• by Jack Feuer , May 2, 2007

I was listening to Bad Religion on the nano, surfing on Ilovealpacas.com, monitoring cable news in case there was an update about Roseanne replacing Rosie, and texting my sister in New Jersey when I realized I was engaged in none of it. And I don't think my experience is unusual. In fact, it's commonplace.

The digital age is what, two years old, and already we're all cyber casualties. Too overwhelmed to move. Too tired to care. Buried in choices and driven by technology, we consume media like butterflies, flitting from one communication channel to the next and remembering less of it every jacked-in minute. And it never stops.

Tomorrow our mobile phones will fold our laundry for us. The day after tomorrow, we'll access Ilovealpacas.com from our clothes. The next day, our cars will nag us about using the turn signal, and a fully interactive billboard of a user-generated ad created by a pimple-faced kid in Akron for a domestic automaker will cause a 10-car pileup on the San Diego Freeway.

How do you measure numb?

This is the unforgiving soup in which the upfront must swim. The great paradox of endless options is that the more of them there are, the more difficult it becomes to truly connect. You can now interact with consumers a million different ways. And they now have a million and one ways to ignore you.

No wonder the new normal in upfront negotiations is not to buy television. Instead, the trick today is to jerry-rig a series of chase vehicles for the Long Tail that includes television and anything else that requires digital technology to work.

Attach this. Add that. Stream this. Wrap that. Link up to a piece of content -- a show about saucy doctors, say -- and follow the damn thing everywhere, wringing every last micro-second of "contact" you can. Scramble to keep up with an audience consuming media at such a frantic rate they don't even know where they heard or saw anything.

Well, OK, they know that if you save the cheerleader, you save the world, but that's the exception.

Most of us have no idea where we've heard anything, and we remember what we've seen even less. Was it online or offline? Basic or premium channel? Terrestrial or satellite-fed? Did I download it from iTunes or read it on a MySpace page?

Ladies and gentlemen, pick any platform you want. Pick them all, what the hell. We're still not paying attention.

Maybe commercial ratings will help. At least we've finally caught up with France. And live-plus, too, assuming the bickering over who pays for what doesn't flare anew. But trust me, DVR penetration isn't even close to the largest shadow on the marketplace.

The ever-more-distant consumer is the big bogeyman hovering over this year's upfront and beyond. Ratings upgrades and smarter, more thought-out digital plays are going to dominate the discussion this year, which is good. It's very good, in fact, because the two trends are invigorating the upfront. Our beloved annual buying bacchanal ought to go fine this time around, assuming everyone stays away from the Armory.

But tomorrow lurks like a hangover, when there will be even more options dividing consumers' attention and driving them to such distraction you couldn't arouse their interest with a cattle prod.

It's about time we counted who watches the commercials, even if they're only "average commercial minutes." It's great that there are a dozen different ways on a dozen and one different media channels to hitch on to "Lost." But it's not enough.

We still can't measure engagement (assuming we can even find it), except for IAG, some proprietary stuff, and dabbling here and there. There's chatter about it in this pre-upfront period, but it's drowned out by the roar over ratings.

See, wouldn't you really love to know if that user-generated Dove commercial on the Academy Awards got women thinking about the brand? Maybe tried it out? (A creative execution, it should be noted, that was produced by MindShare, not a creative agency -- another augury that only Irwin Gotlieb seems to be heeding in any meaningful way.)

Engagement is taking a sidekick role in this upfront, but the challenge it poses is the defining one of this media-business generation. Unlock its puzzle or perish. If you can't break through the fog of digital life, it won't matter how many people watched your commercial or saw your streaming video. You might as well stick to program ratings.

Clutter is media-agnostic.

Which is why I'm looking past this year's deal-fest and looking forward to the upfront of tomorrow, when the industry will be forced to get serious about engagement metrics instead of just talking endlessly about how much it wants them.

Because that's the only way you're going to get me and millions of my closest friends to stop worrying about whether Roseanne will be better than Rosie, and pay even the slightest attention to what you have to sell.