Since the widespread adoption of cable TV, Tivo and like technologies; and increasing exponentially since the emergence of the web and social media, advertising has been in a consistent, full-on Tizzy (capital T) about how to reach consumers, because of something called “Media Fragmentation.”

Apparently, those wacky consumers have risen up and refuse to follow the predictable patterns that once made us advertising folks comfortable. There are so many choices, so many different types, forms, and styles of media that it’s getting downright difficult, if not impossible, to paint a media strategy or creative platform with an industrial spray gun, then hit happy hour, like we used to.

Media and creative are now a maze of micro-strategies and mini-tactics that each work differently for different types of people, depending, of course, on time of day and whether the sun is shining. The fact is, there are just too many different types of media out there to focus a crystal ball on what will work for a given brand, and how. Media is fragmented almost beyond comprehension. At least that’s what I hear.

Funny, though: I see media consolidating.

Months and months ago I scanned an article that had R/GA’s Bob Greenburg talking about Bought, Earned, and Owned Media. Although I didn’t read far enough to get his perspective, the categories stuck with me. The more I thought about them, the more I realized that those are the media categories now. The only ones that matter.

We used to talk about broadcast, print, and out-of-home. More recently, we’ve added social, mobile, viral video, pre-roll, banner, experiential, and a gazillion other micro categorizations.

But tactical categories — classifying a medium by the way it’s made or delivered — aren’t the end-all be-all anymore. Because people, who have always been far more perceptive than advertisers think, are now even more perceptive about who is behind a message, and how it got to them. And that affects their acceptance of the message in ways we’re just now coming to grips with.

People perceive Bought Media, Owned Media and Earned Media differently. Each is a critical part of a brand’s media mix. Each is far broader, in terms of included tactics, than it ever has been before. And collectively, these three categories represent every type of communication a brand could possibly want.

Getting the right mix between the three will depend on the brand’s position in the minds of the people it wants to reach and persuade, as well as the usage habits of those specific people. So, yeah, the right mix of media on a tactical level is still a complex thing to determine. But the categories you have to choose from are, in my mind at least, pretty simple.

Bought Media. It used to be the king of all marketing. And while it still wears the crown for some brands, for more and more, Bought Media is a support mechanism. For some smaller and/or niche brands, it’s actually out of the mix altogether.

Including all the things you think it should include — TV Spots, banners, print ads, billboards, radio, and the like — it’s any instance in which you’ve paid for your message to appear in a place you don’t own. Which means the spot you run on the broadcast of a game is Bought Media, as is the name of the stadium, for which you paid millions; as are the street teams and giant inflatable you put (for a fee) in the parking lot.

Bought Media has reach, provides a sense of “bigness” and can be extremely engaging and entertaining. But it’s also expensive. What’s more, people know you’ve paid to play — so they know the message they’re hearing is one-sided. Not only that, by its very nature, it’s designed to interrupt people and sidetrack them from something they’d rather be doing. If you want to get the most of it, make the most of its potential for entertainment, so it enhances that thing they’d rather be doing, rather than detracting from it.

Bought Media used to lead the way for just about all marketing efforts. Now, especially for smaller brands, it can sometimes be used more effectively to bolster credibility and help the fans you’ve cultivated through other methods spread the word about you.

Owned Media. Technology made everybody a broadcaster and publisher. Which means brands can, and do, create the message and distribute it, too.

A brand site is owned media. But so is a web video, a YouTube channel, a blog, or even a tweet. And so is, when you’re stuck in traffic, that new Beetle in the next lane, covered in digitally-printed graphics promoting the local karate school.

Before digital technology, about the only owned media that existed were the sign on your storefront and the fliers you passed out on the street. Now brands, or individuals, for that matter, can have an instant global audience for messages they create and distribute themselves. Execution, again thanks to technology, can be as sophisticated as anything placed in bought media.

It can be. Unfortunately, it rarely is.

Owned media has as much potential entertainment and engagement value as anything out there. The quality of the content is all that determines that, and users are the ones who get to make the determination. The key word is quality.

A huge statement. Because the cost of distributing Owned Media is next to zero, anyone can do it. That doesn’t mean anyone can do it well. Done poorly, owned media is a misspelled marquee trailer on the side of the highway: Not many people look, and if they do, it’s not that good for your brand.

