No one contests that there have been amazing advancements in media over the passed few decades. However, as with most innovations, problems arise as a consequence of the changes innovation creates.

Looking out at the state of marketing today, I am convinced that Awareness is the Achilles Heel of modern media. The reason why is that there is a confluence of factors – something of a perfect storm – that threatens to swallow up and sink without a trace even the most creative and intriguing communications efforts. Here are the substorms I see coming together:

I. Splintered media undermine Awareness efficiences.
Say what you will about the old world of three TV networks and a modest number of magazines, newspaper and radio stations, but back then it was pretty cost-effecient to build awareness through a media spend. Today people are scattered across an infinitely more complex media space and getting enough bang for a traditional media buck is only getting harder.

II. Pervasive, consumer empowered media undermine discovery.
We’re all 100% in control of our programming intake. That means we can search for topics that interest us and find endless amounts of media to experience. If we can quite literally fill our days with media focused on things we’re already interested in, what time (and fraction of our attention) is left for discovering new interests and passions? Add to this the time constraints we all experience with our demanding lifestyles. Ultimately, there is less time and opportunity to become aware of something we weren’t aware of before.

III. Social media speed is incompatible with business speed.
Business is moving faster than ever. Innovations become parity quickly. Entire industries erupt seemingly overnight. In this sprinter’s marketplace, most companies have taken on the form of competitive runners – they’re lean and streamlined, without the time, people or budget to wait too long for Awareness to build. Yet social media, for all of its efficiencies, works slowly as an Awareness builder on a scale anywhere near what mass media used to deliver. Word of mouth spreads slowly, from person to person to person yet many companies are structured such that they require a critical volume of new customers if they’re to remain in business.

A Perfect Storm.
These are the ingredients of a perfect storm. Traditional media are getting worse at building Awareness efficiently  while consumer empowerment narrows the window of opportunity for discovery. Meanwhile lean businesses need to achieve revenue quickly and do not have the resources to wait out long, slow Awareness builds. Nor do they have the resources to sustain big mass media campaigns.

The following image is my attempt to visualize the problem in terms of the relative wave profiles of four media approaches:

Admittedly, this is not a scientific diagram, but a gestural sketch. The attempt here is to visualize when an investment in a media campaign begins to pay off. The ‘Resource Neutral’ line would indicate roughly an even return on investment. That is, the company gets back in awareness, sales, etc. what it invested in time, money and human capital. This is plotted on a y-axis indicating the passage of time.

Media waves – the splashes and ripples
Mass media both in the early and late stages cost a good deal to get out the door. Early mass media (Let’s say from the Industrial Revolution until the its apex in the 1960′s – advertising’s golden age) would pay this off relatively quickly in high awareness splash with a reasonable lingering ripple effect (the descending curve to the right of the apex of its spike). Back then, there were simply fewer products and less advertising so repeat impressions and subsequent overall retention was easier to achieve.

Late mass media (beginning say in the 1970′s) continue to get more expensive (starting deeper in deficit) and build less awareness (the ‘return’ spike is not as high) for every dollar spent. Similarly the lingering effect is shorter because we have far more products and advertising messages today which lower recall, retention and awareness for any one marketer. The well-known reality is, fewer people remember less advertising for shorter periods of time today. This is compounded by the consumer-empowerment aspect of modern dgitial media which allows people to evade advertising easily.

The viral media campaign is rather less expensive to kick off (a benefit of the low-fidelity Internet and free distribution system), and if it goes viral (which is a challenge on its own) returns a quick burst of significant awareness as this or that video rockets across the referral grapevine. However, the lingering effect is very short as viral is something of a shooting star phenomenon especially with our Internet-empowered collective A.D.D. Viral is also very hard to sustain because frequency in a campaign-like format tends to make something less virally relevant with each execution. Not always, but more often than not.

Wholly different, but not without its challenges, is the long-tail like shape of the social media approach. Here the cost deficit is low (though it can be formidable in terms of human capital when attending to a cocktail of social media outposts in order to get sufficient coverage). However, the time it takes to build Awareness among a sufficient volume of people can be quite long. Like the long tail, the Awareness benefit of social media happens in onesies-twosies not in efficient mass hits.

This is important to note, especially in light of the hype surrounding social media, and here’s why:

One reason is Awareness is just the beginning of the sales funnel. From there more time (and resources) must be added to informing that awareness, persuading to the point of conviction, and stoking purchase. Social media can be very good as the latter three points, but its long Awareness building cycle offsets some of these gains.

The second reason is related to the first. All companies, large and small, have a resource burn rate. Small ventures have limited resources and if they run out before sufficient Awareness (and, by conversion, sales) accrue, they will shut down. Similarly, large established businesses that built themselves up to national or global stature (interestingly, often as a result of success in the mass media past) have greater operating costs and therefore revenue needs and they can’t afford to wait long periods to build sufficient Awareness and sales to satiate the voracious appetite of their massive enterprises.

Weathering the Perfect Storm.
Let’s say I’m planning a business or a new product line within an existing business. I’m inundated daily with numerous case studies and ideas as to why TV is still relevant, social media is the future, direct marketing and promotion yield results, experiential marketing matters most, etc. etc. How do I sort all of this out and determine a media mix that will work for me?

There are two factors to consider and they should be considered early on, before money is poured into product development or opening the businesses. Missing either, in my opinion, is no different than setting out to sea with a light crew, limited supplies and that perfect storm sitting offshore. Sure, you may make it, but I’d bring along a life jacket.

First, know your audience’s media usage profile. There are huge differences between generations, ethnicities, socio-economic levels, education levels etc. in terms of media preferences and consumption. A good portion of the right media mix will be defined by what a target audience prefers. Rather than letting the media-of-the-week define the strategy, let customers.

Second, know the realities of your run rate. If an audience is dictating a largely social media approach bake the accompanying long Awareness cycle into the business plan and make sure to have sufficient resources to wait it out. Think through the rollout strategy and find ways to keep the business running on limited revenue during the early stages of this slow-build process.

If, on the other hand, the target audience is still largely reliant on traditional (and expensive) mass media, planning for this in advance will help as well. Depending on their media usage profile, there may be efficiencies to a limited initial mass media launch that seemlessly feeds into a more localized social media play. There may also be a way of amplifying the impact of those expensive mass media dollars through continuity offline via experiential marketing.

There is no shortage of available media tools. The trick is to understand the relative splash and ripple effect of all of these media such that a cohesive strategy is drawn up in which the costly quick hit Awareness media catalyze the slower building Awareness media and all point to the marketing funnel that ultimately leads to that lifeblood of industry – revenue.

I’ve written before that developing this strategy might best be accomplished by thinking from the bottom-up and inside-out.

By understanding the relative splash and ripple effects of media, a company can limit how many resources it pumps into the more costly channels while balancing the potential risk of resource depletion while waiting out a long cycle social media Awareness build.