The Core

Over the holidays my average-middleclass-family daughter mentioned that she had to go to stores and pick up the printed sales flyer and look at what toys were being advertised in order to get an idea about what was popular this year.  She needed a primer in order to buy gifts for her kids!

Up until now -as any US parent knows- TV ads kept your kids whining and begging for the latest. (Again, I'd rank her  household as solidly average on the tech scale, so I don't think this is an aberration.)

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And then she ordered a lot of it on Amazon Prime.

Until you brought it up I had not thought of it.

I don't watch hardly any commercial TV what little I do is PBS or Roku on demand.  Not a lot of commercials there.  So what is replacing mass media for me is largely WOM, recommendations for brands or models I see either here or on social networks from people I trust.  Sometimes I ask and sometimes its friends saying "lookie here."  Also there is a certain amount of recommendation via blogs gathered in by news apps like Zite or News Republic etc.

Interesting subject.

I haven't had access to broadcast TV except at hotels and family visits since  1988. I have often felt completely out of the conversation because I don't get references. People say "You know that commercial where the guy..." and I just cut them off there.

Until you mentioned this, though, I hadn't really noticed that this happens less and less. It has happened once this week, but I know that because it has become rare. Before it was something that happened at least once any time there was a gathering of more than a couple of people.

I guess it's sort of like the loss of a shared set of "facts" from the evening news. For the Americans in the group above a certain age, you'll remember there  was a time when Walter Cronkite could say "And that's the way it is" and it seemed absolutely true. Once Cronkite came out against the war in Viet Nam, there was no hope for the politicians to control public opinion. Now politicians and their lackeys have a million channels to spin with and tend to find it easier to convince their core audience and harder to convince everyone else.

I don't think the marketing world is much different.

>kids

Virtually ever child I see these days is on a tablet or smartphone playing a game.  The child that plays all the Lego games also wants lots of Lego sets.
Toy-game hybrid strategy seems to be growing.

>have a million channels to spin

Yes, *BUT*...
Not so now with with fragmentation of distribution even down at the user-eyeball level.

I think you misread my post. I was trying to say more or less what you're saying there. The fragmentation means there are a million channels to spin and that means that you have a direct pipeline to your core audience, because they're on your one-in-a-million channel that is targeted exactly to your people. But you are completely shut out from the rest of the world (except for when you get lucky) because they're all on their one-in-a-million channel that is targeted at something else.

Television for the time being still has only say a hundred channels to spin and there are broad audiences, but compared to the 1970s it's fragmented too. In 1980, say, there wasn't a lot you could say about someone based on whether they were an NBC or a CBS viewer. Now I can tell you a lot based on whether someone is an NBC viewer or an HBO viewer, for example.

In other words, it's not just that the influence of TV broadly speaking is losing the mass market, it's that already before even considering the other channels, TV is fragmented. The costs of producing TV shows and ads are high enough that you can't say it has become niche, but it is not exactly mass market in the way we used to understand that.

So I guess the overall point is that nothing inherits the market-making influence of TV. Even if the web goes away, TV of today is not the TV of 1980. And, of course, the web isn't going away.... only print newspapers are doing that.