Done well, however, owned media can be as powerful, or even more powerful, than anything you could buy. Of course, people know you’ve created what they’re watching, reading or interacting with. But you can use that to your advantage, by delivering entertainment or utility beyond their expectations. The only real restrictions on Owned Media are those you place on yourself.

Earned Media. Not that long ago, only PR firms talked about Earned Media. And Earned Media had a distinct definition. It meant that a newspaper or magazine was writing about you. To make that happen, you needed a decent story, but just as important, you needed that PR firm who had a cozy relationship with the editors of those publications.

But now, since everyone is a publisher (see Owned Media) there are a lot more people writing, talking and conversing about you. Their work is public, and it many times has as much reach (sometimes more) than those editors the PR firms are chasing.

What’s more, it frequently has more credibility. The video you posted to your YouTube channel? Owned Media. The 300,000 plays a day, all the comments, and all the “Send to a Friend” clicks? Earned Media. When the editor of the traditional pub writes about those 300,000 plays a day? Again, Earned Media.

Word of Mouth has become Word of Web; it has reach and it has power. When you get people talking about your brand online, whether good or bad, you’ve earned it.

Content Makes the Mix. Those are the categories. The only ones I can think of, and I’ve thought about this a lot.

So what’s the mix? As I said before, it depends on the message, the brand and the users you want to reach. Increasingly, though, for most brands, Bought Media no longer takes the chronological lead. There’s almost always a site (Owned Media) before there’s a spot or an ad.

Although the rules change with the audience and the brand, more and more, the timeline goes something like this:

(1) Make some owned media like a site, a video, or a blog, and publish it.

(2) Using other owned media like blog comments, tweets, and news feeds, generate Earned Media about your Owned Media. Get people viewing it and talking about it.

(2A) Cultivate more earned media in the form of Word of Web by engaging those who respond to your Owned Media. Join the conversation they’re having about you.

(3) Use Bought Media as air cover to extend the reach of your message and provide some credibility for your fans who are now telling their later-adopting friends about you. At least, that’s one way to do it.

There may not yet be a formula for whether the chicken, the egg, or the 8-piece basket comes first. There may never be. But there is a formula for success in any and all of these categories: Quality content.

I’ll concede that it is possible to succeed in Bought Media with less than stellar content. It has to do with the interruptive nature of the category. Head-On, anyone? But as the veteran of many an old-school traditional discussion about good advertising having more impact than bad advertising, I now say quality matters, and the other two categories prove it.

While Earned and Owned Media each include some offline tactics, by and large they are products of the web. And on the web, people choose what they consume, and where they click. If they’re watching what you’ve made, reading what you’ve written, or joining in on a conversation about your brand, or your message, it’s because made an active decision to do so. And nobody actively chooses bad.

Unless it’s bad in a good way. But that’s another discussion altogether.

Made perfect sense when he said it. I believed it then, and I believe it now. There are gazillions of people involved in the making of a film or video, and each has his or her own things to advocate. The director’s ultimate job is to bring all of it together through an educated and critical eye, with the goal of producing the best possible experience for the audience.

The instructor, an episodic television director by profession, knew I directed spots, and had made it known that he didn’t think much of spots, in general. He pointed toward me, and continued, “…unless you’re directing commercials. Then the director is the ultimate advocate for the client.”

Never one to be shy, I argued. Not because I was insulted, but because he was wrong.

“But, if you only advocate for the client, you’ll make spots that suck,” I countered. “Commercial directors, if they’re any good, are advocates for the audience. It’s just that they’re translating the client’s message, rather than the screenwriter’s.”

Point made, point taken. Cut to: Now.

The web isn’t film and it isn’t TV, and people don’t watch or browse. They search. Not always in the literal sense of “search” as we mostly think of it, but, yeah most of the time, literally. I like to think of it as: They seek.

They might seek through a search engine, or category filters in an app store, or by scrolling thumbnails in a dashboard. They could be seeking information, entertainment, connection, communication, or all of the above.

What they seek, specifically, has to do with what’s on their mind this minute. Next minute, it’s something different. What they experience depends on what we put out there for them to find.

As in film, there are gazillions of people involved in the making of the stuff we put on the web for people to find. Technology, IA, design, UI, UX, tracking, measurement and content are just some very broad things these gazillions of people advocate. At some point, someone has to bring it all together.

It’s rather nice that the term, “Creative Director” has the word “Director” permanently embedded. Because I believe the Creative Director must be, at the core, the advocate for the user.

