The Pie Looks Different Now

At NADA today, Dean and I attended a session about media planning with special emphasis on new media and the current economic downturn. One of my favorite metaphors for how to look at this particular issue is to think of your total spend as a pie, with various media making up each piece.

There used to be just a few slices of pie – print ads, radio, TV, and maybe outdoor – but over the years the media has multiplied. We've added different pieces – direct marketing, online, social media – and further sliced our pie.

Given the current economic climate, businesses small and large can no longer slice their pie as many different ways. And the pieces that we have need to work for us. As we look at this, we need to pare down our pieces of media pie to only those few things that work for us. In order to do this, however, we need to remember the classic Peter Drucker quote: "You can't manage what you don't measure."

Does your media pie look different? Consider that each week the average adult spends about 4 hours reading the newspaper and/or magazines, watches TV for 16 hours, listens to 19 hours of radio and spends nearly 33 hours online.

Your pie should look different now.