A fragmented media landscape is a tough environment to create in. It’s common knowledge that the options are endless for audiences to choose a go-to medium to consume their daily messaging.
Zahir Mirza, Executive Creative Director at C2 Comms said, “There is fragmentation and convergence all happening at the same time. It is messy in parts but it’s beautiful. It’s the world we live in.”
“The Middle East media landscape fragmentation is largely a result of its unique position as the gateway between East and West combined with its own language and cultural diversity across countries,” explained James Kaye, Vice President of Digital Activation MENA/APAC, Artefact.
But how can advertisers in the region reach an audience across all these platforms? What can be done to unify the media landscape here?
Perhaps an omnichannel advertising approach would simplify the creative process, but how exactly can this be done?
Audience segmentation
Mirza explains that creative strategies have to be “flexible and versatile” to ensure campaigns can adapt to different mediums.
“Every channel in the media mix has its own functionalities, sub-audience and personality profiles,” he said.
From a creative point of view, advertisers must keep in mind scalability according to Mirza. “Good creative ideas are very adaptable by nature,” he said.
“They can go macro or micro depending on the medium. And that’s because it is driven by the idea and not the execution.”
While developing a creative idea that can seamlessly work across the fragmented media landscape seems like an easy enough task, dealing with varying audience segments is not as simple as it seems.
Kaye explains that using AI as a predictive tool while developing campaigns can help navigate the omnichannel landscape.
“AI can enhance audience segmentation from a descriptive to a predictive model, leveraging first and third party data signals to identify and segment audiences based on predicted value and propensity to engage,” he said.
“AI can also help address specific concerns around measurement in a fragmented and consent-focused landscape of walled garden platforms,” Kaye said.
Create for a consent-based landscape
To do this, Kaye suggests “extrapolating consented first-party data to a wider online population, and using AI tools to enhance data gathering and accuracy across platforms to better understand the impact each channel has on overall marketing performance and returns. ”
“AI can also be utilised to navigate the huge amounts of data generated to synthesise and align on the metrics that matter across platforms to better identify patterns and trends in real time, and feed these learnings back into the audience and creative engines,” he said.
“To better unify this landscape, organisations have to look internally and focus on two key areas,” Kaye explained.
He outlines the internal processes advertising agencies should follow to best reach a broad audience across various media platforms.
“First, is to invest in data infrastructure, capabilities and governance to create a foundation on which any AI or machine learning initiatives can be built to better understand your audience, your value drivers and to measure performance.
This foundation has to be supported with a break down of specialist silos to integrate creatives, build internal processes, and even align internal KPIs to ensure all stakeholders pull in the same direction towards a common goal.
Is unifying the fragmented media landscape really possible?
Yet even with this in place there will still be challenges on the horizon as well as huge opportunities as this fragmentation continues,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mirza makes the point that trying to unify the fragmented media landscape advertisers are compelled to operate in is a futile exercise.
“I don’t think one can or should attempt to unify the media landscape. You can’t,” he said.
“What brings real synergy and unity among the different media is the creative idea that ties them all together,” Mirza said, suggesting that great ideas should be immune to varying media channels.
“The same powerful idea flexes itself in different ways across multiple channels. That’s the unity one should aspire to achieve,” Mirza concluded.
