More Targeted Content….More Targeted Advertising

Every day it seems like I read two kinds of articles. 

The first is about how content production is becoming more and more diversified.  Of course, the implication is that this growth is inversely proportional to the size of the audiences for each type of piece of content.  This is why, as I’ve written about before, live sports broadcasts have become one of, if not the most important content for television networks. 

The second type of article I seem to see every day is about privacy concerns and more specifically, a conversation about how companies like Google want to utilize the more targeted content to generate more targeted advertising.  The logic works like this.  “So you watched a video about whitewater kayaking, huh?  You must like the outdoors, so let me sell you a tent”

Interestingly, I haven’t seen many articles that connect the relationship between more targeted content and more targeted advertising into a broader discussion about how we might use the relationship to transform advertising and enrich content even more.

Our current advertising model is built on the number of eyeballs or ears that a medium reaches, not on whether or not it reaches the desired audience.  As a result, for the most part pricing is based on how many people are reached, not on effectiveness.  For that reason, niche content producers online that have tried to sell advertising have struggled because they simply cannot make enough.  And so this has favored Big Digital and we are back to a bigger is better model. 

What if we went the other way?  What if the solution to the problem that niche content producers have is not to give up and go to bigger channels, but to go smaller?  What if we went all the way down to the individual.  What if I sold the rights to my eyeballs and my ears based on the content I’m viewing?  It’s an idea I’m playing with and I’d love your thoughts.  You can email me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or tweet me @dfnssr or @hotspotdigital.

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