• by John Gaffney , September 29, 2002

Riffs On Two Days Of Forecast 2003

Buckets: Mediapost (parent of Media magazine and all the newsletters you get including this one) put on a Forecast 2003 conference in NYC last week. There were two days. Wednesday focused on traditional media; Thursday focused on a forecast for the Internet business. Now, maybe it was the focus on separate days that caused this, but I was surprised at how much people still think in two buckets about media in 2002. It you’re a planner/buyer it is no longer the Internet bucket and the offline media bucket. It’s one big bucket. In fact, I liken today’s media choices to a theme park. There’s some safe and boring rides and some new and exciting ones, but there all in the same place. Integration, to me, is no big deal. It simply means including all your options when planning and buying media. But it has to start from a mindset. The Internet is not the haunted house that some people seemed to think it was on the traditional day of this conference. Nor is it the wild roller coaster some saw it as on the Internet day. It’s a medium that is unparalleled in its ability to target and measure advertising performance. And it has been proven time and time again that it is the best medium for data capture and CRM. No more; no less.

CRMing: I also continue to be mystified by why people have such as a hard time defining CRM. Probably because it means different things for different people. Simply put, CRM is how you or your client relates to customers. If you’re not relating to your customer, don’t worry, you won’t be in business long enough to worry about a definition.

Fashion Buckets: Having said what I said about thinking of media in one place, I will say that Internet forecast day had better hairdos on men and women, much more hair gel on men, cooler shoes and better appetites.