1) Outdoor and in-store are major media locations

-Need to consider these as outlets for receiving messages.
-Outdoor:
-Billboards, Mobile media
-Companies know more of you inside the house than they do outside
-What does it mean to be “known in a public location?”
-What happens when marketers can track you on the move

-Indoor:
-Video monitors, shelf-talkers, mats, radios
-Supermarkets are ripe for study
-Progressive Grocer magazine

2) Names for traditional media are increasingly metaphors

-What does it mean to watch television?
-The answers do and will mean different things than they have
-Used to be seen as a domestic box
-Privacy was never an issue
-Sender didn’t know receiver

-Defining mass communication is now very difficult
-Does it even exist anymore?
-Turow’s definition: Industrialized construction and distribution of messages through technological devices
-Two-way mediated communication complicates this
-Online versions of TV, newspapers, magazines

-What is a newspaper offline or online? Are they different? Same? What about magazines? Radio?

-Raises issues about the context in which people receive messages, how they use messages, etc.

3) Marketers are increasingly troubled by sample-based ratings research

-There has been a push-back over the past few years
-E.g. C3 (Nielsen)
-Transforms television ratings into ad ratings
-Live plus 3 days (with DVR)
-Changing the currency of television

-The idea of ratings, as a construction of reality, is changing

-Holy Grail: Person-to-person ratings

-Web:
-ComScore and Nielsen Media Metrics
-Problematic when you put them side-by-side
-The numbers don’t match up
-Internet Advertising Bureau
-Attempting to change and standardize
-Evaluating the popularity of a page
-First: clicks
-Next: page-views
-problem: xml format that allows pages to automatically update (leads to less page views counted; decreased ad rates)
-Now: Time spent on a site
-Automatically changes what sites are important
-A new reality constructed by ratings

-Radio:
-Old model: Diary-based currency
-Problem: people were supposed to remember what they listened to
-Next: Peoplemeter
-Stations encode with inaudible watermarks
-Only in Houston and Philadelphia
-Overnight, radio changed
-Realization that people listened to more stations and different stations were more popular
-Some stations changed formats
-Problem: don’t have to actually be listening, just exposed
-Still a social construction of reality

-“Web as a test bed”
-A model for advertisers

4) “Smart” (database-driven) ad-serving companies are vying to stand at the center of media advertising

-Google
-Ad-serving company
-Stands between the advertiser and the consumer
-Ad Sense network (1000s of sites)
-Relates words on the site to ads and loads them
-Moving into other media industries
-Being an advertising business across media platforms

-Database-driven
-The more a company like Google knows about you the more they can tailor ad content and serve it to you wherever you are

-Goal: Serve up hyper-targeted ads to consumers across platforms
-Imagine Google collaborating with Comcast; combining data

-Versioning: Sees people getting different versions of programs (e.g. 60 Minutes)

5) Location-based marketing companies are trying to exploit all the previously mentioned trends.

-Location-specific advertising

-Tracking people across time and space

-Have a ton of data, but the level of analytical sophistication is still low

-Location-specific marketing
-Outdoor advertising is growing
-B/c people are on the move more than ever

-Phone companies
-Guard your location
-Want any marketing that goes to you to go through them

-CRM in supermarkets
-Experiments have given people computers and catered discounts to each customer as they walk through the store

Conceptual Lenses to think about these trends

-Rethinking public space
-What does it mean now that you are less anonymous in the conventional sense?

-Social Comparison
-What does this mean when your next-door neighbor is seeing different ads/content?

-Civic, social, and industrial identities
-How are these changing?

-Institutional and industrial trust and risk
-People don’t trust companies
-How do you gain their trust?

-New ways to order social interactions as a consequence of technologies

-And more…

Q&A

-What about collective experiences?
-A lot less water cooler talk; collective experiences
-Every society needs both segment-making and society-making media
-Buzz w/in niches instead of mass buzz is the new reality

-Common rhetoric in advertising circles
-WWII united America: people wanted collective experiences
-The Vietnam War: began to splinter people
-Advertisers, technologies and media industries followed suit in segmenting and targeting consumers more and more over the latter part of the 20th century
-New rhetoric: Audience is in control…What do we do about it?
-Answers:
1. Find out as much about them as we can
2. Be wherever they are

-“We are in a post-privacy era.”
-Easy to cultivate permission

-Engagement

-Studies you would like to see done?

-Pay attention to the flow of data across media platforms
-Understand how people move across media boundaries
-Use of links across boundaries
-Are people aware that they’re handing data over as they move across these boundaries?
-Cross-media linkages that are technologically enabled

...and some commentary

While some of his observations and speculations may be new to
researchers in communication, it seems that people in marketing, as
well as those who work with industry-folk are well aware. In fact,
some of his points reiterated things I first heard from both Ed Malthouse (Medill's IMC program) and Bobby Calder (Kellogg's Media Management Program)
last spring, as well as my attendance at a number of the NU Media Management Center's symposia.

Additionally, as a regular reader of the media trade presses, it seems
that industry people are in tune with these trends as well. I know
that Turow is an avid reader of the trade presses and my guess is that
these informed his talk. So, it seems the point was to clue
communications researchers into these trends and motivate them to take
these as sites for future research.

Furthermore, you'll notice that he repeatedly refers to audiences as
social constructions of reality. While I don't argue this point, he
seems to more or less downplay audience research and stresses the need
to focus on the production side. I tend to view this as a dialectical
relationship. That is, while the producers control what is available
to audiences, aggregations of those audiences (while they may be
constructions) influence the decisions made by producers, and thus are
just as important to study.

Finally, I completely agree with his call for cross-platform research.
I would argue that media habits are not mutually exclusive across
different platforms. In most of my work, I attempt to understand
audience patterns across various media. This affords a more complete
picture of consumption habits.