• by Felicia Greiff , November 13, 2015

If 2015 was the year the markets became aware of shifting media consumption to digital, according to a new report by Forrester Research, then what will happen in 2016? That’s the question Forrester aims to answer in its new media and marketing study, “Media’s Unbundling Accelerates.”

Luca Paderni, vice president and research director serving B2C marketing professionals, said the biggest takeway from the report is the shift from targeting content to targeting audiences, meaning that marketers will insist on hitting a more refined audience profile with data like purchase behavior or demographics. Viewership isn’t the same thing as audience, he said.

Targeted content offers some degree of information on the average Web page viewer, but the “customer journey,” as Paderni described it, is much more than that. It’s about learning what people do during the course of their day and how content fits into that, he said. 

“Even if ESPN thinks [tuning into its programming] is the most important thing [consumers] do in the day, it’s not. It’s one of 75 things they do in their day,” Paderni said.

Other key takeaways include:

• Publishers will embrace the unbundling of media to access customers: “[Unbundling] is really happening much faster than we thought, frankly, and it’s the biggest pot of money. I think in a couple of years, the difference between TV and digital video is going to be pretty meaningless," Paderni said. By unbundling, Forrester is referring to cord-cutting, over-the-top TV services, mobile video, and other behaviors that untether consumers from traditional TV.
• First-party data is becoming a strategic priority: "There’s a realization from both marketers and publishers that if you’re ready to buy audiences and not viewers, but you’re buying a series of interactions with content, you need a set of unique data to inform that buy," Paderni said.
• Brands will impose their own quality standards on viewability and ad fraud: In fact, large media buyers are going to decide on their own standards. "They’ll find a definition of viewability and stick with it," Paderni said.