The always excellent Henry Jenkins of MIT has a good post about the future of network TV. A metaphor really stands out. We are moving from blocks of eyeballs to a mosaic of niches.
I think both creative and media agencies (the definitive companies of the block) have become a little drunk of late with the promise of the mosaic, the niche and the small community of interest. We picture a kind of marketing Haight Ashbury with a thousand small flowers all at once in bloom. It is desperately seductive. But our jobs (and the ability of any of our clients of scale to market themselves) are built on the aggregation of audiences. Mainstream television might not be so good at getting our audience in one place anymore but the business need hasn't gone away. So we need to be make a unified, intelligible picture from the scattered fragments of the mosaic.
