Today there has been a great battle waging in the media, marketing, and advertising industries between the irresistible force of convergence battling with the immovable object of today's media and advertising industries. It seems that the immovable object has lost to convergence.
Convergence has flipped competition from a property-based model of owning or exploiting titles, channels, media, movies, books, etc... to a service-based model of owning, engineering, and exploiting knowledge of customer preferences. As a technology professional with a great deal of retail experience I see that the media and advertising space is going to start to look a lot more like consumer retail with a new bread of individual, the media consumer. Today's Internet provides media and content providers limitless ad space, the real challenge is to engineer an experience that will bring the media consumers to the content.
Organizations, companies, and advertisers can no longer rely on owning content and distributing and segmenting this content according to mediums such as radio, television, etc... Instead, modern companies must learn to serve their content in a ubiquitous manner that can be accessed and experienced by the new generation of media consumers in any medium.
Apparel, travel & leisure, financial services, home electronics, real-estate, automobiles, and a host of other consumer touching industries have embraced this new convergence through e-commerce not wholly by choice, rather by necessity. Yesterday's Internet Surfers demanded more content, more relevance, and a more engaging experience this motivation drove the transformation of these industries into a new beast, and has created a global e-business economy. Media and marketing executives now have a new challenge of reaching these consumers. The days of the push-oriented media are gone and have been replaced with the converse a pull-oriented, on-demand, cross medium model. Media executives and marketers now have the challenge of creating experiences to sell products, retain customers, and open new markets for their goods and services.