Interesting times. We’ve got a “media democracy” happening today, where the content we consume is no longer defined by a select group of publishers and no single form of media captures all of our attention. Like breakfast cereals, there are plenty of media choices available to consumers.

The 4th screen is mobile. Don't leave home without it.

Clearly, because of the speed and breadth of technology innovation, our content consumption preferences are changing. But what are we doing, as marketers and advertisers (yes, I’m talking to both the buy and sell sides), to take advantage of that shift? As Jonathan Mendez pointed out in a blog post, “…understanding the way people consume media is paramount to optimizing it for revenue generation.”

Well said, Jonathan, “Crusader for Relevance” that you are. Today more than ever, it’s imperative that we take the time to figure out where the consumers are, what they’re talking about and in what format we should deliver the content they’re consuming if we want to maximize the opportunity to interact (and transact) with them.

There's a content consumption profile for everyone. What's yours?

The great thing about working in digital is that we don’t have to guess about any of this. We have incredibly rich stores of real-time data we can pull from, turning a wait-and-see historical approach into a just-in-time, highly proactive approach. And because today’s technology is so damn effective and in the case of Google Analytics, free, we can and should be measuring everything because as we’ve all found out (or will at some point), you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

When you couple the ad networks and exchanges, with their automated processes of buying and selling ad inventory, to this ability to precisely measure consumers’ content consumption preferences, you’ve got the power to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time in the right place. Of course, we’ll all need to get a lot better at the math, but we’re talking near real-time execution down to the site level. And if it ain’t working the way we planned, we can change it – in real-time. Jeepers!

Yes, my friends. It’s time to really hunker down and work to understand the changing content consumption preferences of the consumers whose attention (and interaction) we so desperately want. The days of putting an advert on 3 networks to reach 80% of the female population in America are gone. It’s a highly fragmented media free-for-all out there and the consumer, wherever she’s consuming her content, is in charge.

Listen up.

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