Abstract:

To be a media planner today must be one of the most stressful jobs in the business world. Confronted with a tsunami of change in the ways in which people consume media - and indeed live their lives wrapped up in different and new media environments -it is their job to make crucial multimillion-dollar decisions on media spending allocation. To be able to do this effectively, you would have to be a world-class anthropologist, understanding just how each new generation interacts with a media landscape that is constantly changing in different parts of the world. How do you leverage a MySpace or a Second Life? How do you understand the role of mobile web in India or China where it is now the ‘first screen’? And how can you possibly calculate the return on your investment when the measurement currencies differ wildly in their estimates and something as banal as cookie deletion completely throws your numbers for a loop? Our second area of focus in this issue centres on the deliberations at WIN (the World Industry Network) in Paris.