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February 21, 2009
The Decline Of Reach
How do you communicate with your prospects and customers? That once-simple simple question has gotten increasingly complicated as traditional media lose their reach and relevance, as online tools like e-mail become more challenging due to Inbox overload, and as evolving economics put pressure on already strapped budgets.
One area that has become especially thorny for marketers is the concept of reach -- a traditional measure/metric that is rapidly losing its meaning for both pricing and marketing effectiveness. Relied on during the heyday of broadcast advertising, reach has less and less meaning in a world driven by search marketing and expanding social media. Consumers and business buyers are increasingly triggered by different cues and have less loyalty than ever to individual media properties. Even when media reach is broad, its alue can be questioned. As Steve Rubel wrote in a December 2008 AdAge article, How Digital Media Will Deliver Tangible Benefits, "After all, if a site claims that it reaches millions but they're all just drive-bys, do such figures truly matter?" Such is the impact of technology that let's consumers interact with media in richer ways and lets marketers monitor and leverage that degree of engagement.
All this is leading to a crumbling of traditional publishing and communications infrastructures...as reader/reach metrics have less meaning the value of ads declines. In turn this is forcing marketers to explore new ways to communicate with their customers or to reach new prospects. Failure to acknowledge the changes can kill marketing programs regardless of the quality of the creative or the apparent logic of the media plan.
Posted by jcioban at February 21, 2009 10:15 AM
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