In too many places, the Creative Director is simply the advocate for design. Design is critical. And a design-driven creative director can be a very good thing. But to do the job, the CD has to go beyond design, because the user does. Same with UX specialists.

But only because the term UX too often doesn’t really refer to the complete experience of the user. Too often, it gets mired in the details around navigation, and neglects little incidental things like the quality of the content. Someone has to see the forest, and that someone is the Creative Director.

So whether you’re a copy-driven Creative Director, or a designer, or UX, or content-driven Creative Director, remember that the important part of your job isn’t about what you can put into a piece that lives on the web. It’s in what people get out of it.

Creatives love toys. Take a walk around your creative department — if you don’t find a ton of toys scattered across desktops and perched on cubes, you either (A) made a wrong turn into accounting; or (B) have draconian office decor rules that resemble a gulag and you really should lighten up.

Toys are fun. Toys have personality. Toys inspire creativity and remind us that the entire world isn’t one giant spreadsheet with a deadline — even when it seems it is. The problem with toys, beyond inspiration and diversion, though, is that they’re not usually all that useful.

Enter tools.

Tools do things. They accomplish something. They help you achieve or lighten your load. In the digital world, tools organize, sort, research, remember, file, retrieve, respond and a whole host of other things that you can’t or won’t do on your own. You might play with a toy, but you use a tool.

The problem with tools, though, is obvious to most any creative. They’re boring. At best, they’re invisible — at worst, they’re dreadful, clunky and intrusive. Which is why, when creatives are creating digital things for clients, their first impulse very often is to create a toy.

A while back an interesting discussion about augmented reality broke out on my Facebook wall. Most of the people participating in the discussion were digital creatives and most of them had the same opinion: AR is cool and all, but beyond making cityscapes and flowers grow out of the paper you’re holding in front of the webcam, what does it do, really?

I suspect that some who espoused this opinion were, in fact, stating that the joy of the toy was fleeting and were wishing for more toy joy to be built in. Still, I suggested that when presented with an opportunity to create AR, we think of more ways to use it as a tool. The logic being: the technology is fun to play with.

That’s its nature. It comes embedded with the properties of a toy. Make a tool out of it, and you’ll have that rarest of rare things — a fun tool. Or, if you’d rather, a useful toy. Either way, the hybrid animal is superior to the purebred.

But the logic isn’t just about AR. It’s about digital — and creative, in general, now that the world is so influenced by digital. Think about it. How many apps do you have on your phone? How many apps do you have that you’ve messed with once or twice, on the day you downloaded, and haven’t launched since?

If you’re like most, your answer is: a lot. The ones you use regularly are the tools. The ones you play with once are the toys. The ones you like using regularly are the fun tools/useful toys. That’s the goal now.

If we want to engage customers and prospects with the brand, it helps to engage them regularly. A toy may provide joy, but the joy of a pure toy is usually fleeting. A branded tool may accomplish much, but without emotional reward in its use, no connection is made between the user and the brand.

Some apps, some sites and some AR executions have proven that the divide between toy and tool is not impenetrable. Play with that for awhile, then put it to use.

First let me explain what I mean by “found” creative. When an art director, designer, or creative team begins an assignment these days, one of the first places I’ll find them digging for ideas is in the vast catalogs of stock imagery and footage available online.

The piece is about something sour? Find a picture of a lemon. Simple, efficient, quick, and usually, well within budget. But, is there something missing? I think so.

I think four distinct mindsets — separate, but frequently combined — have given birth to this instinctual hunt for existing assets — and its newfound place ahead of original thinking in the timeline of creativity. And they’re all products of the digital space in which we create.

First, digital, as a space, a culture, and a generation, has a strong DIY ethic. For many digital creatives, the end product is something they’ve pretty much always had to build themselves. They’re not used to having the luxury of a budget or timeline that allows for creating original imagery, so they’ve developed a fierce pride in their ability to make do with the resources at hand.

Second, there’s cost. While we’ve come a long way with this mindset, digital executions are still seen — by clients, and by agencies — as the way to deliver when budgets are tight. Digital is cheap, or so the thinking goes. The problem with that thinking is that it doesn’t include a definition for “cheap.”

