Fragments of Opportunity
Media fragmentation is a suitably obscure and professional-sounding term with which marketing and PR folk will sometimes regale clients.
You don’t need a PhD in semantics (or any other kind of antics) to know it simply means that increasingly specialised media outlets are producing increasingly specialised news and information for increasingly specialised groups of readers, listeners and viewers.
Just in case, though, I Googled the term and right at top of the listings came this definition:
Describes a trend to increasing choice and consumption of a range of media in terms of different channels such as web and mobile and also within channels, for example more TV channels, radio stations, magazines, more websites. Media fragmentation implies increased difficulty in reaching target audiences.
And there’s my beef – what is the basis for this complexity and difficulty?
OK, fragmentation makes it progressively harder to issue specialist messages to generic audiences. Good. Why would you want to, unless you think your target audience is everyone out there, which is likely to be simplistic or maybe a little self-delusory?
Far from being a barrier, media fragmentation can be seen as the media doing your audience segmentation for you, whether for PR, advertising or other purposes.
The opportunities to zero-in on pre-interested, high-value audience groups are immense. For instance, here at Lucid, we subscribe to a constantly updated global email database of thousands of print, broadcast and digital news outlets covering any topic under the sun (in fact, including The Sun).
And for advertising, there are now better ways of ensuring that finely targeted promotion gets to very narrow and specific interest groups, for instance through social media.
None of which has changed the need for sound strategic communications strategy, creative ideas, good writing skills and the ability to provide clarity around complex communication challenges. But, just because something is fragmented, doesn’t mean we can’t get it together.
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