The media landscape has evolved tremendously over the last quarter century. Consumers have evolved even faster with the advent of high-speed Internet-enabled mobile devices and social media. Have your marketing efforts evolved with them? Marketing at the peak of the television era was relatively simple. There were broadcast shows that could give brands tremendous reach. There were also a growing number of cable channels that allowed smaller brands to afford broadcast advertising that could be delivered to more precise audience segments. It was easy for media agencies to find your target, and almost as simple to measure the response. Now …

Media's future will continue to be closely linked to politics, enabling people to demand accountability and authenticity. This is part of a long-term pattern: the telegraph and newspapers accelerated the revolutions of 1848 and TV helped the 1968 rebellions mushroom. And of course, this year, person to person communications via Social media and PDA's made the Arab Spring possible. And now, it has become nearly impossible for a regime to repress or ignore popular sentiment. Little wonder that in the States, we're seeing an increase in targeted "bottom up" political movements like americanselect.org which demands alternative candidates to the two …

A huge part of marketing has always been how well can people recognize your brand and packaging in store or on the street. But now you have a new set of 'eyes' to impress, image recognition algorithms. Image recognition is improving rapidly especially due to the investment from the military and government as they are using it for security reasons. Services like Google Goggles, Microsoft Vision, and Facebooks face recognition are bringing this to the consumer world and your products need to be created to be recognizable be machines. Design for media will need to be thought of as not …

Online advertising is one of the few industries growing in the US amid these lean economic times. Here in the US the market is so dynamic that we can get myopic, and must sometimes be reminded that there's a very big world out there. The industry is also growing worldwide, and brand advertisers everywhere are primed to spread their message to a global market and capitalize on increased inventory and the ease with which they can target internationally. But there are complications. According to the findings of a recent Econsultancy study commissioned by the Rubicon Project, the role of …

The word "sharing" in the online context immediately conjures up the social networking giants who have built entire businesses around the act. From photos to activities and now music, movies and every other imaginable type of media, sharing has become second nature for anyone with a Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn account. But sharing online has been around long before social networks came onto the scene. Remember when sharing a link consisted of cutting and pasting it into an email? It really wasn't that long ago. Though social networks have made it vastly easier to share by seamlessly integrating it …

A major transformation will take place in the global media industry as the needs of marketers and traditional analytics and data suppliers diverge. Fundamentally, the way marketers define information will radically change. Today, because of the continual inundation of new media and consumer-brand interactions, marketers are awash in too many metrics and data. The result is that marketers struggle to make sense of this "data torrent" that in terms of the sheer volume of data is overwhelming. To try to absorb the volume, many companies have formed "insight silos" across an organization, creating groups such as digital media …

Peak Oil refers to when oil production reaches the point of diminishing returns. Borrowing the concept, will there be a point when media consumption reaches a point of diminishing returns? Our research at MAGNAGLOBAL forecasts a steady increase in household adoption rates of media devices, time spent with media, and total consumer ad exposure. And in the era of ubiquitous connectivity, we are also anticipating a steady increase in simultaneous media consumption. Whether or not one can call the top, the point is that our lives are becoming increasingly mediated. Total Mediation will profoundly impact how we learn, tell stories, …

Every nervous newspaper editor in the country knows that media needs new revenue to survive. The solution we are exploring is to invest in media as an asset to the 360-degree platform we provide the businesses we want to work with. While it is certainly not the New York Times model of independent journalism, we believe it is in our own interest to produce the most independent and authoritative media product we can. It is a hybrid for the online media age, when consumers are already more actively engaged with brands than ever before.The elements of this hybrid include …

Media is advancing to the state where trends are both developing on individual tracks and are converging simultaneously creating a melding of opportunities. Smart marketers know that for their brand story to be relevant with consumers they need to leverage these trends and be part of the recipe for this rapid change. From our vantage point as a digital marketing technology company, there are four major forces shaping the future of media. But these four trends are not independent, they are also converging, and tapping into this media-meld holds value for advertisers: Media personalization is expected by consumers: …

The media prognosticator field is a crowded one. I can't say I'm too inclined to join it. I'm no Nostradamus. I'm a sales guy. My crystal ball clocks time in quarters, not years or decades. So take my predictions with a grain of salt. But know that they come rooted firmly in the reality of the marketplace. And that reality is that TV content will continue to drive the future of media. There was an interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago. Its central premise was one I can get behind: "the very fragmentation of …