When compared to a 60-second spot buy on the Super Bowl, it’s a pretty sound bet that your digital execution should, and will, cost less. How much less, though, is relative — to the idea, and to the goals for the piece. In the world of television, no one with any experience would assume that an intern-executed, low-quality camcorder commercial could ever compete with a network-level spot in terms of quality or viewer engagement.

Yet that very assumption is made every day, hundreds of times, in the online space. To be fair, online, there are success stories that feature no-budget content. But a simple look at the sheer volume of online content tells you quickly that those successes are the exception, rather than the rule.

Third, there’s all the other stuff, beyond imagery and content, that goes into a digital experience. The action — the action you put into it and the action you want the user to take. In the digital world, this is a function of creative thinking, too. And it’s as important a function as any other portion of creative thinking.

But too often, we think about the UI without giving due credit to the full UE. And it’s the wrapping — the imagery — that contributes an emotional component to that UE.

The fourth mindset that contributes to the proliferation of found creative is also the simplest: There’s a lot of really good stuff to find. The well is deep. And most times, just what you’re looking for is a couple of clicks away.

Collectively, these four mindsets lead most creatives, and most clients, to the logical conclusion that many or even most times, it’s a prudent decision to use a wheel that’s already been invented. And frequently, that’s the right choice.

But sometimes, it’s merely the easy choice. There are times when the user experience and the brand will see much more benefit by making a much more difficult creative choice.

In another life, I directed fashion and fashion-inspired TV spots. The influences I studied for light, composition and attitude were the best in the business: Avedon, Newton, Ritts, et. al.

When those photographers captured an image for their advertising and editorial clients, they produced more than a picture of a woman wearing a dress. They put a stylistic subtext in the image that reflected on the brand. It also separated the brand from competitors who had no such subtext in their imagery.

Similarly, the historic Levi’s 501 Blues campaign made use of (for the time) non-model-looking models, a unique blue caste for the images and a signature camera style that separated the work from everything else on the air.

These are creative choices that contribute to the finished piece in ways that found creative — existing assets — can’t.

Yes, they’re budget decisions. And timing decisions. But they’re just as applicable online as they ever were in the pages of a fashion magazine, or in the commercial breaks between network shows.

Original thinking, combined with purpose-built content, can produce a final product that is stronger and better serves the brand. Almost always the best things you find can be found inside your head. And to truly see them come to life, you’ll have to make them from scratch.

I don’t know about you, but I get that question all the time. Video on the web has officially come of age for advertisers (a long-anticipated event, at least for this former spot director), and everybody wants in on it. Everybody.

Of course, a lot of the groundwork that was laid to get to this point, at least in the minds of most advertisers, has led to the mistaken belief among too many that you can do just about anything in video, slap it up on the web somewhere, and you’ll have the next viral hit. Or at least, people who are, ever so remotely, interested in the broad category your product fits into will flock to watch what you put up, no matter what you put up. Oh, and by the way, how much?

I sometimes have a hard time believing it, but too many advertisers are still in a mind-space that treats the web as a thing, a plug-in, a commoditized unit, that can simply be applied to a marcom mix in nice, even increments. Sorry folks, it just doesn’t work that way.

Cheap, done-on-a-webcam, silly little videos can, yes, become global viral hits. But the chances of your regional sales manager, talking across his desk about “added consumer value” to a guy with a camcorder, becoming the next Numa Numa are — remote, at best. To be fair, maybe you’re not after the next viral hit. But I’m assuming you do want someone to watch what you upload.

I’m not one of those ad guys who says you have to spend what we used to spend on TV commercials to make a web video that’s watchable. You do, if you come up with an idea that requires the same production specs. But the key to what you need to spend has everything to do with the ideas you generate. And that has everything to do with what you hope to accomplish with your video on the web. Which, together, make the calculations for the price of a web video exactly like the calculations for any other type of advertising creative: It all depends on what you want it to do, and the idea you create to do it. Important here to note that actually having an idea in the first place is the real cost of entry.

Making effective web video boils down to ideas that connect with the people you want to connect with. If the idea is there, the video will do its job. The idea, of course, is going to tell you how much you’ll need to spend. If your idea involves explosions and car crashes, please don’t try to do it on your intern’s camcorder. But if said intern’s camcorder represents all the money you have to spend — don’t automatically give up, either. Spend more time thinking, or get someone to think smarter, and there’s every chance you can create something that connects, on a much lower budget. But you’ll have to leave the explosions out of it.

