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readers in terms of very large groups, demographic groups or psychographic
groups or special interest groups. That magazines are toast is ironic because
they were first medium that could be targeted. Before cable television, before
radio networks, before any other medium, magazines figured out how to create a
targeted environment that was designed for just sailors, for instance, instead of
everyone who had a boat, regardless of whether it was a sailboat or a
powerboat.
Now magazines are toast because there’s a better way to target even more
specific groups of people. There’s even a way to target individuals as a group. In
fact, it really isn’t appropriate to think of “targeting” because the very notion is
founded inside the context of large mass markets, one where marketers need to
hone in to targets. But magazine people think targeting, and can’t conceive of a
different way of doing it. They just can’t get their minds around the idea that you
could write for one person at a time, or that computers could handle managing
the interaction with an individual one at a time. They don’t have the attitude.
To have the attitude, you have to embrace the Internet and all of the new abilities
it gives you, even if they challenge the most fundamental principles you learned
at home, in school, at work, or even on the street. Here are the few basic,
immutable principles that I’ve been able to discern that are relevant to the
Internet:
Personalization: The idea that you can target media to an individual is now
embodied in the phrase “one to one marketing”, popularized by consultants Don
Peppers and Marth Rogers in a book by that name several years ago. Before
that it was known as narrowcasting, as opposed to broadcasting. But it’s not just
media or marketing. On the Internet, the fundamental promise is that you can be
the single most important entity whenever you are interacting with it. Computers
can remember information about anyone. Computers can use that information to
present only the most relevant data to any individual automatically. The networks
that connect computers into the Internet can deliver that information to you
wherever you happen to be. This is personalization: It is a still a very difficult
thing to accomplish. The technology is still primitive. We haven’t done very much
personalization yet so we still don’t really know how to do it. True personalization
requires integration, which is the hardest thing of all to do with computers – to get
various computer systems to cooperate even if they weren’t designed to do so.
You’ll get example after example from Patrick as you read Internet Attitude about
how personalization could work if we had the technology and knew how to apply
it. It’s just a matter of time – and attitude.
Interaction: Before computers came along and got hooked up to the Internet,
media were static or passive. In other words, media people – writers, producers,
editors, musicians, actors, etc. – made something that you consumed. A movie
might involve several senses, but you got to consume it without talking back. The
Internet is interactive. That means consumers can talk back. This is a very, very
difficult part of the Internet Attitude for almost everyone to adopt. Whether you
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