The idea of a fragmented media landscape is today mostly unchallenged. It is also wrong.
Media looks fragmented when we apply traditional agency categorisations to modern media behaviours. When we split “listening to music” across analogue radio and digital radio and music apps, mainly because of how media is traded.
These trading categories can play tricks: where the choice of evening big-screen viewing is C4, ITVX, Netflix or YouTube, consumption pie charts paint a picture of fragmentation. But to normal people this is just TV today, not too dissimilar to their navigation of countless TV channels in the early 2010s.
We endlessly split media consumption between media owners, or points of access – whether it’s on a big screen, in a web browser, through an app, on a tablet, a phone or a widget – adding complexity. These splits mostly tell us that agency life is a headache (true), and that advertisers can expect some inefficiency (yes), and that people have lots of devices (ditto). But it obscures the basic fact that 18-34s still consume nearly 4 hours of video a day, that everyone listens to about the same amount of audio, and that – crucially – people are concentrated in fewer media platforms than ever.
This myth leads to bad advice. Audiences are not « dispersed across a vast array of niche outlets”, in any meaningful sense: they’re all watching TV (on one of their devices), listening to the radio, using Google, Facebook, YouTube and Netflix. You can reach them all searching or shopping, messaging or traveling.
That last point is really important: as an advertiser, you can take a single asset – video, audio, animated, still, text – and get it in front of any segment you want, at any volume you choose. Your storytelling can be broadcast or personalised, singular or atomised. Generally, you do not need any single media or platform to reach any single audience – which is the literal opposite of how things used to work. How you seek to influence the audience is today your choice.
Fragmentation is an agency problem, not an advertiser problem. The challenge – how your budget will generate maximum long-term benefit for your brand – has never been less about how we reach an audience and never been more about how we create meaningful influence.
h/t Peter Buckley for the inspiration