There are good, cheap web videos. There are bad ones, too. Just like there are good expensive web videos, and bad ones to go along with those. It’s not the price that makes it work, or fail. It’s the idea. Start there.

Truth is, it’s hard to keep up with the regular changes on the regular-time web, never mind the real-time one. And if you spend time thinking, and possibly over-thinking, the situation — especially when you’re overloaded on client projects, or pitching as much business as you possibly can in this economy — the prospect of shifting to a higher gear, full time, is a bit daunting.

Yes, the real time web is here, and in terms of work, it’s a lot. But as for creating and maintaining most brands, it’s also not enough on its own. To build lasting relationships, and solidify brand images that stand the test of time, you need more than 140 characters. You need 140 characters, now, to be sure. But you also need the other stuff — the things you layer those 140 characters on top of.

While everything we do in advertising of any kind is pretty transient, social media is uber-transient. A blog post lives forever, but people (mostly) only read it when it’s new. A Tweet is even more fleeting, especially if your followers follow lots of people. For this reason, social media — in real time — makes a great layer to add to a multi-platform brand effort. For pure long-term brand building, even a constant stream of tweets is somehow missing key elements. But combined with a steady stream of all the other stuff we as agencies can produce, those tweets wield some serious power. Sometimes the best brand images are born in real time, but live on when sustained efforts are applied.

As I am frequently wont to do, I’ll use a non-advertising example to illustrate my advertising point. Partly because I think it kind of fits, and partly because as I write this, we’re approaching July 20, 2009 — the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

When you think of Apollo 11, chances are, the images and sounds that come to mind have something to do with a combination of how old you are, and how much brand work — yes, brand work, whether intended as such or not — has been done for both NASA and Apollo over the years.

If you’re about my age, maybe you have (varyingly fuzzy) memories of watching live as Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. If you’re older than me, you likely conjure images not just of the moon landing, but of President Kennedy’s speech that set the course for the space race in the first place. Or, perhaps your man on the moon imagery has more to do with a guy with an MTV flag. Or a Tom Hanks movie about a different Apollo mission. Or, maybe, it’s a memorable side note from a grade-school lesson about the space shuttle.

Whatever your immediate image, it’s a product, not just of the real-time event — but of the countless images, films, videos, websites, books, patches, decals, visitor experiences, and all the other stuff we as advertising agencies get paid to produce for brands every day. Yes, the stuff created around Apollo 11 is there because it’s an historical event. But, tell the truth — aren’t you pretty much always attempting to turn that next product launch into some sort of historical event?

Now, let’s layer a real-time element over top of all of the above. Whether you heard it when it was first broadcast, or have only heard it in an historical perspective, the recorded transmissions between the lunar module and mission control add texture, and an emotional quality, that cannot be ignored. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” It is the sound track to all the moon images you’ve ever seen. Without the imagery, the real-time audio has power, but not as much. Without the audio, the pictures — ditto.

When you think of social media as an ongoing, real-time, text-based soundtrack of sorts, it starts to become easy to see how much stronger it can make all your combined efforts in other media. By itself, it’s strong — but combined with everything else you’re doing, it can help produce something that could stick for forty years.

You can’t read a social media story right now that isn’t Twitterfied. Heck, one of my tweeple, a well-read blogger and Twitterer, just yesterday, tweeted that he sat down to write a story about Twitter, but then decided not to. Because every other new story he could find about social media and online marketing was about Twitter.

I’ve been tweeting for a couple of years. In that time it has gone from an interesting way to swap thoughts and tidbits of information with a few friends, to a global real-time conversation between enough people that it has become a force in politics, marketing and culture. But you already know that, because you’re tweeting now, too — and even if you aren’t, all the other articles about Twitter have told you as much.

Advertisers want to tweet. Ad agencies want to develop Twitter strategies to sell to advertisers. And Twitterers are exhibiting a predictable mixed set of reactions to marketing messages on Twitter. Some embrace them. Some don’t like them at all. Some couldn’t care less. Kind of like the reactions to marketing messages on other social platforms. Kind of like the reactions to marketing messages in life.

Nevertheless, Twitter rules. It rules the moment, at least. It’s almost as if Twitter has caused a shift in the very fabric of the web. Except. Except, the shift that is the buzz, the shift that is Twitter — isn’t really Twitter. Not really.

