Post Divisionalist Thinking
Mark at PHD in San Francisco posted this up that he found… a chart of predicted media split up to 2020.
It’s a good chart, and handy for presentations (though in my opinion a little too optimistic that by 2020 people will still be spending more time watching TV than using the internet).
But the box in the top corner for me is telling the real story; by 2020 80% of the hours we spend with media will be ‘digital’. Which, let’s be honest, might as well be all of it.
Faris pointed out the other day that even if a medium isn’t digital, people will use digital things to ‘augment’ it themselves anyway. Sharing their thoughts on the X Factor through facebook, twitter, forums etc. They take non-‘digital’ media and make it ‘digital’.
And he also pointed out, rightly, that it’s increasingly irrelevant to keep using the term ‘digital’.
We need more ‘Post Divisionalist Thinking‘. It’s not ‘digital’ and ‘traditional’. You can’t separate the two on a media plan, or indeed for the people you’re trying to reach out to.
At the risk of sounding trite, it’s all just stuff. Things that you, as a meadja person, use to try and connect people with companies.
We didn’t group the old stuff together because it was all made of atoms, or all broadcast over radio waves. So we shouldn’t group the new stuff together because it’s all made of digital bits.
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