The smartest thing I’ve learnt is how much I don’t know
Opinion
The IPA’s senior insight analyst, Molly Bruce, stands in for Simon Frazier’s regular monthly column to break down why reframing fragmentation can help us to more accurately reflect changing audience behaviour.
Our job really is about connecting things together. I might not immediately know the answer about everything, but I back myself enough to know the right people, or the places to go to find out.”
There’s something surprising in what Tessa LeGassick from Hearts & Science said on the latest episode of the IPA Making Sense podcast. Not the part about not knowing everything, as most people in this industry will nod along to that. The surprising bit is what comes after: that it’s fine. That not knowing is, in fact, the beginning of something useful.
Co-hosting the IPA Making Sense Podcast alongside the brilliant Simon Frazier has given me a front row seat to some of the sharpest minds in the industry. At times it’s felt like being asked to drive Lewis Hamilton in an L-plated Lamborghini. But being junior turns out to be a surprisingly useful place from which to look at the media landscape – with no preconceived ideas and the curiosity to keep asking why.
Despite their years of experience, the guests we’ve had on the show share a common thread: the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
This strikes me as quietly ironic. We spend the early part of our careers trying to banish gut feeling in favour of rigour, evidence, and expertise. And then we spend the rest of it discovering that expertise has its own blind spots, that mastering one area just reveals the edges of another, in a perpetual state of ever-enlightening ignorance.
But I’d argue this isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a methodology.
From one channel to too many to count
As we know, television began with a single channel: BBC One. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with the BBC.
When daily BBC TV news began in 1954, there were no on-screen presenters. They believed showing faces would distract from the stories, so viewers simply listened to a voiceover. Imagine that now, it just wouldn’t wash; we’d be flicking to Rivals before they could say “Labour leadership challenge”.
The landscape looks radically different today, and that difference has left the planning profession with a particular kind of hangover…
A hangover of expertise
The conventional story about the modern media landscape is one of fragmentation. Channels multiplying, audiences splintering, the job getting harder and more complex. Even in the last decade, I’ve felt the pace accelerate. Data sources are everywhere; consumers are slippery and fickle; audiences are complex and scrutinous.
But I wonder if the fragmentation narrative is itself a product of expertise. If you learned your trade in a world of cleaner channel boundaries, fragmentation is what the landscape looks like from where you’re standing. But the map you learned no longer matches the territory.
Approached fresh and without that set map, things look very different. They’re not fragmented but fluid.
Fragmentation vs. fluidity: A question of who’s looking
The word fragmented evokes something broken: a mirror struck by a hammer, its shards still forming the original shape but no longer reflecting a clear picture. They say a shattered mirror brings seven years of bad luck, and fragmentation can be an equally unwelcome prospect.
But that framing tells us more about the observer than the observed. It assumes a prior state of wholeness that audiences themselves never really experienced. Why would people mourn the loss of limited TV channels when a varied content diet was emerging ripe for consumption?
And we have the data to back this up. IPA TouchPoints turns twenty this year, and across two decades it has captured upwards of 33m half-hour windows of real audience behaviour, making it one of the most comprehensive pictures of how people actually spend their time.
What does that picture show? Not a story of relentless disruption and displacement. Channels don’t tend to kill each other off. They merge; they shift; they learn to coexist. The fragmentation narrative, it turns out, was never really about the audience.
Follow the behaviour, not the blueprint
We are trying to create memory structures. There are so many channels now that some fundamentals get forgotten. It’s still absolutely about reach and frequency, understanding how that operates within a channel and across channels. Because nothing happens in isolation, and audiences don’t operate in isolation.”
Video is a good example of this in action. It’s permeating everything, blurring channel roles to the point where platforms feel less like distinct destinations and more like different rooms in the same house.
A short you saw on TikTok one day is on Instagram another and reclipped for YouTube a fortnight later. A clip from that episode of The Rest is Entertainment you listened to on Tuesday has popped up on YouTube by Thursday and is being discussed on the radio by Friday. The content is the same, but like a painting in a house, your experience of it shifts depending on which room it’s hung in.
Channels don’t disappear; they become tent poles for content to be draped across. As Rich Kirk says, you’ve got to respect the “physics of each format”, because the same content lands differently depending on where and how it’s encountered.
You need to get the alignment right between content and context. Get it wrong, and things may not hold together, and they most certainly won’t weather a storm. But when everything’s aligned, you’ll find everyone congregating in your tent because it’s warm, dry, and perfectly addresses people’s needs.
Bringing it all together
Although media has multiplied, perhaps audience behaviour never has. People continue to follow content, and that content has become fluid. The fragmentation narrative was always a problem for the planner, not the audience. And the way out of it isn’t a better framework or a more sophisticated model; it’s through the willingness to set aside what you think you know and continue to ask questions of what’s actually there. As Caroline Manning puts it, we must embrace the messiness.
While I may not immediately know everything about how to translate this perspective shift into practice, I back myself enough to know the right people, or the places to go to find out.
And so, driving an L-plated Lamborghini aside, what I do know is this: the challenge is not to painstakingly piece together a broken system. It’s to recognise that from the audience’s point of view, it was never broken in the first place.
Join us for TouchPoints’ 20th birthday at Picturehouse Central on 1 July, with Vicky Fox, Rich Kirk, and many more.
Simon Frazier is the associate director and head of marketing, data innovation and The Making Sense unit at The IPA. His monthly column for The Media Leader will return in July.