What I learned this year, and we absolutely must
address this in the future, is that the consumer adapts
to changes in content and content distribution and
technology and all that good stuff, they adjust to it
significantly faster than we the marketers do. If you look at the movement of viewership from
television
to online video, when you look at the use
of social
media, and you look at all the new apps for tablets, the
consumer adapts to that so much faster than the marketer
does, and with a significantly more creative lens.
We as marketers have to get more aggressive and speed
up our ability to adapt and to follow the consumer.
One of the biggest issues that I had with this past
upfront is that what really drove the pricing was not
an increase in demand. There was a little bit of increase
in demand, but the biggest driver of the pricing
was supply erosion. So are these people just no longer
consuming video? No. They’re consuming it in online
video, yet we’re not moving money there and following
the consumer at a fast enough rate. Thus we’re
raising the prices of television and we’re not truly following
where the consumer is going.
It’s amazing to see how certain smaller companies,
more mom-and-pop-type organizations, are using
Twitter and Facebook to drive their business, yet the
bigger brands haven’t really scratched the surface yet.
I thought we moved faster. And I saw this year we
moved at a slower rate than the consumer has, and I
think we’ve got to get our butts in gear.
