In an interview with Bill Gates, Bob Garfield from Ad Age asked him about the effect of the digital world on marketing and whether they will be like that Titanic and go down with the ship.
Gates responded saying that it's not going to be disruptive in the instantaneous sort of way but rather "it's more evolutionary than that." He added that it's "not some overnight cataclysm," but will rather work itself out year after year.
He also said that the new tools should be adopted and the increasing ways that you can target will help immensely in the near future.
He's talking about the improving ability of metrics and targeting across various portals, platforms and Web sites. Here's a good metrics site you can check out on this.
In response to a question talking about the change from reaching a mass audience to a fragmented one, Gates said that reaching them will become just as easy as it used to be by making a buy for a single TV show. It's not that you can't get large number anymore, it's that the numbers will come from many different locations.
Advertising will become less of a guessing game, along with a lot of elimination of waste. All of this is just another way of saying that the ability to reach niche sites will be easier and easier as we go along. From the creating of niche sites view, we need to keep on going deeper and wider in our interests to provide the content that will draw viewers to our sites.
I agree with Gates that this is going to be a gradual process, and not a one-time, huge event. Those that stick with it and continually improve will be big winners in the end.
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