The End of Mass
David Meerman Scott
Author of 12 books including NEW RULES OF MARKETING & PR and WSJ bestseller FANOCRACY | marketing & business growth speaker | advisor to emerging companies
Apparently, the Baseball World Series begins tomorrow. I had to go to the Web to learn which teams are playing this year – it’s the Diamondbacks vs. the Rangers. But wait… Rangers? I thought they were New York’s Hockey team.
We’re long past the point when large populations focused on the same thing, like the World Series.
In the USA, we used to have three broadcast television networks. According to Poynter, in 1980 more than 42 million people would watch the evening news, nearly a quarter of the American population. It was common for 25 to 30 million viewers to tune in to watch just one, Walter Cronkite on CBS, the so-called “most trusted man in America.”
Advertising on those three networks would reach huge numbers of people. Something like the World Series might be watched by half of Americans.
The mass market and marketing programs targeted to the masses are over for good. There aren’t good ways to reach large numbers of average people.
Fox News, the most watched cable news network in the United States today, gets about 2 million prime time viewers. That’s less than two percent of the current population.
Millions of online niche channels
While mass has disappeared, people dig in deep to the things they love. They become devoted fans of artists and organizations and companies, associating with like-minded people both online and in-person.
While I don’t care about professional sports or watch television news, I do have many things that I love including going to live music shows, surfing, hiking, camping, and the Apollo lunar program.
And for each of the things I love to do, there are people, companies, and organizations I follow. There are bloggers, YouTube channels, Facebook groups, and company websites that I focus on to learn and to be part of communities.
For nearly every market, there are niche channels on social networks like Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn. That’s how you reach the right people, becoming important to the small number of people who care about what you do.
Marketers who understand fandom and how to reach niche audiences are way more successful than those who use the mass marketing techniques of the past.
Prosci-Certified Organizational Change Management Consultant
1 年Somebody younger than myself was talking about "Happy Days" and how they thought it was lame and that it must be a generational thing. I explained that I was there for the original seasons and was also not incredibly fond of it myself — but it was somehow always there, like a piece of furniture. And in print, it's crazy to think that an ad in "TV Guide" or "Readers Digest" once reached a circulation of 50+ million — in a country of about 100 million fewer people than now.
Publicist provides personal approach to building public profiles
1 年It wasn't that long ago that editors and publishers decided what we saw via newspaper inches and TV air time. While niche marketing is good for focusing on specific audiences, as someone noted in the comments here, algorithms now decide what we see. Dare I say, like editors of old. But a lot of those algorithms aren't as smart as their platforms think they are. Or are they programmed like editors of yesterday -- they're feeding us what platform managers/owners *want* us to see?
Working on Further and Leading Expert. Former projects acquired: Copyblogger, Rainmaker, StudioPress.
1 年I only know who's in the World Series because one of the teams beat my Astros and the other beat the Phillies, which I enjoyed seeing. ??
Co-Founder of AnswerStage, Delphi, Prospero & KnowledgeVision. Expert in user-generated content, online communities & AI-Assisted video marketing.
1 年You're right. Everything is niche. But there'sone exception: Taylor Swift. That's why she's such an amazing phenomenon. She inspires stadiums full of fans to pay a lot of money to attend her shows and celebrate together. The fans are a key part of the experience. That's rare in our nichified world but there's clearly still a desire for people to have a large-scale shared experiences. (I don't know who's in the World Series either but that's a whole other discussion)
CEO @Tigon Advisory Corp. | Host of CXO Spice | Board Director |Top 50 Women in Tech | AI, Cybersecurity, FinTech, Insurance, Industry40, Growth Acceleration
1 年Salient point David! "Marketers who understand fandom and how to reach niche audiences are way more successful than those who use the mass marketing techniques of the past".