First, in a literal sense, the inventive uses for Twitter and the explosion of the service as a platform have as much to do with third-party applications as anything else. The service itself, from a functional and interface standpoint, hasn’t changed much since it was launched. What has changed is a result of innovative programmers, and innovative users, providing an almost constant stream of apps to enhance the Twitter experience, and ways to use Twitter to deliver far more than 140 characters about what you had for breakfast. Add Oprah, and you’ve got yourself a phenomenon.

But that’s not the biggest shift. Not even close. The most significant shift in the nature of the web that has been ushered in by Twitter and all the things and people that surround it is immediacy. Time. Real time. Twitter didn’t invent, or even allow for, a real-time web. It was already there. But Twitter did make the real-time web a cultural phenomenon. And that’s huge.

The web has had immediacy — or, at least the potential for immediacy — since day one. But it hasn’t always lived up to the promise. Not that long ago, the first word about a big news story was likely to be broadcast live, or very close to live, on radio or TV. Not until the first “breaking news” paragraph was written, and the callout headline composed for the landing page, did the story hit the websites of the news outlets. That took (gasp) minutes. Now news is tweeted by people on the scene. Because there are no gatekeepers, in the form of station management, or, well, even the technological process of broadcasting, the tweets get there first. Yes, the gatekeeper problem sometimes translates to an accuracy problem, but here, the point is about time. And Twitter is very real-time.

From a marketing perspective, that’s both a challenge, and an opportunity. Real time is hard. Hard to build a brand — at least using the tactics marketers are used to using. The good news is, good things can happen fast. You can see immediate reactions, results, and as Dell has found, sales, with the right Tweets. Current TV was able to use Twitter to turn an arduous, and typically long, ad agency screening process into a fun, and attention-getting five-day creativity shootout. And along the way, they found some hidden-gem agencies they might not have uncovered, otherwise.

But just as good things can happen fast, so can bad ones. A bad customer service experience at a single location can turn into a national or global PR crisis in less time than it takes to eat lunch. Which means, being out to lunch is no longer an option.

For creatives crafting marketing messages, or more appropriately, promoting positive conversation about products and brands, the real-time web requires not so much a shift in tactics as the addition of multiple new skill sets. It’s not enough to be able to craft an attention-getting message that plays over time. It’s just as important to play off the cuff. But contrary to what a lot of other digital-natives believe, I don’t believe one negates the other. In fact, they’re complementary. Advertising creative used to be akin to crafting a novel or a film. Real-time creative is like improv. To be successful, you need both skills on hand.

How lasting is Twitter? It doesn’t matter, really. Plenty of trends, tactics, services and styles come and go almost constantly online. Little things get big, big things go away. What matters, though, is the shift Twitter has ushered in. The real-time web isn’t going to go back in the box.

It’s here for real, and it’s here to stay.

More time to think, more time to tweak, more time to make it perfect before it hit the press or the air. There was a time when our fight against time was either a fight against an airdate, or a fight against an estimate that never, ever, seemed to include enough creative time.

But times have changed. And now I find that our old enemy, Time, is on our side. Oddly enough, though, it’s not because we have more of it. It’s because we have less.

As social media continues grow as the go-to function for web users, as brands continue to integrate social elements into brand sites and brand elements into social sites, the metaphor of marketing as a conversation ceases to be a metaphor. It’s real now. The conversation is happening. It’s live, and it’s in real time.

Things that happen on the web have always happened fast. They happen faster now. Sometimes, in 140 characters or less. Mini trends spout, blossom, mutate, spawn related trends, and die off, all in a span of time that was once considered not enough time to even get a project through the initial planning meetings. So, how can this new acceleration of time possibly be good for creative?

It’s good because it underscores the basic principle of all creative, online or off: If you’re doing it right, you’re creating something that initiates, or perpetuates, a human interaction. That’s true of interactive. It’s also true of a billboard. When you’re having a creative conversation in real time, you pay more attention to the person you’re conversing with. Making creative decisions in real time forces critical thinking about the possible immediate reaction to those decisions. It allows for real-time adjustments when the environment shifts. Real-time changes when you make a mistake. And real-time intensification when you hit home.

While I hate using over-used sports metaphors, I’ll do it anyway: The faster pace of creative in today’s environment has shifted the job of the creative lead on a project from being an offensive coordinator in the box to being the quarterback on the field. You do the pre-game strategy, and follow a game plan. But being in the middle of the action forces you to react, and sometimes improvise, based upon immediate changes around you. If you don’t, you’re in the dirt.

