• by Robin Neifield , September 21, 2011

The future of media will, at least partly, be about managing the overwhelming number of media options available to consumers. Long term it's likely to be driven by the yet-to-be-developed tools and utilities that will allow the consumer to make sense of the profusion of media options and allow him to time shift, curate, multi-task, edit, find, choose, rate, share and store the media bits he wants to have available.

Some of these utilities will be paid and others not. The best of them will cross-media platforms to provide single source efficiencies and intelligent recommendations. Content providers will be optimizing against these tools and utilities as the quickest route to gain placement, visibility and users/viewers while brands will (still) be scrambling for linkages to their audiences through their media choices. In this increasingly fractured environment brands have too many horses to bet on so performance-based options will be critical to reduce risk. Oh boy - there is a lot of work ahead of us!

Robin Neifield, CEO, Netplus