

The future of media isn't going to be less programming like that which we see on TV, but rather more of that programming being watching through means other than what we understand as television.

This is the content that is getting the most attention, and so it will need to have the most focus. Media planners are going to be at a loss to provide quantifications and qualifications of audience that will satisfy their clients' requests for such information. Where can they go to get it?

How do I know who is engaging a particular medium and how many are doing so? Media measurement matters less than content measurement. The future isn't going to be about the identities or numbers of people watching TV; it's going to be about who or how many people are VCasting "Lost."

Does it matter?

In a post-accountable advertising world, does the monitoring and measuring of audiences really matter? If all I'm looking for is to instigate consumer actions, then what does it matter how many consumers there are or if the consumer is six or 60?

It matters because the bulk of advertising is a rhetorical exercise, an engagement of persuasion. All decisions to buy one product over another are not driven by impulse or an appeal of price/item. A great deal of our decision-making processes happens below the radar of the cerebral cortex and relate to matters beyond reason. Part of that rhetorical exercise is a matter of appealing to one's sense of self, and to do that effectively you have to know who you are addressing.

The number of people in an audience matters because I have to make decisions based on considerations of efficiency and potential volume of business.

Tracking audiences whose media consumption is no longer fettered to time and space is the biggest challenge of our future, not how to count an impression or whether more people will be using TiVo.

The next thing would be to determine just how audiences should be defined. If demographics are just proxies for behaviors, and behaviors are just proxies for states of mind, and states of mind may or may not be surrogates for purchasing potential, what is the best way to describe an audience?

Perhaps behavioral targeting companies can find a way to tap into the various media devices through which content is consumed; or maybe ad serving companies can.

Whatever may come, media planners are going to be stuck using substitutes for audience like impression counts, number of downloads or device penetration in a certain market.

These will work for now, but something better has to come along.

Jim Meskauskas is media strategies editor for iMedia Connection.