Electronic Retailer - March 2012 - 29

Selling in a Fragmented World

With so many marketing channels and so many ways for consumers to reply to a direct-response offer, what’s a poor advertiser to do?
BY JACK GORDON Advertisers began talking about audience fragmentation decades ago, when the term meant that consumers’ eyeballs, once glued to six or seven television channels in a given market, had become scattered among 67 (or so) cable channels. Little did those advertisers suspect that the splintering had only begun. Today, many households can choose among hundreds of TV channels. And television itself is only one piece of the fragmentation puzzle. The classic directresponse media of TV, radio and print have been joined by an online marketplace that amounts to an alternate universe – one requiring that attention be paid to banner advertising, search engine marketing and optimization (SEM and SEO), social media and more. Response mechanisms have fragmented, too. People intrigued by a DRTV commercial still might pick up a landline phone and call an 800 number. More likely, however, they will go to the internet, maybe using a mobile phone to do it. Many of them won’t bother to remember the URL they saw in the commercial. Instead they’ll turn to a search engine like Google. That means, at minimum, that the advertiser’s landing page and its SEM/ SEO strategies “had better incorporate the same language used in the DRTV script,” says Linda Chaney, senior vice president of business development for Acquirgy, a directresponse marketing agency headquartered in St. Petersburg, Fla. What’s more, some shoppers will use social media to research the product before they buy. As a consumer, “I might go to Facebook or some blogs to see what people are saying about it,” Chaney says. “I might do that on an iPad or a smartphone. Then I might go to a retail store to buy. Or I might buy from your website, still using a mobile device.”

No Excuses
That’s what fragmentation looks like today. With so many channels and so many response options, how does a marketer reach the right customers via the right avenues at the right times, and ensure that that they can respond in the manner that consumers prefer? It’s a challenge, to be sure. But not everyone buys the idea that the complexity has become overwhelming. “To say that we can no longer find the customer because of fragmentation is silly,” says Wendi Cooper, owner and creative director of C Spot Run Productions (CSRP) of El Segundo, Calif., a DRTV production and campaign management company. “We have so many more places and ways to reach the consumer that it’s easier, not harder – or at least it should be.” 29

March 2012 | electronicRETAILER

Electronic Retailer - March 2012

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