Media Fragmentation Could Become A Pain For Advertisers, Says Eyre

Richard Eyre, chief executive of Pearson Television and former chief executive of ITV, has warned the media industry that the increasing fragmentation of audiences could become a problem for advertisers.

Speaking at MediaTel’s Media Question Time last week, Eyre said that the advent of digital multi-channel television and the convergence of TV and the internet are leading to the fragmentation of audiences into unusable-sized fragments. Eyre argued that these niche audiences will become exceptionally difficult to measure and exceptionally difficult to use and will cause problems in giving advertisers a decent account of how their money is being spent.

“There is a spectrum, from an advertiser’s perspective, with at one end a monopoly, which effected TV and radio ten years ago; a midpoint, which is plurality, where there’s a nice blend of some mass audience winners and some niche winners; and then there’s a third stage which is pain in the arse. And I think we’re heading towards pain in the arse, quite honestly, from an advertiser’s perspective,” Eyre told the industry.

It was suggested that the vast increase in the number of channels and the increasingly ‘active’ use of media by audiences could lead to a weakening in the power of advertising. Mandy Pooler, chief executive of MindShare, agreed that this is a possibility, adding: “I think advertisers are coping beautifully at the moment because we’re at that plurality stage. I think the good thing about the research is that it will move from ‘did we reach the headcount – did we tick the boxes’ to ‘did the advertising actually work’.”

However, Hugo Drayton, managing director of Hollinger Telegraph New Media, says that digital media is not all ‘doom and gloom’. “I think it means we will have a better, more accurate world,” he said.