That doesn’t mean it’s a time for shoot-from-the-hip creative. Far from it. It’s a time for more homework. If you’re going to be able to react in a way that not only takes advantage of real-time shifts in the environment, but also moves your effort forward, strategically, and in a macro sense — you’re going to have to know your stuff. You’re going to have to be prepared for, literally, anything. Only when you’re fully prepared are you ready to play in real time.

Not because of the similarities and differences that have been chronicled, debated, fought over and bloodied ad nauseam. But because I subscribe to the notion that history repeats itself. And I believe we’re seeing it repeat itself in a way that affects, and will continue to affect, the creative things we do for the web.

When television sets first started showing up in a significant number of American homes, the programming they played was already relatively familiar to the audience. Here was this radio with pictures that represented a newfangled way to treat everyone’s living room as if it were a theatre seat.

Because of bulky camera equipment, huge lights, and limited mobile ability, content for early television needed to be something that could be produced from, essentially, a single vantage point. Hence, producers went with what they knew had already worked well in other media: News, from radio — and from the stage,Vaudeville.

Vaudeville became the TV variety show, a perfect style of content for the then-new medium. It offered a little something for everyone — because everyone, of course, was watching the same show. Which wasn’t all that different from the live version of Vaudeville, where everyone sat in the same playhouse, and expected a little variety for their ticket price. Variety TV wasn’t the same as Vaudeville, but it was close enough that the producers could produce it well right from the start. The audience accepted it easily, because it was familiar, yet, different.

It didn’t take too much time, though, for TV producers to realize that television was much more than just a window to a single playhouse. Different types of people wanted to watch different types of entertainment, at different times of day. And the spectrum allowed for that, and for multiple channels of programming, broadcasting simultaneously. As production techniques became more and more sophisticated and mobile, so did the content on television. Soon, the content there was no longer an adaptation of the playhouse follies that had come before. It was content that was truly of the medium, for the medium.

Fast forward your DVR today, and you’ve got Lost, robotic cameras in live sports, and a host of TV-native innovations that take the creative structure of content not only beyond the box, but far, far beyond what anyone, probably, in those early days of the medium could ever dream. Where will it go from here? No way to know, because technology isn’t showing any signs of stagnating, and technology always opens doors for creativity. Once we’re truly familiar with all the potential of a medium, and all the ways users use a medium, we innovate, creatively, making things that are native, rather than adaptations.

The web, in that respect, is no different than TV.

I don’t need to go all the way back to websites made with frames to make this point. I can jump back a couple of years, (or even jump sideways to now, with some marketers) and talk about brand sites.

It wasn’t long ago that a brand site was, by default almost, a tour de force of entertainment prowess, with the sole intention of collecting users and never, ever, letting them go without a fight. It was a TV show with the ability to click on stuff, designed around the principle that entertainment lures viewers, and gives you an opportunity to slip in a product message somewhere along the way. Which is a pretty good principle, when you’re talking about traditional media.

On the web, though, we’ve now learned that things are different. While people certainly do use the web when they’re looking for entertainment, the operative part of that phrase isn’t “entertainment.” It’s, actually, “looking for.” The web is an active, rather than passive, experience — even if the active part is merely a search for something to watch, however passively. Users control their own paths — and not just within your site. Users seek what they want to seek, find what they want to find, and use the whole web, all at once, to do it.

Which is why you’re seeing more and more brand sites that are built, not as islands in the web, but as textures, aggregators, and supplements to other information that can be found elsewhere on the web. We’re seeing brand sites that link, literally and figuratively, to other brand efforts, and related efforts, in social gathering places. We’re seeing a combination of entertainment, narrative, information, connection, and sometimes, retail, built into what, not long ago, was conceived as a simple, singular, entertainment-driven brand experience. Brand sites now are more eclectic – to reflect the eclectic motivations of any group of users. Entertainment still has a critical role. It’s just not the only thing that has a role now.

We’re moving from our own version of Vaudeville — linear, entertainment-first; an adaptation of proven traditional forms — to something more web-native. More of the medium, rather than simply in the medium.

