PHOTO: CHIP SIMONS
Reaching The Simultaneous Media Multitasking Consumers
It used to be that your teenage kids were the only ones listening to music, zipping off instant messages, searching the Internet, and talking on the telephone all at the same time. But the explosion of technology and choices has pushed media multitasking across the generational divide. Everyone is now a simultaneous consumer of media. Those new patterns of consumption create challenges and opportunities for companies that can navigate the terrain.
Marketers, in particular, are struggling with ways to reach people in a world of “foreground” and “background” media--the latter being a fade-in, fade-out form that grabs consumers’ attention only occasionally. Think of the TV show that runs at a low hum while you work on a computer. Or the podcast that plays between telephone calls. The challenge: projecting the effectiveness of any given message in this multilayered world. Perhaps background media should be priced lower than foreground media. A more radical thought: With multiple layers of media playing at once, we have 48 or more hours of media coming at us in a 24-hour time frame. What’s the business model for that?