It's About The Consumer, Stupid! by DAM News Staff

August 31, 2010

: Image by finnur.malmquist via Flickr

MediaPost Publications It’s About The Consumer, Stupid! 08/23/2010.byRob Griffin

Here we are, roughly midway through 2010, and I find myself thumbing back through old articles onSearch Insider, like my first of 2010, titled“The Opportunity Impact Of Change.” As I looked back at trends, my own thoughts, and how our business has evolved I recognized a theme — which is not surprising, for, as they say, vision is usually 20/20 in hindsight. That theme is around the art of pinpointing and predicting future value — and how often this gets separated from where value is actually created.

Simply put, value is created by the end consumer, and everything flows back up the food chain from there. This seems really simple, but all too often this gets over-thought and muddled with the confusion of one’s organizational place within the food chain. History has seen it before, and our industry is rich in change and opportunity with lots of exposed risk.

Let’s start with where value has traditionally been made in the media world: TV and creative as a mechanism to drive value and extract value in return. We have seen in everyone’s favorite show, “Mad Men,” how the transition from creative to media+creative went. In our industry we go through long periods of the same punctuated by quick spurts of massive change. So fast-forward to this year, where we have watched how strong digital has become and how much search is a part of the post-recession growth. I wrote about this in an article titled“My Big-Bang Change Theory.” Just a few months ago afterMedia Post’s Search Insider Summit, I also wrote abouthow consumers were driving change in our industry — but how much have we changed in how we drive value for our clients, based on how consumers’ behavior is changing?

Continues @http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Archives.showArchive&author=1220