Social media has been a key catalyst that has ignited brands’ realization that people gather on the web to do things other than listen to brands talk about themselves. Once, it was a spoken truth, frequently ignored. Now it’s a given. And while social media has been a catalyst, and while elements of the social web are now an integral part of almost every effective brand effort, the technology driving creative innovation isn’t about to stop at Twitter. Where’s it going from here? No way to know. But it won’t be backward.

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Here’s the theory: Mass is gone. Niche is all that exists anymore.

We know that traditional advertising was built on the idea of mass. We know that the web has ushered in the era of niche. I’m just not sure we realize the extent to which it has happened.

When you talk about mass, you’re talking impressions. But the web regularly shows us that a few quality impressions are frequently far more valuable than many more broadly targeted ones. It’s easy to see online. The web works with niche messaging because it is so intimate. User preferences and actions are an individual thing. When your ad is served, you’re dealing with a single user’s mindset at a single moment. A niche of one. But the reality is, you’re dealing with that same niche of one when a person sees your billboard from her car, or your spot from her couch. In the past, we never really thought about it that way. I’m not sure consumers did, either. But now I’m convinced they actually, actively, do.

Now consumers have a much more acute understanding of the power they have, in fact, always wielded. Now they have better tools to put that power into practice. And with their more acute understanding of the situation, they’re not afraid to use those tools. Personal attitudes toward messaging, brands, and products reflect an individual’s ability to customize a personal world on command. If your message doesn’t fit perfectly, they look somewhere else for one that does, because they know it’s a click away. Or they make their own out of parts and pieces of yours, and others, because they can.

When most CEOs were teenagers, depending on the current age of the CEO, teenagers listened to Elvis, or maybe the Beatles. Their parents did not. The division was generational — demographic. When I was a teenager, you either listened to rock, or to disco, but not both. Some demographics involved, but some psychographics, too. Now, defining a musical genre that encompasses the whole of the group called teenagers is impossible. There are too many. Pick any one, and you’ll be right for some, and wrong for more. And demographics rarely give you an accurate picture of the true emotional motivators that define those myriad tastes.

There are, still, Mass events. The Super Bowl qualifies. Kind of. Because how it’s experienced is far more a collection of separate, but related, niches than a single mass. There are those who interact online, and those who just watch the old fashioned way. There are fans of the teams, fans of the sport, and fans of the particular game. There are those who only care about the commercials. Those who only come for the beer. Those who forget it’s happening, those who actively abstain, and the list goes on and on. Each niche is ripe for its own distinct message, if we can deliver.

There are viral hits. And there are still popular trends. But it seems, to me at least, that the numbers are getting smaller, and the durations shorter. Further evidence of niche elements making their own decisions apart from the crowd. Let’s remember — the wisdom of the crowd is very, very different from the action of the mob. As consumers embrace more of their individual power, mob action becomes more and more diluted.

Traditional media, built on mass, is declining. Even on the web, display is taking a hit. And of the tactics that serve marketing messages on the web, display is, by far, the closest thing there is to mass. Conversely, search is strong. And social media is the current darling. Not because those things are new. They’re not, anymore. But because they are the most intimate. The most personal. The most customizable. The most niche.

What this means, I think, for creatives — and for the brand personalities they help create — is hard work, and more of it. It’s no longer enough to establish a brand personality that is expressed the same way everywhere it appears. It now must have multiple elements of nuance – to speak to the sometimes small, but never insignificant, cultural nuances that separate the niches within the broader target. It means more variations on a theme. And it means working with a deeper understanding of real people, and the very real differences and individualities that separate them. It’s like the difference between gardening and farming. More intensive labor to produce more satisfying results.

Find related niches, and it’s possible to build a coalition that represents the significant numbers that are attractive to clients used to mass. To continue the analogy, a number of gardens can produce the same quantities as a farm. But again, to retain the quality of the garden, the labor is more intense.

Technology will continue to enhance our ability to deliver custom messages to smaller and smaller niches of our audience. Creatives must learn how to address the niche-scaled variations of cultural preferences in the messages they create. It’s critical to understand that, while everyone in the target base may, in fact, like the product — each member of the target base likes it for a different reason. By speaking more intimately to the niche, you form a more emotional connection.

Mass communication is steadily taking on most aspects of interpersonal communication. The cultural groups we’re creating for are getting smaller and smaller, even as the brands we represent get larger. As creatives, we have to recognize that, and address it in the work. We may be on a path that will someday lead us to the ability to deliver individual messages to individuals. For now, though, the creative unit of measure is the niche.