Jeff Jarvis writes about decision makers from the advertising industry meeting for discussing the metrics for TV advertising. The advertising rates now are decided by calculating the audience rate a program might have. As such, the model involves a strong correlation between the ads and the TV shows - advertisers look at which programs are best rated and what audience they have. The decision is made by using a proxy - the TV show rating - for targeting a particular interest of a market segment.
An easy example would be a beer producer advertising during a sport event broadcast and assuming that people watching it would be interested in drinking beer. Now, it is evident that not everybody watching sport is beer drinker. Some may be kids, some may have a non alchoholic life, some may enjoy other drinks. Some of them may be beer drinkers but nobody can say for sure how many, the best they can come up with is a guesstimate. The higher the audience rate for that event is the higher the bias of this assumption may get. And this leads to wasted marketing.
In this context, measuring the audience for ads instead of having the program ratings as a reference may prove more useful. It reduces the bias and permits marketers getting what they paid for in terms of audience to their ads. What does this mean? Instead of TV stations creating targeted content for getting targeted advertising - their main revenue stream after all - they should look at the consumers by their interests. Instead of throwing ads at a sport broadcast, the beer company may find a better channel for getting to the beer drinkers community - the exact target - hence getting a better return for their marketing spending. It is all about understanding the behavior of a network of people (beer drinkers in this case) and finding the right channel for communicating the message. And this translates into need-to-have-INFORMATION.
Wasted marketing is a problem and I believe that knowing the consumers well may lead to reducing it. Consequently, info-based organizations are most likely to succeed and this may change a bit the advertising industry configuration. Jarvis puts it best:
"Advertising will be all about ad hoc networks of people rather than content. [...] You turn your attention from buying content to marketing to consumers, all that changes. [...] So the network is redefined. It's not a network of content. It's a network of people. And really hasn't that always been the holy grail of advertising: It's about us, the consumers, the people."
