Showing big-name clients how to get results

Tobaccowala is one of the industry’s leading media strategists, and that makes him one of the new oracles on Madison Avenue. Media strategists are the people who decide where to spend advertising dollars – across Yahoo’s sites, on ABC’s Desperate Housewives, or in The New York Times Sunday Style section. They used to rank just above accountants as the kind of people advertisers wanted to meet in the industry. In recent years, however, disdain has been replaced with adulation as the attention spans of consumers have shrunk. With the Internet, ad-skipping digital video recorders (DVRs), video cell phones, and portable music and video players all vying for their attention, consumers are getting harder to track. And that’s putting media strategists on the speed dials of advertisers befuddled by the changing landscape.

With a sterling track record, Tobaccowala is first among the new stars of ad agencies. His message to clients now is that they must get used to being in a permanent state of discomfort. The forces unleashed by tech on the ad world are gaining momentum and leading to even more unexpected developments. “Blogs and podcasting have gone from ‘What are those?’ to mainstream in less than two years. Rupert Murdock paid $580 million to acquire a social-networking business [MySpace.com], and Google’s market cap is higher than Viacom’s,” he says.

He’s less than impressed with some of the supposed solutions offered by others on Madison Avenue. One example: product placement in movies and TV, a common tactic advertisers are using to combat the popularity of DVRs. Tobaccowala dismisses most of them as “lazy”.

His advice? Adapt to consumers’ changing behaviour rather than try to cling to the status quo. People’s preference for consuming content when they want it will only grow, he says. He predicts 30% of U.S. homes will have DVRs in less than two years. Pair this preference for on-demand content with the ability to search for video on Google or Yahoo, download it over speedy broadband links, and zip it to the living room TV, and traditional TV schedules will be rendered meaningless.

Tobaccowala sees loads of opportunity in this new world. Think of how people get lost for hours surfing the New net, he says. In the near future they will start doing that with flat-panel TVs in their living rooms. And advertisers will have much more information they can use to target particular viewers. Rather than knowing simply what percentage of 18- to 25-year-olds watch Desperate Housewives, they’ll be able to figure out which people watch, how frequently, and what they’ve been searching for recently on the Net. Advertising can become more science and less art.

Traditional media, from television to newspapers, will continue to be plenty important, he says. But he thinks they need to change their ways, too. They have to provide news and entertainment in a greater variety of forms and help advertisers target consumers in the various media. “We are hungry for information and will value those who do a superior job of editing the ocean of material there is,” he says.

Business Week, 2005

Notes

1. TiVo (TV Your Way) – information website for TiVo digital video recording set-top device for personal television. TiVo works with a growing number of agencies and clients from many industries to deliver branded entertainment and special offers to TiVo viewers. It is a new type of advertising and entertainment. TiVo partners are: Universal Music, New Line Cinema, Best Buy, BMW and more.
2. blog (web log) – интерактивный сайт: easy-to-use web site where you can quickly post any information or news. New stuff shows up at the top. Visitors can read what’s new, then they can comment on it, or link to it, or e-mail
3. podcasting (a combination of “broadcasting” and “iPod”) – a term used to describe a collection of technologies for automatically distributing audio and video programs over the internet via a publish and subscribe model. Podcasting enables independent producers to create self-published, syndicated “radio-shows”, and gives broadcast radio or TV programs a new distribution method. In the podcasting model, the publisher publishes a list of programs in a special format, known as a “feed”, on the web. A user who wants to see or hear the podcast subscribes to the feed in special “podcasting” software, which periodically checks the feed and automatically downloads new programs as they become available
4. social networking –сетевое общение:refers to a category of internet applications to help connect business partners or othe rindividuals together using a variety of tools. Websites using the “Circle of Friends” online social networks started appearing in 2001. This form of social networking, widely used in virtual communities, became particularly popular in 2003. MySpace is an example of such a website. There are other 200 social networking sites, and major companies have entered the Internet social networking space, being organized around business connections
5. Viacom – an official website containing facts about the company, shareholder information, businesses, announcements, and employment opportunities
6. Video-on-demand (VOD) systems are systems which allow users to select and watch video content over a network as part of an interactive television system. VOD systems are either “streaming”, in which viewers can start as the video streams over the internet, or ”download”, in which the program is brought in its entirety to a set-top box before viewing starts. All video on demand systems allow the viewer to pause, fast forward, fast rewind, slow forward, jump to previous, etc. Streaming VOD systems are available from cable providers
7. New.net ( Domain Software)povidesa better way to navigate the Web