• by Betsy Frank , September 21, 2011

I have always believed that media doesn't drive consumer behavior as much as consumer behavior informs the media we use. "Back in the day," when the conventional wisdom was "If you build it, they will come," I used to say (and still do), "When they are ready to come, you had better have it built!" For the better part of the 90's, predictions around the consumer embrace of interactive TV were rampant and aggressive, but until consumers understood interactivity from their use of engagement with the internet, TV would remain a passive, static experience. Without the web, and the way consumers could control and participate in media, nothing else would have been feasible. So consumers need to change before the media do. I found a speech I wrote in 1999, where I quoted George Daniels: "No single invention-and no group of them taken together in isolation from non-technological elements-ever changed the direction in which a society was going... (T)he direction in which a society was going determines the nature of its technological innovations. Habits seem to grow out of other habits, far more directly than they do out of gadgets."

BETSY FRANK is the Chief Research and Insights Officer, Time, Inc.